ENTERTAINING TORTURE,EMBODYING LAW

Torture appears as an image: once, of sovereign power, more recently, of acts performed on people not even defined as prisoners. It served to instruct, now it serves to entertain, as image and spectacle. Law's entertaining of torture both enables the spectacles seen (and not seen) since Abu Ghraib, and intersects with wider cultural practices, especially in cinema and television. Torture has been a form of entertainment as much as it has been a subject of revulsion. Recent justifications of torture have sought cinematic backing. The US Justice Department torture memos, and the scandals of Abu Ghraib and beyond, link attitudes towards torture with a culture of entertainment and spectacle, up to the point at which the law comes to entertain torture. At stake in both spectacle and actual practices is a form of corporeal sovereignty: the wholeness of the sovereign against the brokenness of any body that would threaten such wholeness. This paper explores these intersections, along with the logic of a sovereign disregard for the body, through readings of the torture memos, First Blood, and the investigations into prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq.     

Education after Abu Ghraib

Drawing upon Theodor Adorno's famous essay, ‘Education After Auschwitz, ‘this article examines the question of how education should be engaged in light of the abuse and torture by American soldiers and personnel that took place at Abu Ghraib prison. The essay attempts to understand not only how the photographs of abuse and torture signalled a particular form of public pedagogy, but also how pedagogy itself becomes central to understanding the changing political, ideological, and economic conditions that made the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib possible and what the latter implies for how we understand both cultural politics and the growing authoritarian nature of American society.     

The Politics of Pain and the End of Empire

This article is a discussion of the role of feeling and emotion, and particularly the experience of pain, in contemporary global political events. In placing pain at the center of an analysis of a lived experience of global politics, the aim is to forge strategies to resist neoliberal imperialism and to create emotionally literate political communities. Drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry, Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon, the article situates the concept of emotions in a modern colonial landscape that is both racialized and gendered, complicated by neoliberalism as a subjectivity that contains the scope for emotions. As a case study, the article considers the emotions of viewing the deliberate infliction of pain through the circulation of the ‘Abu Ghraib photos’, particularly in the form of recent museum exhibitions in the USA.     

What remains of Abu Ghraib?: digital photography and cultural memory

Ten years on, the photographs from the US-operated Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib have become synonymous with the war on terror for highlighting an unseemly combat culture. This article focuses on the ongoing functions of these viral photos as objects of cultural memory and also highlights their use as war trophies. Drawing on theories of digital photography, emotional and gestural communication, visual semiotics, and cultural memory, this article examines six of the circulated images. Focusing on the symbolic, the visual contents of the photos are contrasted with the rhetorical account from criminal investigator Brent Pack in the documentary Standard Operating Procedure. While Pack concludes that these images are in fact abusive, he nevertheless dismisses the relevancy of the emoting individuals within the photographs. The arguments here take a particular shape: the pictorial display of emotion is not only relevant, but is essential to the communication of group identity and the perpetuation of cultural memory, which is reinforced by the role that digital photographic technology plays in aiding the circulation of this cultural memory.     

Pupillary Responses to Static Images of Men and Women: A Possible Measure of Sexual Interest?

The pupil dilates to images that are arousing. In Experiment 1, we examined if the pupil’s response to brief presentations (2,000 ms) of static images could be used to identify individuals’ sexual orientation. Participants were grouped according to their self-reported gender and sexual orientation (male heterosexual, N = 20; male bisexual, N = 13; male homosexual, N = 19; female heterosexual, N = 28; female bisexual, N = 21; female homosexual, N = 17). Pupil size was monitored to images of men in seminude poses, women in seminude poses, or neutral images. Every group showed the same pattern of responses, with the greatest dilation to male images, then female images, and least dilation to the neutral images. Experiment 2 used more tightly controlled stimuli and tested at two different image durations (150 and 3,000 ms). Both heterosexual men (N = 18) and women (N = 20) showed greater pupil dilation to images of nude men than to nude women. However, in Experiment 3, where we reduced the erotic content by using images of clothed models, both heterosexual men and women showed greater pupil dilation to images of women. The results showed that while the pupil does dilate strongly to sexual imagery, its response to these brief static images does not correspond to a person’s sexual orientation in a simple manner.     

