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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

The eye can see a great deal, but it rarely sees itself, and never directly.  Perhaps that is one reason why photographs such as this one remain somewhat scandalous.

This close-up of an eye exam in Indonesia exposes the eye as an object of sight.  We see a soft, wet organ, an aperature that ironically looks camera-like, and coloration that we know isn’t normal.  The orange and red could be a sign of disease or only a diagnostic dye, but in any case the organ’s vulnerability is highlighted.  The blunt thumb holding up the eyebrow is there to help, but it could just as easily blind the man, whose fragment of a face is tense with the strain of holding his eye unprotected before a bright light.  His mute fear becomes even more animal-like when contrasted with the optical instrument in the left foreground.  We are seeing an eye, but one that is trapped, first in disease and then in the clinical apparatus.  His eye has been made an object of the clinical gaze, which comes from outside the frame.

This staging becomes even more intense in the next photograph.

Once again, we see an eye isolated as an object of clinical manipulation guided by an instrumental gaze signified by medical instruments.  All the dramatic values have been enhanced: the eye is more fully decontextualized, with even the face now absent; the instruments now are inside the eye cavity during surgery; the light on the eye is harsher while the eye itself is immobilized (and sure to be harmed if it moves). This is a moment of extreme vulnerability, but if any emotion is to be supplied it has to happen without any cue from the patient, who in fact could be anaesthetised.  The emotional vector, if any, will follow another feature common to both images: the presentation of this clinical intervention to a third viewpoint, that of the spectator.

Every photograph can be thought of as being reflexive, that is, as showing not only some part of the world but also the act of seeing.  That seeing can be further refined as seeing photographically, and as seeing individually, or publicly, or in many other senses as well.  The two images above operate somewhat like popular science writing: they put the viewer alongside a medical intervention as if you could be part of the scene on the basis of your interest rather than actual expertise.  Thus, one watches as if an attending physician or as if in an operating theater, but actually from a third position of the public spectator who becomes aligned with the structure of expertise.

It probably is significant that both the expert and public viewers are not visible.  The eye being seen is completely subordinated to being an object of sight rather than a perspective on those watching, and one should note that the embodied eye is poor in the first case and blacked out in the second.  So, it might seem that these images are not reflexive: the clinical eye is the eye examined, not that of the examiner, and the public is not represented in any form but the photograph itself.  But as I’ve tried to suggest, the images can reveal quite a bit about two intertwined ways of seeing.

Photographs by Beawiharta/Reuters,

Like the recent Olympics, the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China has supplied spectacular images of brightly colored, state-sponsored performance art on a grand scale.  Many of the photographs are of military troops marching on parade.

Something seems to be lost in translation, however, as what we see here is a far cry from the amateurism and informality of a typical Fourth of July parade in the U.S.  A better comparison would be with an Army drill team–if the U.S. Army drill teams had 10,000 troops.

These massive formations of perfectly entrained, tightly choreographed, visually striking troops embody design principles seen throughout Chinese public arts–again, think of the many displays of common movement at the Olympics.  Given the work that goes into it, the performers must take great pride in what they do, and from comments at photo blogs it seems that Chinese spectators around the world really like what they see.

But what do you see if you are not Chinese?  I confess to being somewhat baffled by these images, not least because I can’t help but see them as the latest iteration of the Victory Day parades in Moscow during the Soviet era.  That is, I have the ideological reaction that I was supposed to have when being shown these images in the U.S. press at the time: I see the totalitarian state revealing itself all too clearly in its supposed show of force.  Where the Soviets or the Chinese want us to see massed might, we see the state using enforced conformity to crush freedom and individual expression.

LIFE, Time, and other media outlets loved to shoot the Victory Day/May Day parades, and no wonder.

Today, it looks shabby, perhaps even comical, but at the time it was seen as the work of a state using all its resources to mold Mass Man. The USSR is gone, but the Cold War interpretive framework is maintained by shots of marching troops in North Korea and elsewhere.  (Russia continues the tradition as well, but coverage now is more varied.)  And if that isn’t enough, there still are movies of goose-stepping Nazis, which probably is where the visual convention started.

But are the Chinese formations living monuments to conformity?  Is the authoritarian reality behind Chinese capitalism being revealed–worse, is it being made appealing through their production of the visual spectacle?

I think the answer probably is, in a word, “no.”  Public art does not have one style, different nations share some conventions but also draw on unique cultural traditions, and in any case times change.  The ideological categories of the cold war are not completely out of date, but they are about as good as cars from the same era.  Rather than hazard a reading, I’d rather ask others what they see, whether they like the images, and  why.  Even so, I can’t shake my basic reaction and think that, for all the progress that China is making economically, they still are experiencing something like culture lag when it comes to fashioning civic performances to articulate their version of modern development.

Of course, one of the characteristics of the new China is that they can set their own fashions, thank you very much.

Photographs by Joe Chan/Reuters, Howard Sochurek/Life, Sipa Press/Rex Features.

In contrast to the many images of right wing demonstrators disrupting town hall meetings, this photograph of elderly citizens listening to a discussion of national health care appears to be a model of thoughtful deliberation.

They are old, yes, but not incapacitated.  Indeed, this is just what an audience is supposed to do at a democratic forum: listen carefully.  The individuals here appear by turn skeptical, reflective, and (in the background) critical, and in every case attentive.  Isn’t this what everyone should be doing when thinking about the momentous questions of whether and how to reform health care?

Well, yes and no.  The problem is that, as a group, the elderly are tilting against reform, despite not being out of synch with the rest of the electorate on  other issues.  But is that a problem?  Obviously not if you oppose reform, but otherwise it is indicative of several ironies within the health care debate and at least one paradox within democracy itself.

Needless to say, all of the elderly have the government health insurance that some of them would deny their fellow citizens.  It’s called Medicare and not “the public option” or “socialized medicine” or “government interference in the doctor-patient relationship,” but it’s all of those things–and a good thing, too.  And, of course, the vast majority of those who have it like it and assume that they are entitled to it.  Nor do many of them know that those politicians and organizations that oppose the current reforms also opposed Medicare.  Most tellingly, this group watches more TV news than other voters (something that oddly is often described as being “more informed”), and some of them go so far as to claim that they oppose reform because then don’t want the government involved with Medicare.

A more vexing problem is that, because democracy depends on the secret ballot and aggregated decisions, any voter can behave with a very skewed sense of responsibility.  One can vote against government benefits while remaining assured that you will continue to receive government benefits.  So it is that Red States that vote against “big government” receive more government money than they spend in taxes.   Obviously, if the state’s net take was dependent on the political philosophy it endorsed, voters might think twice about their decisions; but, of course, they don’t have to.   Likewise, if those elderly voting against the public option had to give up their public health care, they might think differently, but that’s not an option.  This disconnect between political rhetoric and government policy has become second nature to all of us.  We accept that politicians can rail against the government while securing government contracts and services for the home district, and that you don’t have to be held personally responsible for your vote.

In other areas of life this would be seen as rank hypocrisy.  Imagine saying that everyone in the family has to eat vegetarian, except me; or that everyone in the congregation ought to pledge, except me; or that everyone in the office has to observe the dress code, except me.  Whereas in private life we take it for granted that pronouncements and actions should be consistent, democracy seems to make hypocrisy a virtue.  What is not readily acknowledged is that this hypocrisy is characteristic not merely of politicians, but of the voters as well.

Paradoxes exist for a reason, and this one probably leads to good outcomes as well.  What is needed, at least in the hear term, is more attentiveness and more imagination.  Look again at the photograph above.  One can see democratic deliberation, and also the frailty and mortality that is the core of our human condition.  One can see, in other words, not only a civic habit but also the fundamental purpose of government.

Note also how each of the individuals is in a defensive posture.  They are protective of themselves, and understandably so.  And keep in mind that none of the press reports defines the elderly in terms of experience or wisdom, but only in terms of the demographic power at the polls.  Given the lack of respect typical of a traditional society, they know that they have to mobilize according to shared interests.

What they, and we, must understand is that self interest can only be fully realized by taking care of others.  From that perspective, the problem is not that the elderly are in the picture, but that they are solely among themselves.  The better understanding will come not by carefully addressing their problems, but by putting those problems in a wider context, one that is at least wide enough to make the high costs of hypocrisy apparent to all.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

When raging wildfires threaten a city, the imagery quickly acquires an allegorical tone.   Apocalyptic horizons suggest that much larger catastrophe looms, and civilization itself can seem exposed, unprepared, unprotected. At that moment, the public art of photojournalism becomes capable of both revealing vulnerability and meeting the need for reassurance.  Like this:

As fires engulf one side of Athens, Greece, the Parthenon arises above the city in magnificent splendor.  Marble bathed in electric light, the monument anchors the image.  One could almost image a cosmic battle between firestorm and enlightenment.  Culture rises up against Nature, a glorious past against a chaotic future, continuity against conflagration.

In between lies the city.  Although hundreds of thousands of people will live and work there, it is subordinated between the monument in the foreground and the ring of fire on the horizon.  Set in a natural crater, in the middle distance, with small lights scattered across it as if they could wink on and off, the city seems to lack both significance and power.  Actually a dynamic achievement greater than any monument or natural event, here its fate seems poised between two alternatives, one of which is no longer possible while the other is terrifying.  It becomes merely a firebreak between past and future, between a lost world and the task of staving off disaster.

You may have to look at the image for awhile to notice the city at all.  The monument dominates the scene, and there is reason to be suspicious of its prominence. Is Athens only the conservator of the Golden Age of Greece (and, according to the standard narrative, the West)?  Are we to be reassured that the shrine still stands, despite whatever havoc is being experienced by ordinary people whose houses are in the fire zone?  If the photograph reveals a deep tension between civilization and catastrophe, it also may be helping some return to a false sense of security.

One might ask, isn’t that what monuments are supposed to do?  Yes, but then there is this image:

I won’t dote on this unusual shot of the Washington Monument, but it is a remarkable example of how the conventional view–and experience–of a public work can be altered by a change in angle and lighting.  Instead of the white tower rising in sublime simplicity amidst the capitol city, we see what could be ancient ruin.  Stragglers wander about the obelisk on a dark plain under a threatening sky.  We could be on a moor near Stonehenge as pilgrims pass by on the way to  another destination.  The pennants in the background could be from a temporary fair in some dark age yet to come.  Again, the future seems much less promising than the past.  The difference here is that, instead of using the monument to anchor collective experience against disruption, now the public icon has been turned against that conventional experience.  Instead of security, the monument anchors a sense of foreboding about the national project.

Two monuments, two visions.  The photographs in each case contain no news, but they do provide allegories of collective life.

Photographs by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images and Jewel Samad/AFP-Getty.  For other NCN posts on wildfire images, go here, here, and here.

Bearing the pall is an honored ritual in western funerary traditions according to which typically the most intimate friends and family members of the departed carry the casket that cloaks and contains the bodily remains. Until recently I thought of this as a rather instrumental ritual, activated largely by the pragmatic need to transport the body from one place to another in solemn and decorous fashion. This past spring, however, my mother passed away at the age of 83 and I came to realize the larger symbolic significance of literally touching the coffin, of making physical contact with the deceased, even if only by proxy and separated by the ritualistic container. I can’t say that I have the words to describe the actual feeling accurately, but there was something powerfully transcendent about it—almost as if I was making contact with a different plane of existence.

My experience was personal and private and I haven’t discussed it with anyone until now. Nevertheless, I was reminded of it by this photograph of Senator Edward Kennedy lying in repose at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. The individuals kneeling at the coffin are five female family members, but in the visual tableau of the photograph they function as faceless surrogates for the thousands of anonymous members of the public who stood in line for hours just for the opportunity to pass the casket on the other side of a velvet rope and to pay their last respects to a life dedicated to national public service. The photograph underscores the solemnity of the occasion—heads bowed, hands folded, and notice how the pall is illuminated in a space otherwise shrouded by shadows cast by the backlit scene—but more than that it channels an ineffable, transcendent, affective sense of belonging that is arguably essential to communal life, animated here by decorously “touching” the coffin with our eyes.

The photograph above was the first image in the NYT’s “Pictures of the Day” for August 25, 2009. The second picture in that slide show was of the funeral procession for Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, an influential Shiite theologian and the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq who had died of lung cancer.

The NYT employs the two photographs to make the point that “very different” leaders—one quintessentially western, the other quintessentially eastern—were mourned in “very different ways,” contrasting the rational and decorous “solemnity of the public farewell to Senator Kennedy” as “thousands of visitors continued to line up to pay their respects,” with the unfettered “emotion of the public farewell” to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim marked by the “thousands [who] poured into the streets amid tight security.”

And indeed, the normative differences and implications of the two photographs are surely pronounced, as one displays a scene that is apparently stately and reserved, a modicum of order and restraint, while the other purports to reveal a dangerous mob “pouring into the street” and warranting “tight security.” In one image the facial markers of emotional expression are hidden from view as the faces of the individuals cannot be seen, either turned away from the camera and directing attention to the coffin or veiled by distance and dark shadows. In the other image, however, shot in the harsh light of day, facial expressions of intense emotion are prominent and pronounced, not least the man in the very center of the image who appears to be bearing much of the weight of the coffin and crying out in grief. And there are other differences as well, as one image genders the public it displays as passively female, the other aggressively male.

And yet for all of the differences what stands out most in need of comment is the profound similarity between the two photographs as each indicates a ritual of mourning predicated on making a direct, affective connection between a surviving public and its deceased leaders as a performative, transcendent marker of civic identity.  Call it “solemnity” or call it “emotion,” the simple fact is that communal life demands affective connections.  If we are going to come to terms with the profound tensions between east and west we might not find a better place to start than in acknowledging and taking  account of this radical similarity.

Photo Credits:  Damon Winters/NYT; Loay Hameed/AP

The news on a slow news day is not like slow food–it’s often more like junk food.  But there is better and worse in junk food, and the same holds for what the press serves up during the summer doldrums.  Time Magazine recently put up a slide show about the zombie walks and related zombie festivals in various cities around the globe.  (There have been several events this summer, along with auditions for the London Bridge Experience staged for tourists, while some of the photos document choice displays in previous years.)  But I’m getting ahead of the show, which started with this beauty:

And he is gorgeous, isn’t he?  As much as I like The Night of the Living Dead, there definitely has been a fashion upgrade in the ensuing decades.  Purists might point out that there is little in the way of genuine corruption evident in this dude: the hair, piercings, beard, and bone structure are stylish in any case, while the make-up only highlights those bedroom eyes.  Romance or Romanticism, he’s got it down.

But why look at a walking corpse, or act like one?  As with the movie, these zombies might be providing a ghastly simulacrum of the “normal” society seen walking about during the day.   The undead can display bodily cravings that otherwise are kept under wraps, and the reactions of those still not buried can reveal social norms that mutilate and kill.  If so, this guy really is a model, because he suggests that fashion dominates modern life and that art is not enough to overcome the distance between one soul and another.

Unless, of course, you have the good sense to not take any of this too seriously.  And so my admiration for the first image was topped by the good laugh I had when I saw this photograph:

These zombies are waiting in a cafe before their auditions in London.  God, I love this tableau.  Even the zombie life can come to this, another day of deadening routine.  Worse, you have to believe they could be ordinary customers not in costume.  He’s shell shocked by another day in a job that is sucking the life out of him; she’s already so bored with the relationship that she could croak.  The living dead, indeed.

The moral of the second photo is that we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that ordinary activity is a sign of life, or that the living aren’t already succumbing to mindlessness.  The moral of the first might be that artistic attentiveness, which is the opposite of mindlessness, can both liberate and isolate.  Alive or undead, there are no easy answers in how to live your life.

Photographs by Johannes Eisele/Reuters and Stephen Hird/Reuters.their auditions.

My first impulse on seeing various iterations of this photograph—this is the official White House version—was to take a pass on commenting on it.  After all, I surmised, it is such an obviously orchestrated photo-op that there is very little that needs saying—a point seemingly underscored by the fact that many of the numerous newspapers that showcased the photograph on their front page chose not to include any front page commentary beyond a simple caption (including the New York Times).  And perhaps this was with good cause as most articles written about the event emphasized such key facts as the clothes being worn, the type of glassware being used, and the variety of beer being consumed (it turns out that the president is a “Bud Lite” man).  But then I watched the Colbert Report and was reminded that the point of this meeting had something to do with what President Obama had called “a teachable moment.” And the more I looked at the photograph the more I wondered, what exactly is being taught?

The photograph shows four men sitting at a round table having a beer and engaging in private conversation.  We know it is a private conversation in part because the four men have their attention directed towards one another and seem oblivious of the fact that they are being observed by a row of photographers some fifty feet away.  But note too, that the very setting underscores the sense of privacy as the table is conspicuously set apart from the rest of the yard in what middle class homeowners might recognize as a patio carefully shielded from public view by trees and planters.  The sense that this is a private meeting is further accented by the photograph as it is shot from afar with what appears to be a standard 50 mm lens that locates the viewer in public space at some distance from the event, and most importantly, clearly outside of hearing range.  Indeed, there is a quality to the photograph that suggests that the viewer is something of a voyeur, intruding where they don’t belong.

Put simply, everything about this photograph signals that the event is a private moment, albeit one that was carefully orchestrated as a spectacle for the passive consumption of the national public.  And, indeed, when someone in the media dubbed the meeting a “beer summit” the president was very quick to point out that this was not an official or even political event.  Rather, he emphasized, “This is three folks (sic) having a drink at the end of the day and hopefully giving people an opportunity to listen to one another.”  The point to note here, of course, is who got “to listen” — and who was consigned to view the event from a distance and without sound.

The lesson to be learned then, it would seem, is that racial tensions of the sort that animated this meeting are best handled as private matters, issues to be resolved by adults (not citizens) between and amongst themselves and outside of the public eye.  And if the outcome is little more than to “agree to disagree,” well, what’s wrong with that?  Perhaps this is what it means to live in a so-called “post-racial society.”  The difficulty is that such an approach grossly simplifies the nature of the problem of race in contemporary society, and especially in instances where racial matters are implicated by the use of state violence to manage the citizenry.  Following the meeting Professor Gates was quoted as saying, “When he’s not arresting you Sgt. Crowley is a really likable guy.” I assume that the comment was made with tongue planted very deeply in cheek, but in any case the irony is profound and very much to the point,  for what is at issue is precisely how Sgt. Crowley behaves when he is enacting his role as an officer of the state, wielding badge and gun.  And whether he was right or wrong in arresting Professor Gates, surely that should never be a private matter shielded from the public view.

Photo Credit:  Lawrence Jackson/Official White House Photo

Recently USA Today ran a photo contest to answer the question, “Can a single image capture the essence of America?”  Of the 1,035 entries, this one was judged to be the best:

It’s a fine image, and one can easily concur with the judges’ statement that it has “gorgeous color, beautiful light and a killer reflection.  The visual surprise makes the eye move back and forth, and the subject is emblematic of the American West.”

But wait a minute.  There is a difference between the first half of that judgment and the second.  Color, light, and the reflection are one thing, while surprise and emblematic representation are another.  In fact, water reflections are standard stuff in nature photography, so there would be little surprise there (nor would viewers be likely to be confused about which horses are real).  And what about the idea that the landscape is the definitive image of the American West–and therefore of America?  Can you get more conventional than that?

My unease wasn’t helped by the paper’s claim that the contest photos “capture America the beautiful beyond obvious landmarks to its glorious landscape and spacious skies.”  OK, no Statue of Liberty, but the Western landscape is an equally obvious visual figure, and it is clear from the text that our perception is supposed to be shaped by the iconography of “America the Beautiful.”  Sure enough, the second and third place photographs are from Antelope Canyon, Arizona and Arches National Park, Utah: in other words, they are beautiful examples of familiar scenes in the photographic archive of Arizona Highways, National Geographic, and similar house organs of travel photography.

The fourth place photo is of an ocean sunset, and so it goes.  Most tellingly, of the top ten photos, only two–numbers 6 and 10–include people.  In the first of these, we see children practicing with lariats at a “cowboy training camp” representing “family fun vacations in the American West”; in the second, there are tiny figures in the background of a photo of kites at a beach.

Don’t get me wrong–some of the contest entries are fine photographs.  But what about the big question: do they picture America?  If so, we may have a problem, because then America is in some important sense essentially empty.

If you look at the rest of the submissions, it seems evident that America is the West, which is largely void of people.  As Richard Avedon, Michael Shapiro, and others have stated before, this is not an innocent idea.  The photo operates ideologically, whether by hiding the workers, implying that natural resoures are boundless, or reinforcing assumptions about American exceptionalism and providentialism (as if Central Asia didn’t have similar vistas, or lacked God’s grace).

To be fair, however, we also have to note that these photos also are negotiating other problems of political representation: by not featuring people, no one ethnic or social group is given the privilege of being the “face” of America, and showing natural scenes through conventional iconography does supply the typical places and common objects that are necessary for the shared seeing that is a vital element of democratic public culture.

That said, it seems to me that we could do better.  The dedication and skill of the amateur photographers in the contest needs to be augmented by critical discussion of how one might represent “the essence of America.”  One argument is that there is no such thing to represent; another is that no one representation could do so.  On the other side, the US is not simply a neutral aggregation of autonomous individuals having nothing in common, and collective living requires common images and ongoing judgments about what is more or less representative.

And let me say it as clearly as possible: America is not empty.  Nor is the natural order of things walking serenely in single file.  Nor can photographs represent a political community as neatly as still water reflects horses.   Public life needs many images–these and others as well.  America is beautiful, but not because the people are invisible.

Photograph by Joanne Panizzera/USA Today.

Commentators on photography frequently claim that the image is a counterfeit of reality. Beware the image, we’re told, as it is not the real thing.  But it you look at what people do with images, you can see far more than people being mislead.  What I find particularly notable is how ordinary people are enlisting images as foot soldiers in public demonstrations.  Instead of displacing reality, images are being used to increase the scale and impact of democratic advocacy.

You could see it as Chinese parents held photographs of children killed when their schools collapsed during an earthquake, and you can see it now as Iranians protest their government’s attempt to fix the presidential election.

Here a protester is not only marching in the street but displaying a photo of another protester who was shot by a government thug in an earlier demonstration.  For an example using an earlier photo of state violence, look at the bottom of this post, and see others in photograph 9 at The Big Picture. That’s only part of the repertoire, however.

I doubt anyone thinks this guy actually is Mir Moussavi, so the protectors of reality can stand down for a moment.  He is doing something much more significant than imitation, anyway: by making the photograph a mask for this political theater, he puts the political leader’s face on the body politic that is the multitude of people in the street.  The leader, who actually is living on the edge of house arrest, is given the force of the people, whose identification with his cause and their right to a fair election is given specific statement.

There may be more going on as well.  This carnivalesque mashup may also be a response to the State’s attempt to mobilize the same means of persuasion on behalf of their theocratic regime, as they do here:

These women are holding photos in a demonstration on behalf of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  The stock portrait of Leaders with the Flag and corresponding production values are in sharp contrast to the dynamic documentary witness in the first image above.  If you want to communicate Order and Stability instead of change, however, this state-sponsored image will do.

It’s tempting to leave it at that: a contest between competing images that reflects the two sides of the polarized confrontation in the street.  The  disenfranchised people, their candidate, and a dynamic visual culture on one side, and traditionalist social orders, clerical leaders, and propaganda on the other.  But I want to tip the scales further on behalf of democratic public art, which, after all, should be too brash and ungainly to be easily categorized.  For that and other reasons as well, you really ought to get a look at this:

The photographs are from the slide show at the Huffington Post.  Photographs 1-3 are Getty images; I don’t have an ID on 4.

One of the questions one might raise about coverage of the Middle East is how much to feature women under the veil.  Despite the range of positions in the region about body covering, the tendency in the US is to feature burqas (of whatever kind or name) when emphasizing deficits of rights and modernization.  But, of course, the matter is not so simple.

For the record, these women are wearing the Afghan chadiri.  If you look closely at this photo, you can see that it might confound several assumptions about living under the veil.  Instead of uniformity, each outfit is individually decorated.  Instead of a primitive society, the women are standing in a pleasantly modern setting.  Most peculiar, perhaps, is that they are standing to be photographed.  How, one might think, can a photograph matter when their faces can’t be seen? (To see how mistaken this question can be, go here.) They may expect to be recognized by what can be seen, or they may be indulging the request for a photo precisely because they are protected from public scrutiny.

These subtleties may be obvious inside their culture, whereas to the Western gaze the women are interchangeable: anonymous, uniform, and uniformly subjugated.  Given their confinement to private life, in public they are not citizens but merely women, interchangeable women.

Before anyone gets too righteous about the Western alternative, we should take a look at this:

These Florida State fans are definitely not under the veil.  They are, however, another example of cosmetic cloning.  (Let’s set the little girl aside, although notice that she is a Florida State woman in training, right down to the bracelet.) Sure, we can identify them as separate individuals: one belly has a navel stud, one doesn’t, and the third has a tattoo, what more do you want?  But they are more closely entrained than the three women in the first photograph: bare midriffs, identical shirts, hats, buttons, bracelets, hairstyles, makeup, and gestures.  Even their faces look like close copies of each other.

We could point out that they are free to choose how they display themselves in public, but this doesn’t seem to be a great example of independent decision making.  My point is that they might as well be in burqas–they are interchangeable women, as much under the sway of gender-specific norms for appearing in public as anyone else.  Their aggressive femininity is little different than the gender segregation of the burqa; both might be labeled variant forms of cosmetic fundamentalism.

None of this need be complicated: many people rightly oppose any gender rules that confine women to subordinate status.  But if  images of women are to be used to subordinate East to West on the grounds that a denial of visibility is a denial of rights, then it’s only fair to raise equivalent questions about how rights are being used to keep women locked into limited gender roles closer to home.

Photographs by Margaret Orwig and Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel.