Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Next Wave New Directions in Women's Studies) - Softcover

Hesford, Wendy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822349515 ISBN 13: 9780822349518

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Spectacular Rhetorics is a rigorous analysis of the rhetorical frameworks and narratives that underlie human rights law, shape the process of cultural and legal recognition, and delimit public responses to violence and injustice. Integrating visual and textual criticism, Wendy S. Hesford scrutinizes “spectacular rhetoric,” the use of visual images and rhetoric to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners, chiefly Americans. Hesford presents a series of case studies critiquing the visual representations of human suffering in documentary films, photography, and theater. In each study, she analyzes works addressing a prominent contemporary human rights cause, such as torture and unlawful detention, ethnic genocide and rape as a means of warfare, migration and the trafficking of women and children, the global sex trade, and child labor. Through these studies, she demonstrates how spectacular rhetoric activates certain cultural and national narratives and social and political relations, consolidates identities through the politics of recognition, and configures material relations of power and difference to produce and, ultimately, to govern human rights subjects.

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Wendy S. Hesford is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. She is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy, a co-author of Rhetorical Visions: Writing and Reading in a Visual Culture, and a co-editor of Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation and Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real.”

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SPECTACULAR RHETORICS

HUMAN RIGHTS VISIONS, RECOGNITIONS, FEMINISMSBy WENDY S. HESFORD

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4951-8

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................................ixIntroduction.......................................................................................1ONE Human Rights Visions and Recognitions..........................................................29TWO Staging Terror Spectacles......................................................................61THREE Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle............................................93FOUR Global Sex Work, Victim Identities, and Cybersexualities......................................125FIVE Spectacular Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Politics of (In)visibility.....................151Conclusion: Posthumanism, Human Rights, and the Humanities.........................................189Notes..............................................................................................205References.........................................................................................233Index..............................................................................................257

Chapter One

Human Rights Visions and Recognitions

Human rights defenders fight for international recognition and visibility in a global marketplace that tends to recast structural inequalities, social injustices, and state violence as scenes of individual trauma and victimization. Yet human rights advocates and scholars have not sufficiently considered what the status of visibility is in human rights advocacy, or how the moral vision of human rights internationalism becomes entangled with global capitalism and hierarchical structures of recognition and visual technologies to produce and regulate human rights subjects. Although visualism is implicated in the debates that have long occupied human rights scholars, such as debates over universality and cultural relativism, the field's embrace of an ocular epistemology (the seeing-is-believing paradigm) that heightens the salience of normative scenes of social and civic recognition (or misrecognition) warrants greater scrutiny. To gauge the political and ethical quandaries that shape human rights appeals and the entangled discourses of humanitarianism, global capitalism, and human rights, we need to investigate the underlying faith in vision and a dialectical politics of recognition, a faith manifested in our engagement with human rights subjects and the discourse about them.

The goals of this chapter are fourfold: (1) to interrogate the cultural and ideological work of spectacular rhetorics in perpetuating a dialectical politics of recognition, underwritten by trauma and subjection, in the history of human rights and its professedly egalitarian imaginary; (2) to explore the tension between humanitarian sensibilities and the enactment of human rights as a form of social criticism, particularly as that tension is manifested in scenes of suffering; (3) to complicate the ocular epistemology and seeing-is-believing paradigm of human rights advocacy by approaching spectatorship and witnessing as historically contingent rhetorical acts; and (4) to deliberate the potential of a differentiated politics of recognition or models of ethical exchange that move beyond recognition. Together these critical forays provide a new vantage point from which to engage the human rights paradox of an exclusive universality, as well as the rhetorical force of the visual field in the perpetuation of the normative assumptions to which human rights internationalism is tethered.

Human Rights Struggles for Recognition

It is ... an ongoing task of human rights to reconceive the human when it finds that its putative universality does not have universal reach. — Judith Butler, Precarious Life

The history of human rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and means to look and to confer recognition. As this history suggests, struggles for recognition are also struggles for visibility. Kelly Oliver, a philosopher and social theorist, argues that "recognition is a matter of seeing. The stakes are precisely the unseen in vision— the process through which something is seen or not seen" (2001, 158). Invoking visual metaphors to characterize empowerment (as visibility) and disempowerment (as invisibility), Upendra Baxi, a legal scholar, points out that, in effect, "the hegemonic function of rights language, in the service of governance ... consisted of making whole groups of people socially and politically invisible" (2006, 46). Here Baxi refers to the "modern" human rights paradigm and European modernity, which were characterized by the logic of exclusion, and the tradition of rights talk and the philosophy of natural law that emerged from the American and French revolutions (42). Both the European liberal tradition of thought and the criteria of individuation associated with Enlightenment rationality privileged the capacity to reason as the criterion for what it meant to be "human" (44). Only those viewed as possessing the "capacity for reason and autonomous moral will" were accorded the status of "fully" human beings; slaves, colonized peoples, indigenous peoples, women, children, and the "insane," marked as other and therefore as not fully human, were by definition not "considered worthy of being bearers of human rights" (ibid.). At the same time that the capacity to reason was differentially applied, so too was the dispersal of compassion. Western liberal philosophy of the late eighteenth century linked modern moral identity to the capacity to sympathize with distant others across boundaries of race, class, religion, gender, and nation—an attribute associated with the development of humanitarianism, and the secular universalism of liberal humanism (Hunt 2007; Nussbaum 1998; and Rorty 1993). Although humanitarianism emphasizes the alleviation of suffering and human rights focuses on the legal defense of violated rights, the two movements are not easily disentangled. Both share intellectual origins in liberal political philosophy and natural law thinking of the eighteenth century. In recent years, human rights and humanitarian law have again converged, both in their shift away from the state as the bearer of rights and toward individual victims and in their representation of distant scenes of suffering characterized by the projection of a hierarchy of victimhood, recognition, and action (Wilson and Brown 2009, 5–6).

Baxi highlights the contrast between the modern human rights paradigm, with its exclusionary criteria, and the contemporary paradigm, which, he contends, is based on principles of inclusion (2006, 46). The contemporary paradigm refers to rights specified in international law in the period following the Second World War. No longer exclusively at the service of imperial conquests, as Baxi claims, the contemporary human rights principle of radical self-determination took precedence in the recognition of the equal worth of all human beings (46). According to Baxi, the contemporary human rights paradigm should not be seen as separate from the struggles for self-determination and national independence among European colonies or the social movements of the post–cold war era,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822349515
• ISBN 13: 9780822349518
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 292
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande