- Title
- History's actors in the theatre of war: images, myths and the frame in the War on Terror
- Creator
- Messham-Muir, Kit
- Relation
- Antithesis Vol. 22, p. 143-155
- Publisher
- University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communication
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- This paper examines two episodes within visual culture that occurred in the months following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Firstly, it considers the newsmedia mythologising of Private Jessica Lynch's rescue from Iraq; secondly, it considers the photographs of prisoner abuse that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in 2004. This paper is not concerned with the reliability of these or any other images, but the extent to which these moments in the visual culture of the West met, or did not meet, the emotional demands of their audience. This paper makes use of Judith Butler's notion of 'the frame,' which is not merely that which is pictured within the frame of the images that emerge from war, but that which delimits what can actually be recognised, understood, communicated, considered and acted upon, and that which cannot. The Jessica Lynch and Abu Ghraib episodes offer interesting insights into the functioning of frames of war: the Jessica Lynch. myth was created to fit the frame, but failed, until it was rehabilitated into the fame retrospectively by its dramatisation as an American telemovie. The Abu Ghraib photographs, however, intruded into the frame, and despite the abuses portrayed, were swiftly interpreted out of the frame through a cognitive and legal reframing of the actions they denote. This paper considers the power of the frame to not only include and exclude certain images of war, but to will them into existence.
- Subject
- War on Terror; Private Jessica Lynch; Judith Butler; Abu Ghraib
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1340615
- Identifier
- uon:28528
- Identifier
- ISSN:1030-3839
- Language
- eng
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