Well, your NCN guys are on the road again.
We’ll be back right after the Thanksgiving Holiday on November 29th.
Veterans Day, November 11, 2010
In hailing the end of World War I President Wilson declared “Armistice Day.” In 1938 the U.S. Congress designated it as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace.” It was subsequently renamed “Veterans Day” in 1954.
Credit: Steve Breen, San Diego Union Tribune
Sight Gag: Erehwon Airlines
Credit: Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Press
Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.
Sight Gag: Late Modern Halloween
Credit: G. Campbell
Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.
Sight Gag: Nine Years Later
Credit: Breen/San Diego Union Tribune
Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.
On The Relative Ordinariness of Everyday Life
Car accidents, like the one above, are pretty common events in the US, somewhere in the vicinity of 12 million per year. And that’s probably one reason why we don’t see very many photographs of them in national and regional newspapers. That the above photograph of an accident in Queens showed up in the WSJ’s “ New York Photos of the Week” slideshow for October 2-8 is thus a bit odd.
For one thing, it’s not a particularly good photograph. The caption reports a head-on collision but we can only see one vehicle; the car we can see is obscured by the person standing in front of it; and the cropping is somewhat off kilter yielding an unbalanced image with too much empty space on one side, and too much clutter on the other. But more than that, there is nothing that seems to distinguish the event itself. No one died, though there were injuries, and it doesn’t seem to have been the result of road rage, alcoholism, or texting while driving … all topics that seem to be of some recurring interest—at least in local newspapers. It appears simply to have been a run of the mill car crash. One of the 12 million. And what makes its placement all the more curious is that there are two other photographs of relatively ordinary car accidents in the same slideshow for a total of three out of eighteen images. One can only assume it was a very slow news week in the Big Apple.
Or maybe something else is going on here. Maybe the point is precisely the ordinariness of such accidents in contemporary society. Amidst the work and play of everyday life accidents simply happen. Individuals may be responsible in some measure, but in an advanced technological society calculated risks are also systemic, animated by the conditions of modern life. And yet, as the photographs in the WSJ imply, there is also a certain randomness to all of it. Here two cars hit one another head-on, there two police cars run into one another, or a van runs into a store front. All we can do is clean up the mess and move on. Its how we live our lives.
Of course, what counts as ordinary is relative to time and place. And so we have another photograph concerning an automobile “accident” that circulated across the blogosphere and showed up on more than a few photographic slide shows in the past week:
The place is East Jerusalem. The driver of the car is the leader of an Israeli settlement. The boy hurtling through the air is a Palestinian youth who, along with the other boys in the photograph, was allegedly throwing stones at the car. Depending on who you want to believe the driver was either trying to run the youths over or attempting to escape their attack. There is plenty of evidence to support each interpretation, but truth to tell, the photograph really does very little to help us sort it all out. What the photograph does indicate, however, is the ordinariness of everyday life within the settlements of the West Bank, a world where settler violence is so common that it becomes impossible to distinguish an accident from a violent assault. Or, perhaps more to the point, it suggests the sense in which the ordinary risks of everyday life in some parts of the world life far exceed the otherwise simple concerns of random mishaps and misfortunes.
Photo Credit: Ken Maldonado/Wall Street Journal; Ilia Yefimovich/Agence France-Presse/Getty
Sight Gag: Do You Remember When … ?
Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.
The Softer Side of War
The military is a brotherhood. The battlefield a cauldron of male bonding. And so it is that we are accustomed to thinking that war is men’s work. “Real” men’s work. So much so that even the thought of a homosexual in camouflage is enough to make some in the Pentagon almost apoplectic as they seek to explain the deleterious effect such “integration” would have on unit cohesion. And generally, the conventional wisdom goes, women are really no less problematic inasmuch as they create “distractions” that disrupt the fragile ecology of the band of brothers. As the photograph above suggests, however, one solution to this problem is to have all-female units, a band of sisters, as it were, who might lend a softer touch in the battle for the hearts and minds of those whose land we have chosen to occupy by military force.
This photograph leads off a slide show at the NYT titled “The Female Marines” that tells the story of a group of women warriors who have been attached to the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment in the Helmand Province with the express purpose of “engaging” Afghani women. The assumption, apparently, is that gender trumps nationalism, and when Afghani women encounter other women they will see past their uniforms and body armor—as well as the fact that they are carrying high powered, automatic weapons—and they will identify with them as women.
The premise relies on a cultural reductionism that is altogether implausible, if not downright absurd given the circumstances of the American occupation of Afghanistan. And so one has to wonder about photographs such as this one, which show the “engagement team” sitting on the floor in an Afghani home, drinking tea and playing with a toddler while members of the family look on.
