Silence as Protection: Construction and Deconstruction of Violent Subjects in Media Portrayals of South-Asian and White Incidents of Domestic Violence

This paper focuses on the ways the West silences South-Asian women experiencing domestic violence in the diaspora. My literature review illuminated a gap in the dominant literature where the phenomenon of silence is focused within the South-Asian community and rarely contextualized within the power system of racism in the West. Through a review of critical literature, it was clear that we must shift our gaze to how the West silences South-Asian women, due to the presence of the ‘White external gaze’ onto the community. This literature suggests that the members of the South-Asian community do not have control over how an issue within the community is taken up by the West to perpetuate racism once the issue is publicly talked about. This research paper includes an analysis of this ‘White external gaze’ in regards to how exactly it contributes to the silencing of South-Asian women. Western news media was selected as a form of the ‘White external gaze’ due to the influence its ‘talk’ has over the public and its context in the West, where White superiority exists. I conducted a comparative Foucauldian discourse analysis of news materials discussing three incidents of domestic violence involving South-Asian subjects and three involving White subjects. Each set included one incident from Canada, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). Through my analysis, I found domestic violence being generalized within the South-Asian community and individualized within the White community as well as the subject production of the violent South-Asian man and the distancing of the White man from their perpetuated violence. This research paper has proved the racism that is perpetuated by the media, a form of the ‘White external gaze’, when speaking about incidents of violence within the South-Asian community. As a result, this project provides insight into how the silence of South-Asian women is a means to protect their community from the racism perpetuated by the ‘White external gaze’ within the West.