1 - Visualizing Corpse Politics

Summary

This introduction focuses on how dead body images, seen as taboo, are framed in various ways to humanize or dehumanize the dead. The graphic nature of images of the dead in humanitarianism is framed as precisely what provides the grounds for their power to effect change; the social and cultural taboo against viewing dead bodies means that when we are invited to view them, it must be under extraordinary circumstances, and viewing is itself posited as a political act. Yet critics have raised the issue of voyeurism, pain porn, or compassion fatigue. In the context of dead enemy bodies, images of enemy dead are often viewed in a context that perpetuates a distancing between the viewer and the subject of the image, designed to cultivate affective responses of retribution, hatred, and satisfied revenge, rather than empathy. These framings are introduced precisely because the binary between bodies we display and bodies we don’t display needs to be examined and problematized. This begins to illustrate what is at stake in the context of the politics of emotion, in the sense that emotions are constructed and shaped through binaries of self and other, though these distinctions are always tentative.