The photograph has all the qualities of a snapshot in which the principals studiously avoid acknowledging the camera so as to feign a natural or candid moment. But there is nevertheless a tension in the image that belies the illusion of a comfortable identification between the family and its “visitors.” Note, for example, how all but the toddler—who presumably has no knowledge or experience that would signal danger or caution—holds back from any direct interaction with the marines. And notice in particular the boy who stands deep in the back corner, his line of sight riveted upon the automatic weapon that sits on the rug in the middle of the floor. It is hard to know exactly what he is thinking, but it seems unlikely that he is counting his blessings that the people who have taken over his home are women and not men.
That wars such as the one we are fighting in Afghanistan are a struggle for hearts and minds is obvious, and it should give us serious pause as we continue to commit to the use of military force as a way of overcoming the influence of the Taliban in a country that has withstood occupation for centuries. But more, we need to challenge the notion that such force and occupation can be made less noxious or troublesome—let alone more successful—by trying to feminize it. In the end, female marines with guns are, well, simply marines with the guns.
Photo Credit: Lynsey Addano/NYT.
Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.
Sight Gag: Congressional "Truthiness"
Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/European Passport Agency
Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.
Seeing Gender in Transition
By guest correspondent Emily Dianne Cram
Two children in Afghanistan play in an alleyway between two houses. The child on the left awkwardly turns forward while looking back towards the viewer. The child, whose name is Mehran appears to be running toward a place in the distance where bodies blur almost indistinguishably from one another. Or maybe Mehran is running away from the spectator watching the scene unfold. Whether moving towards or away from particular coordinates, the important point to note is that the viewer of the photograph sees Mehran suspended in what appears to be a moment of stasis, yet simultaneously always moving.
Mehran’s story is one of several featured in a recent New York Times essay and slide show that chronicles a practice known as “bacha posh,” in which female-bodied youth pass as boys to secure their families’ status within their communities. The title of the essay—“Afghan Boys are Prized, So Girls Live the Part”—cues the spectator habits the “gender abroad” genre typically evokes: condemnation of a misogynistic practice. Yet, such a judgment seems problematic if we take another look from a perspective that troubles how we think about gender.
What is remarkable about the slide show is the banality of bacha posh in a cultural context Westerners typically see as marked by strict gender segregation. In the image, below, Azita Rafaat, a member of Parliament, leans down to address Mehran, who dresses as a boy.
The entire scene invokes the narrative of a mother attempting to quiet and contain an unruly child in public. Rafaat’s hand curls firmly around Mehran’s shoulder as she demands the child’s attention with what appears to be a stern look. Rafaat reacts with an expression that is in equal parts puzzlement and discontent. What is especially distinctive about the photograph is how Mehran’s white clothes blend into the bodies of the men in the background, while Rafaat, shrouded in black, awkwardly ushers the child through the scene. And what we get is something of an allegory for the often confusing norms of public and private behavior that implicate the equally confusing norms of gender and sexual identity as they manifest in their local contexts. And in the end, Mehran’s particular identity hangs in the balance.
These photographs illustrate how gender in particular is a way of moving one’s way through the world to produce forms of social relationality. Yet, this view is contingent on seeing gender as a permeable category that people use as a means of building their communities. Accordingly, gender is an embodied act, something that is done to produce a relation to others in the world. This perspective enables us to see gender in transition, and how cultural practices often exceed the strict binaries of male/female and woman/man. Perhaps if we take our everyday embodied violations of categories more seriously, we can see the work gender does in a different light, rather than rush to judgments about others.
And yet, the act of seeing gender in transition is imbued with its own paradoxes. In the photograph below Zahra, a girl who has passed as a boy since childhood, gazes pensively through sheer curtains towards a bright, sunlit day.
The juxtaposition between the shadows behind Zahra’s back and the white light greeting “hir”* face and torso suggests that the secret past is coming to an end. Part of bacha posh is a transition into womanhood and the rites of marriage and motherhood. For Zahra and others, such a transition is difficult and at times undesirable because of the way their bodies sediment a particular way of being with others. Another look shows Zahra gazing towards an inevitable future with a sense of heavy dread, and we learn not only of hir desire to live as a boy, but that s/he has never “felt like a girl.”
Zahra’s story shows the contingency of gender, and the heartbreak that emerges when one’s own desires for a particular embodiment conflict with community norms and practices. This tension is endemic to the human condition, one that we all embody as we attempt to find the way our bodies fit into spaces of the world.
* “Hir” is a neutral pronoun that serves as one alternative to the gender binaries embedded in the English language. I choose to use “hir” in this case because of the way Zahra describes hir embodiment: female bodied, yet desiring a male public presentation. “Hir” emerges from a transgender critique of language, a perspective that understands the limits of and inventional potential of language in articulating the complexity of embodiment.
Photo Credit: Adam Ferguson/NYT
Emily Dianne Cram is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Public Culture at Indiana University, and her research engages the intersections of visual culture, embodiment, and gender and sexuality. She can be contacted at emcram@indiana.edu.