‘Warsaw 2’: Gendered Negotiations in a Fearful Landscape

Abstract

Through culturally contextualising the interlinked spheres of fear/risk/danger/threat, this paper explores the dominant local gender discourses being articulated on the chronically violent boundary zones of Belfast's ‘interface’ communities. In particular, the paper engages with the ‘risk-victimisation paradox’, where women are found to report high levels of fear of violent crime when their levels of victimisation are in fact low, while men consistently report low levels of fear despite higher levels of victimisation. The Belfast case study offers a very different image of gendered spatial use, where men are found to willingly discuss their fear of violent assault and to outline numerous avoidance strategies to escape the possibility of victimisation, while women, in contrast, are those who appear to be daily risk-takers, entering fraught boundary zones and carrying out actions typically avoided by men. The paper questions whether this situation is the result of cultural constructions of masculinity in the Belfast situation which differ from the ‘invulnerable’ model of masculinity which remains one of the dominant representations to be found in the literature.