Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity

By Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer.

This volume explores violent perpetration in diverse forms from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. From National Socialist perpetration in the museum, through post-terrorist life writing to embodied performances of perpetration in cosplay, the collection draws upon a series of historical and geographical case studies, seen through the lens of a variety of texts, with a particular focus on the locus of the museum as a technology of sense making. In addition to its authored chapters, the volume includes three contributed interviews which offer a practice-led perspective on the topic.

Through its wide-ranging approach to violence, the volume draws attention to the contested and gendered nature of what is constructed as ‘perpetration’. With a focus on perpetrator subjectivity or the ‘perpetrator self’, it proposes that we approach perpetration as a form of ‘doing’; and a ‘doing’ that is bound up with the ‘doing’ of one’s gendered identity more broadly. The work will be of great interest to students and scholars working on violence and perpetration in the fields of History, Literary Studies, Area Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Museum Studies, Cultural Studies, International Relations and Political Science.

Clare Bielby is Senior Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. She is the author of Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s (Camden House, 2012) and co-editor (with Anna Richards) of Women and Death 3: Women’s Representations of Death in German Culture since 1500 (Camden House, 2010).

Jeffrey Stevenson Murer is Senior Lecturer on Collective Violence in the School of International Relations and Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews. His articles have appeared, among elsewhere, in the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society; Terrorism and Political Violence; and the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, where he is an Associate Editor.

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