Re-aligning rationality: Crisis management and prisoner abuses in Iraq

This paper focuses on the U.S. military abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib as a case-based illustration of a psychodynamic approach to organizations. Rather than viewing the abuse and its PR aftermath as an instance of poor crisis management, we argue that it should be seen as an expression of systemic neurosis at the highest levels of government. Understanding crisis as the normal outcome of a dysfunctional system provides an alternative explanation of the nature and causes of crisis and prescribes therapeutic intervention prior to training in crisis management and public relations.     

Mental Imagery and Production of Hand Gestures While Speaking in Younger and Older Adults

Speech and conversational hand gestures were recorded during interviews of 23 younger (M = 21 years) and 19 older adults (M = 70 years). Three kinds of questions were used in order to activate either visual images, motor images, or no mental image (abstract topics). On average, the rate of gesture production did not differ in younger and older adults, but it was significantly influenced by imagery conditions. Gesture production was higher in the motor than in the visual imagery condition, and lowest in the abstract condition. A significant interaction between age and imagery conditions influenced the proportion of representational gestures, which were relatively less frequent in older adults, especially in the visual imagery condition. Content analysis of verbal responses showed that imagery values did not differ in younger and older adults, but that concrete words were less frequent in responses to abstract questions than in the two other conditions. The implications of these results concerning the mechanisms of gesture production and the age-related changes in conversational behavior are discussed.     

Museums and the visually impaired: the spatial politics of access

Based on a study of 36 museums in London and the South East of England, the paper offers a deconstructive reading of ‘access’ and its spatial practices by analysing their responses to the visually impaired visitor. Within any discursive space we find aporial, non‐discursive moments that introduce ambivalence into an otherwise seemingly ordered and known arrangement. Such forms of presence have been described, amongst other things, under the heading of the figural (Lyotard). In the discursive space of the museum, a space of seeing and conservation, the visually impaired visitor figure tacks its way into the museum as such a figure that we can call (after Mark C. Taylor) an underdetermined not. Through such a figure we can consider the (dis)ordering effects that this ambivalent form of presence can have. The study reveals how such a figure not only introduces a problem of access but is also mobilised by the museum so that access can be addressed as a museum issue. Museums have changed from previously being indifferent to dis/ability needs to now existing in a state of being in‐difference with them. This idea reveals the way in which museums shift the (often haptic) challenge that such a figure makes to the (scopic) signifiers of the museum by responding to them through the less troublesome regimes of what is signified. Access in this case is neither granted nor denied but endlessly deferred.     

Dimensions of pornography

In this article, definitions and dimensions of pornography are analyzed. College students (N =201) reported the degree to which they believed items in a series of statements reflecting sexual images were pornographic. Factor analysis is used to explore the multidimensional nature of pornographic imagery and produce item indices of perceived pornographic content. The analysis delineates five dimensions of pornography: consensual heterosexual and lesbian sexual images, consensual male homosexual images, skin magazines, rape images, and art. These five dimensions of pornography are interpreted as reflecting dimensions of exploitation, degradation, and objectification. It is concluded that future research on pornography should consistently implement measures of multiple dimensions of pornography. This will allow future research findings on pornography to be aggregated and, thereby, better inform social policy.     

ABU GHRAIB AS A MICROCOSM: THE STRANGE FACE OF EMPIRE AS A LIVED PRISON

Drawing on Derrida, Foucault, Dorothy Smith, Anzaldúa, Wallerstein, Said, and Gurdjieff, among others, this article argues that the strangeness of Abu Ghraib—“father of the strange (or of the stranger)”—has less to do with what went on inside the prison and more with the global prison yard. Strange is how we, global spectators of the prison abuses, continue to stand on shaky cardboard boxes of rising and falling empires with hoods of amnesia and evasion put on our minds, and sophisticated media wires of true or false fears manipulating our emotions. To escape from prison, a mystic once said, one must first realize one is in prison. The inquiry is used as grounds for advancing a discourse on Newtonian and quantal sociological imaginations in favor of a Sociology of Self-knowledge.     

