Eroticism and the Politics of Representing the Abused Body

2021 ◽  
pp. 500-516
Author(s):  
Lisa Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
The Body ◽  
Abu Ghraib ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Abu Ghraib Prison

This chapter discusses the photographic and dramatic representation of sexual violence in conflict and the potential for such visual spectacle to be received as erotic or titillating. The chapter begins with a brief consideration of the human fascination with horror, then draws upon the work of Judith Butler on vulnerability, and Susan Sontag and Georges Bataille on suffering to analyze the relationship between pornographic imagery and the images of Abu Ghraib prison. Taking an example of a dramatic representation of wartime rape, Colleen Wagner’s The Monument, the author’s decision not to display the body is explored as one strategy to avoid the exposure of the body to the gaze of the spectator.

Remaking/Unmaking: Abu Ghraib and Poetry

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1596-1610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Metres
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
The Body ◽  
Abu Ghraib ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Abu Ghraib Prison

So now the pictures will continue to “assault” us—as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying that they have seen “enough.”—Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others”… a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.—Elaine Scarry, The Body in PainWhen The ABU Ghraib Prison torture scandal began to circulate throughout The MASS media in Spring 2004, most pundits and commentators neglected to note how those images hauntingly paralleled the 9/11 attacks, insofar as each event's widespread publicity—replayed and reposted images of physical and psychological destruction—participated in the very unmaking that the perpetrators intended. In other words, just as the terrorist act on the Twin Towers was an act of both material and symbolic destruction that required media representation of the planes hitting the towers, mass media's recirculation of visual images of naked and dominated Iraqi men completed the act that Charles Graner and other United States military police had begun. Though the disturbing video representation of the 9/11 attacks rapidly disappeared from television, the Abu Ghraib photos persisted far longer (see York). The rapid disappearance of video of the planes striking the buildings suggests its traumatic power for Americans. But why would the Abu Ghraib photos be less disturbing than those of the attacks of September 11, 2001—given what they say about United States conduct in the war? In this essay, I consider the Abu Ghraib effect in the wider context of imperial imaging of the other. Second, I analyze artistic and literary responses (including Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings, Daniel Heyman's etchings, and an anthology of poems on torture) that attempt to re-present Abu Ghraib and make visible the invisible of that torture. Third, I sketch out how Arab American poets have played (and can continue to play) a critical role in the conversation about the effects of United States policies in the Middle East. Finally, I share my own poetic project, a long poem called “–u –r—” that attempts to make audible the muted voices of the tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.

scholarly journals Shaping Toronto: female economy and agency in the corset industry, 1871-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanna M. M. McKnight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fashion History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Female Consumers ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Relationship

In amplifying the contours of the body, the corset is an historical site that fashions femininity even as it constricts women’s bodies. This study sits at the intersection of three histories: of commodity consumption, of labour, and of embodiment and subjectivity, arguing that women were active participants in the making, selling, purchasing and wearing of corsets in Toronto, a city that has largely been ignored in fashion history. Between 1871 and 1914 many women worked in large urban factories, and in small, independent manufacturing shops. Toronto’s corset manufacturers were instrumental in the urbanization of Canadian industry, and created employment in which women earned a wage. The women who bought their wares were consumers making informed purchases, enacting agency in consumption and aesthetics; by choosing the style or size of a corset, female consumers were able to control to varying degrees, the shape of their bodies. As a staple in the wardrobe of most nineteenth-century women, the corset complicates the study of conspicuous consumption, as it was a garment that was not meant to be seen, but created a highly visible shape, blurring the lines between private and public viewing of the female body. Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish informs this study, and by acknowledging the ways in which the corset became a fetishized object itself, both signaling the shapeliness of femininity while in fact augmenting and diminishing female bodies. This study will address critical theory regarding the gaze and subjectivity, fashion, and modernity, exploring the relationship women had with corsets through media and advertising. A material culture analysis of extant corsets helps understand how corsets were constructed in Toronto, how the women of Toronto wore them, and to what extent they actually shaped their bodies. Ultimately, it is the aim of this dissertation to eschew common misconceptions about the practice of corsetry and showcase the hidden manner in which women produced goods, labour, and their own bodies in the nineteenth century, within the Canadian context.

