Visualising and Re-Membering Disability Body Politics in Filmic Representations of the ‘War on Terror’

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-180
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Stuart Murray

This chapter focuses specifically on film and visualising depictions of the connections between disability and posthumanism as they are manifest in a set of contemporary narratives about war and conflict. I use a broad conception of prosthetics to read these intersections, claiming that their articulations of embodiment are disability stories even as they appear to be narratives of hyperability, scientific strength and male authority. The chapter juxtaposes a series of Hollywood features exploring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with films made in Iraq and Iran that narrate the conflict from alternative points of view, ones that often lack the kinds of sophisticated technology that so marks American storytelling. In each, the power of the visual, of seeing disabled bodies, is paramount. Seeing the weaponized soldier, as well as the disabilities such technologies produce through the disasters they create, creates a powerful identification that reaches across many aspects of contemporary life, from media images of refugees to stories of disabled veterans. The chapter claims that fiction film, again often full of the messy contradictions that define the meeting of disability and posthumanism, offers opportunities to unpick the terms of this power and the reach of its meanings.


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (5) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Alessandra Renzi ◽  
Greg Elmer

This article investigates infrastructure spending from a biopolitical perspective and rethinks its connections to emerging regimes of (in)securitization. Starting with a study of the organization and contestation of the G8/G20 summits in Toronto in June 2010, the analysis moves through the shifty territory of a governmental logic that is reconfiguring the body politics of civic participation, as well as the ways in which discourses on economic growth, property and public safety intertwine in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. The case of Toronto shows significant changes to recent security practices, control techniques and funding arrangements. Rather than ‘war on terror’, ‘austerity and crisis’ are the new keywords sustaining current governmental rationality and the criminalization of dissent, which are no longer funded by defence budgets but by economic stimuli packages. This new rationality, while still relying on fear as an affective mode to mobilize masses, has exchanged a set of discourses on the clash of cultures or civilization for one on sacrifice. Following Foucault’s work on the government of populations and security, it is now possible to talk about ‘a sacrifice series’ to describe the series of elements that connect military or economic logics of (in)securitization.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candice A. Alfano ◽  
Jessica Balderas ◽  
Simon Lau ◽  
Brian E. Bunnell ◽  
Deborah C. Beidel

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Mayton ◽  
Joshua B. Lloyd ◽  
Christina N. Browne ◽  
Megan M. Wicklander ◽  
Lisa M. Davis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail B. Calkin

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