Olympic Films and Public Memory

How is our memory of mega‐events structured? This article investigates the relationship between cinema and the Olympic Games. To this end, it first unravels the historical origins of the strong link between the two, as both are symbolic products of the 20th century. The Olympics reaffirm the image of the modern nation‐state; the cinematic medium visually represents the Games as spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl's film, Olympia (1938), recorded at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, supplies the most enduring imagery of this type. In addition to Riefenstahl's thoughts and methods, this study delves into Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which was influenced by Olympia. Ichikawa's film, which reflects his artistry and showcases his various skills, won critical acclaim and, intriguingly, precipitated the “document or art” controversy that involved the Japanese state and the mass media. Whether document or work of art, this film has supplied the public with imagery for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games—various images that most of us recognize—and thereby played a key role in constituting our memory of them. Therefore, our experience of the Games is a mediated experience through the construction of our public memory. Our memory culture is composed of “prosthetic memories” that are technologically assembled through cinema and act as Freudian “screen memories.”     

Moving images of exclusion: Persisting tropes in the filmic representation of European Roma

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the most prominent tropes in the earliest and most recent filmic representations of Roma. Stereotypical images of Roma abound in many fictional features as well as documentaries, from the representation of Roma as eternal nomads to racially prejudiced depictions of Roma women and the alleged innateness of music to Roma. Because images and modes of representation change over time, the paper juxtaposes the earliest portrayals of Roma with those produced in the last 15 years. The analysis particularly centres on two dominant reoccurring tropes: types of spaces typically occupied by Roma in film, that is the lack of a place or so-called placeless-ness of Roma; the gendered other, or the Roma woman and the culturally and ethnically othered Roma musician. Ultimately, by analysing how these tropes have persisted in varying forms over 100 years, this work points to the filmic imagery that perpetuates antiziganism, but also how the same has changed over the years to offer possible counter-narratives.     

Fabrications of self: Identity formation in the Odyssey

Abstract

This interpretation of the Odyssey challenges conventional readings in a way that recaptures the strangeness in a text that has been colonized by interpretative strategies, interpretations that impose certain cultural and gendered stereotypes. My reading inverts and subverts some of these stereotypes, without claiming to reveal, or aiming to establish, true identities. Rather, my point is that identities are unstable and unpredictable; the main characters in the Odyssey can be understood best by analysing their characteristic style of dealing with these uncertainties. In this light, Odysseus appears as much less stable and much less ‘in control’ than in standard readings. His presumed, and famed, autonomy is shown to be largely a product of self‐deception, deriving from an inability to confront himself. The women in the Odyssey, on the other hand, are stronger characters, both less helpless, and more helpful, than standard readings allow for. Calypso and Circe play a positive role in liberating and educating Odysseus. Penelope, for her part, turns out to be involved in a much more subtle and elusive form of self‐fabrication than Odysseus. Rather than applying stereotypes of cunning' or ‘faithful’, we should understand both Odysseus' and Penelope's actions as the product of their own idiosyncratic way of dealing with contingency, within the bounds set by cultural and natural circumstance.     

The challenge of creating ‘alternative’ images of ageing: Lessons from a project with older women

This article analyses two participatory projects designed to engage older women in the creation of new imagery of old age. While it was hoped that this imagery would offer an ‘alternative’ to mainstream depictions or indeed offer older women a presence amidst the much noted absence of images of older women, the brief left it open to the professional photographers recruited to the project and to the participants themselves to direct the representations. In recent years, critical gerontologists have repeatedly called for artistic challenges to conventional ways of imaging old age. By working with two groups of older women, the intention was that ‘ordinary’ older women (non-celebrity, non-artist) could be included in that challenge and imagery created which would show the lives of older women honestly. In the case of the two projects described here, professional photographers were enlisted to give visual form to the women's views on ageing and their lives as older women and deliver ‘exhibition quality’ images. Important factors in determining the types of images produced included the artistic style and preferences of the photographers and their respective ages, both of which are explored here. In-depth analysis of some of the images produced shows that while they did not succumb to the usual ‘heroes of ageing’/‘bodily decline’ binary (Featherstone & Hepworth, 2005), they did not escape other dualistic categorisations. The images can be broadly viewed as nostalgic/melancholic or humorously carnivalesque. This finding is evidence of how difficult it is to create ‘alternative’ images of older women which defy established modes of categorisation.     

Forward,Ever Forward: a reading of Robert Harris,Photographic Album of South African Scenery,Port Elizabeth,c.1880–1886

Early copies of the Photographic Album of South African Scenery that was published between c.1880 and c.1888 by Robert Harris in Port Elizabeth consisted of 28 double-card pages with two, occasionally one, tipped-in photographs per page. During the near-decade of its production, the number of images increased, printed captions replaced handwritten captions and both the selection and arrangement of images became gradually more coherent and programmatic. The paper interprets these changes as Robert Harris’s attempt to construct a public identity for South Africa at the moment its economy and society were being transformed by the diamond mines at Kimberley and elsewhere that constitute the focus of the later form of the form Album. In the developed form of the Album, a narrative progression is suggested to move from Cape Town and the Western Province, to Port Elizabeth and the Eastern Province, to the Kimberley Diamond Fields, Natal, etc. In order to read this journey critically, the paper is arranged to demonstrate the constituent parts of this journey in the representation of cities and towns, laid out in grid plans on the African veld; the depiction of individual buildings with their expressive vocabulary of architectural style; and the idea of commerce – represented in street scenes, markets and seaports – and the facilitation of commerce through roads, bridges and mountain passes. The disproportionately large number of photographs of Kimberley, with both its mining operations and no less than three commercial markets, underlines the significance of commerce and industry in the new South African identity. The emphasis on commercial achievement in the Album leaves an obviously subordinate role for images of nature in both agriculture and landscape. Farming is represented through such exploitative practices as forest clearing and hunting, rather than the developed forms of agriculture of wine farming, sheep farming and wheat farming. And landscape in the Album is either a landscape subdued to the wants and needs of a settler population that would bludgeon its way through mountain passes or divert the course of rivers to facilitate commerce, or a landscape that is defined by the imported aesthetic conventions of the picturesque and sublime. Similarly, grouping the photographs of indigenous peoples that are scattered throughout the Album, one may see that their representation is entirely instrumental, divided crudely into roles of either war-like barbarians or pliant labourers. In these ways, the Photographic Album may be understood as a true mirror of the colonial achievement.     

What does the pursuit of a high quality of life entail?: Grounding a theoretical model in lived experience

In response to calls for a better understanding of quality of life, we draw upon working professionals’ perspectives and experiences to introduce a theoretical model that emerged from an inductive analysis of respondents’ language. A key element of this model includes a collective picture of factors representing quality of life. Further, this model suggests interrelatedness among these factors with pursuit of a high quality of life emerging as a dynamic process with a tensional nature. Our proposed model extends existing research by more fully capturing the complex ways in which people from the United States describe quality of life and its pursuit.     

The Poetry of Social Distress

>This paper discusses the varied ways Christian fundamentalists think about Jews and Israel in their theology and in their daily lives. Topics include the continuing significance for fundamentalists of Jewish responsibilities for the death of Jesus, the place of the Holocaust imagery and especially the importance of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the instrumental role fundamentalists believe Jews play in the end-time story leading up to the return of Jesus to Mount of Olives and the making of a new Jerusalem and the beginning of the millennium. The paper suggests that in these ambivalent images lies much social distress in the form of anti-semitism, distortion of our Middle East policy, and the erosion of efforts to create a human ecumenism.     

Las políticas de igualdad en el ‘welfare mix’: opiniones y percepciones sobre el papel de las ONGs

This paper has been structured in three areas. In the first one, the author shows the relevance that words and conversations among individuals have on social research, both terms being very important to the well-known sociologist and writer Franco Ferrarotti. In the second part, the author explains the necessary qualitative methodology to be used when analysing a main topic. In the third one, the author analyses the reality of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from the gender perspective to detect if they are or not a reflection of that Spanish reality regarding sex discrimination. Finally, this paper states the challenge the Spanish society needs to face to outweigh sex inequality without excluding the NGOs or any other form of association. This paper calls for the involvement of society, which along with the state and market, has an important task to accomplish.