Gaze-related activity of putative inhibitory burst neurons in the head-free cat

1993 ◽  
Vol 70 (6) ◽  
pp. 2678-2683 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. E. Cullen ◽  
D. Guitton ◽  
C. G. Rey ◽  
W. Jiang
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Head Movements ◽  
Related Activity ◽  
Visual Axis ◽  
Abducens Nucleus ◽  
Gaze Shifts ◽  
Burst Neurons ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Output Neurons ◽  
The Relationship

1. Previous studies in the cat have demonstrated that output neurons of the superior collicular as well as brain stem omnipause neurons have discharges that are best correlated, not with the trajectory of the eye in the head but, with the trajectory of the visual axis in space (gaze = eye-in-head + head-in-space) during rapid orienting coordinated eye and head movements. In this study, we describe the gaze-related activity of cat premotor “inhibitory burst neurons”(IBNs) identified on the basis of their position relative to the abducens nucleus. 2. The firing behavior of IBNs was studied during 1) saccades made with the head stationary, 2) active orienting combined eye-head gaze shifts, and 3) passive movements of the head on the body. IBN discharges were well correlated with the duration and amplitude of saccades made when the head was stationary. In both head-free paradigms, the behavior of cat IBNs differed from that of previously described primate “saccade bursters”. The duration of their burst was better correlated with gaze than saccade duration, and the total number of spikes in a burst was well correlated with gaze amplitude and generally poorly correlated with saccade amplitude. The behavior of cat IBNs also differed from that of previously described primate “gaze bursters”. The slope of the relationship between the total number of spikes and gaze amplitude observed during head-free gaze shifts was significantly lower than that observed during head-fixed saccades. 3. These studies suggest that cat IBNs do not fit into the categories of gaze-bursters or saccade-bursters that have been described in primate studies.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Ex-centric Cinema: Machinic Vision in the Powers of Ten and Electronic Cartography

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Harbord
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
The Body ◽  
Educational Film ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Made In

After a century of cinema, accounts of this cultural form see it as divided between documentation and animation (the real and the magical). Yet the challenge that cinema presented in terms of a relocation of perception from the eye to the machine has become occluded. The shock of cinema in its earliest manifestations resided in the body of the spectator, no longer the site of primary perception, but dependent on an other (the camera, the projector) lacking in human qualities. This article argues that the newly configured body–machine relationship provided by cinema became a marginalized feature of cinematic culture, an ex-centric cinema relegated to the sub-fields of science and educational film. In the mid-20th century the project surfaces spectacularly in the work of pioneering designers Charles and Ray Eames, most poignantly in their film Powers of Ten (first made in 1968, remade in 1977) , a journey into the cosmos and back again into the body of a man. Bringing together discourses of space travel, cartography, physics and cinema, the film moves us towards an understanding of visual culture as an apparatus of calculated possibilities, where visualization replaces representation. If we take the Powers of Ten as a non-representational film, an ex-centric cinematic practice, we uncover non-linear and non-representational ways of apprehending the relationship between bodies and matter. This literal line of flight is one path that cinema may have taken. Its presence, however, is detectable outside of the cinema, in the software programs of electronic cartography copyrighted as Google Earth. The human body is not made virtual by its engagement with calculated visualization but is in turn part of the field of enquiry, equally porous, and definable in various scales and in different dimensions.

scholarly journals Shaping Toronto: female economy and agency in the corset industry, 1871-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanna M. M. McKnight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fashion History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Female Consumers ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Relationship

In amplifying the contours of the body, the corset is an historical site that fashions femininity even as it constricts women’s bodies. This study sits at the intersection of three histories: of commodity consumption, of labour, and of embodiment and subjectivity, arguing that women were active participants in the making, selling, purchasing and wearing of corsets in Toronto, a city that has largely been ignored in fashion history. Between 1871 and 1914 many women worked in large urban factories, and in small, independent manufacturing shops. Toronto’s corset manufacturers were instrumental in the urbanization of Canadian industry, and created employment in which women earned a wage. The women who bought their wares were consumers making informed purchases, enacting agency in consumption and aesthetics; by choosing the style or size of a corset, female consumers were able to control to varying degrees, the shape of their bodies. As a staple in the wardrobe of most nineteenth-century women, the corset complicates the study of conspicuous consumption, as it was a garment that was not meant to be seen, but created a highly visible shape, blurring the lines between private and public viewing of the female body. Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish informs this study, and by acknowledging the ways in which the corset became a fetishized object itself, both signaling the shapeliness of femininity while in fact augmenting and diminishing female bodies. This study will address critical theory regarding the gaze and subjectivity, fashion, and modernity, exploring the relationship women had with corsets through media and advertising. A material culture analysis of extant corsets helps understand how corsets were constructed in Toronto, how the women of Toronto wore them, and to what extent they actually shaped their bodies. Ultimately, it is the aim of this dissertation to eschew common misconceptions about the practice of corsetry and showcase the hidden manner in which women produced goods, labour, and their own bodies in the nineteenth century, within the Canadian context.

scholarly journals A Queer Aesthetic: Identity in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Horror Films

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-464
Author(s):  
Seán Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
And Performance

Judith Butler argues that every category of personal identity, such as gender, the body, nationality, sexuality, or ethnicity, is predicated in part on a crisis between what that identity affirms and what it excludes. How this crisis manifests itself in everyday life is key to understanding how identities are reinforced, negotiated, subverted, or rejected on both social and individual levels. In this paper I consider three films directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi between 2001 and 2006, arguing that they are especially competent in not only representing ontological tensions of this kind within their narratives, but also in manifesting these tensions so that they are made viscerally available to the viewer as affect. To understand how this is achieved, I draw on the work of Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others, to articulate how a stylistic system, or aesthetic, is developed across these films, and what techniques contribute to its production. I find that key components of this aesthetic include images of touch and performance, the transgression of bodily boundaries, and what Margrit Shildrick calls an “erotics of connection” between bodies.

“A Progression and a Regression at the Same Time”: Hybrid Masculinities and Entrepreneurial Selfhood

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Whitmer
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Creative Class ◽  
Personal Style ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Relationship

Research suggests normative masculinities are increasingly defined through consumption, particularly the consumption of fashions and cosmetics. Much existing research examines heterosexual men’s reluctance to embrace consumer masculinities due to cultural associations, which associate consumption with femininities and subordinated masculinities. However, not all men are reluctant consumers. Little research has examined the relationship between masculinity and aesthetic consumption in a cultural context in which the body is increasingly framed as a tool for self-promotion and upward mobility. Drawing on qualitative research on male personal style bloggers, I examine the masculinities of men who actively turn the gaze on themselves, performing creative class ambitions through the display of the dressed body. I find privileged bloggers incorporate elements of non-hegemonic masculinities into the performance of hybrid masculinities, which allow them to distance themselves from the negative associations of hegemonic masculinity while continuing to reproduce sexual difference and hierarchies.

Explaining Behavior

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Talbert ◽  
Jessica Wolfendale
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Abu Ghraib ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Abu Ghraib Prison ◽  
Gilbert Harman ◽  
Stanford Prison Experiment

This chapter explores the relationship between the crimes committed by American troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo’s experiment is one of the most famous of a large body of social psychology experiments that support the “situationist” perspective on human behavior. A central situationist claim is that features of the situations in which people act have a greater influence on behavior than we ordinarily suppose, and enduring features of personality and character have a correspondingly smaller role in explaining behavior. We explain how this research has been interpreted by psychologists such as Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett and by philosophers such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris.

Tapping into the senses: Corporeality and immanence in The Piano Tuner of EarthQuakes (Quay Brothers, 2005)

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Fátima Chinita
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Life ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract In The Piano Tuner of EarthQuakes (2006), the Quay Brothers' second feature, the sensual form and the meta-artistic content are truly interweaved, and the siblings' staple animated materials become part of the theme itself. Using Michel Serres's argument in Les cinq sens (2014, whose subtitle in English is A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies), I address the relationship between the Quays intermedial animation and the way the art forms of music, painting, theatre and sculpture are used to captivate the film viewer's sensorium in the same way that some of the characters are fascinated by the evil Droz, a scientist and failed composer who manipulates machines and people alike, among them Felisberto, a meek piano tuner with the ability to stir the natural elements. I further proceed to posit the entire film as an intended allegory of animation on the Quays part. Their haptic construction of a three-dimensional world which they control artistically is replicated in the film in Droz's and Felisberto's activities vis-à-vis Malvina van Stille, an abducted opera diva who is kept in a suspended animation state (just like a marionette) and several hydraulic automata with musical resounding properties, some of them made up of an uncanny assortment of body parts. The artificial life of these creatures is contrasted, in two ways, with their physical reality as beings that exist in the world: first, via Serres's sensorial strategy to transform a body into a conscious entity (i.e., endowed with a soul), an embodiment I call 'Corpo-Reality', and second, by resorting to Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the body without organs (BwO) in its advocacy of 'hard' nature and the rejection of a rigid assortment of body parts (either biological or social). The paradoxical organic objectivity of the 'marionettized' Malvina is pitted against the seemingly subjective doings of the mechanical automata, especially an android woodcutter. However, just as in the story things are not what they seem, and the automata actually reflect the 'real' world of Felisberto's tuning of them (and vice versa, in a process entitled 'vertical mise en abyme'), so the film itself can be a 'crystal-image' (per Deleuze), offering itself to the senses of the spectator.

The Spectator's Performing Body: the Case of the Via Negativa Theatre Project

2011 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomaž Krpič
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

The concept of the performing body consists of two elements: the performer's and the spectator's performing bodies. The performer's body is an active and creative body on stage, while the spectator's body is considered an uncreative body, passive in his or her seat. In this article, findings regarding the duality of the performing body, its interchangeability, and its intertwinement, derive from researching Via Negativa, a Slovenian-based (yet international in its nature) theatrical project established almost a decade ago by theatre director Bojan Jablanovec. The mission of Via Negativa is to investigate the relationship between the performer and the spectator exclusively through theatrical means. Tomaž Krpič is a sociologist of the body with particular interest in postmodern theatre and performance. He was until recently Lecturer in Cultural Sociology in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Ljubljana University, Slovenia.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document