Bielby, Clare, and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, eds. Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity

In Perpetrating Selves, Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, together with eight other contributors to the volume, move away from the ‘conventional’ scholarly consideration of the perpetrator as a static object of investigation within the field of perpetrator studies. Instead, they advocate for a focus on perpetration understood as a dynamic process of constructing and performing one’s subject position through ‘doing’ violence defined as, “amongst other things, a generative force” (3). Acknowledging violence’s ability to “reconfigure or transform the self” (3), Bielby and Stevenson Murer describe perpetration as a dynamic and relational modality of subject formation that – before, during, and in its aftermath – generates a multiplicity of variable positions taken by the perpetrating self. 

This shift in the object of research from the perpetrator to perpetration also reframes the scholarly attitude to the perpetrator him-/herself, whom Bielby and Stevenson Murer propose to approach with empathy – in a double sense. Firstly, it is an attempt “to apprehend the human in the perpetrating subject” (5) and translate the individual story into social schemata of subject positions. Secondly, it is the researcher’s awareness of and preparation for the complexity of affective reactions that can occur in the encounter with the perpetrator: the requirement to proceed adequately to (but not in spite of) the sympathy or antipathy towards the perpetrator. 

Perpetrating Selves investigates perpetration from a gendered and interdisciplinary perspective. It involves the voices of scholars, presenting their research on bodily, textual, or material practices related to or making use of the act of perpetration, as well as practitioners, interviewed about their artistic or curatorial work. Reflecting on National Socialist, Apartheid, and Rwandan atrocities, as well as on mythical, pop-cultural, and terrorist acts of violence, the volume presents a broad and insightful perspective on perpetration in modern and contemporary history and culture. 

Therefore, Perpetrating Selves proposes a methodological refinement of Perpetrator Studies and offers an extensive exemplification of this novel approach. Situating perpetration as a modality of dynamic subject construction can lead to a more nuanced scholarly perspective on perpetrators by providing researchers with the framework that allows them to acknowledge the human side of those who commit violence.

Author of this entry: Mateusz Miesiac.

Bielby, Claire, and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, eds. Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.