Terrorizing Bodies
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Beginning with one single body painted by Gustave Courbet in 1866 and one temple destroyed on September 11th, this paper moves to consider the far reaching impact that the War on Terror has on the entire social body. By paying attention to the unknowable status of both the events and the perpetrators of terrorism, it will be argued that the overwhelming ambiguity of terrorism and counter-terrorist activity has allowed the War on Terror to return to prior discourses of racism and homophobia to mark the corporeal otherness it hopes to confront. Here, images from Abu Ghraib prison, joke pictures forwarded through emails, and other graphic images produced from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts will be read to consider the discourse that is deployed when constructing the ‘terrorist’ body. More than knowledge about the terrorist though, these images offer insight into the dominant notions of the white heterosexual male that are embedded into the West’s nationalist discourses, and offer insight into what bodies, and what desires, are left out of these discourses. Through all of these readings, the unique biopolitical configuration of the War on Terror is made apparent, a configuration which allows simultaneously for the protection and destruction of challenging bodies.
Repository Citation
Gutierrez, Chris. "Terrorizing Bodies." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss1/48