Martyr bodies in the media: Human rights, aesthetics, and the politics of immediation in the Palestinian intifada

Abstract

The growth of the human rights regime in the Palestinian occupied territories during the last two decades and the spread of visual media have had an extreme effect on the nature of Palestinian politics and society. They have transformed the way Palestinians represent themselves to each other and to the international community, whereby appeals to human rights help to constitute a human subject with certain kinds of rights that are seen to arise not from a political status but from the state of (human) nature. In this article, I explore the “politics of immediation” at work during the second Palestinian intifada, which began in 2000, to explain why social actors mobilize representations of people in states of acute physical and emotional distress as part of their political projects. [human rights, Palestine, aesthetics, intifada, media, affect]

In-betweenness and crumbled hopes in Palestine: the global in the local of the occupied territories

“…Although innovative in the use of performance and cutting-edge technology, Twenty-first Century activists also use older, Nineteenth Century abolitionist tactics, such as the dissemination of testimonials that turn anonymous victims into named individuals with families (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 88). Allen (2009) insightfully describes the esthetics of this work. ''Palestinian human rights representatives place a heavy stress on sharing the experience of Palestinian suffering with foreign visitors, on opening channels through which foreigners can identify and empathize with Palestinians'' (Allen 2009: 167).…”

‘All the Beautiful Things’: Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian Childhood

“…I failed to take into account how these visual methods are themselves central to the construction of Palestinian childhood discourse. As Allen (Allen 2009) argues, in a confluence of three intertwined elements, affect, visuality, and human rights, visual representations of suffering, in particular children's suffering, are central to the formation of Palestinians' rights-bearing political subjectivity. In this sense, the visual methodologies used in this research did not so much capture the ways in which Palestinian refugee children perform the discourses of childhood, as much as provide the very means by which such discourses were performed, but also, as we will see further below, disrupted, contested and transformed.…”

“…An overreliance on the language of trauma risks infantilizing Palestinians, limiting their political subjectivity to that of child-like victims (see Peteet 1994;Thompson 2009). While Allen (Allen 2009) points out that images of suffering have been used in an attempt to portray the humanity of Palestinians to a global audience, Feldman (2009) argues that humanitarian aid limits humanity by "reducing people to their victim status [...] requiring them to appear as exemplary victims and not political actors in order to receive recognition of their suffering." Moreover, trauma discourse summons a range of disempowering practices that aim to alleviate individual injury without addressing the structural violence of occupation.…”

“…However, trauma discourse delimits as much as enables Palestinian political manoeuvrability (Allen 2009;Feldman 2009). An overreliance on the language of trauma risks infantilizing Palestinians, limiting their political subjectivity to that of child-like victims (see Peteet 1994;Thompson 2009).…”

When wounds travel

“…Such work has further demonstrated how medical and legal discourses about physical and psychological trauma have become central to the development of humanitarian logics and practices -especially in their recognition of victimhood and suffering in war-ridden societies and other situations of emergency (Allen 2009;Fassin and Rechtman 2009;James 2010;Feldman 2004;Kelly 2011;Ticktin 2006). In the humanitarian setting, the 'suffering body' has become the main legitimate source of such claim making, as a constellation of diagnostic tools, medical certificates, and therapeutics are often operationalized to identify the 'scarring' of war on individuals and communities (Fassin and D'halluin 2005), and mitigate their effects through a range of medical, legal, and/or psychosocial interventions.…”