Seeing (in)security, gender and silencing: posters in and about the British women’s suffrage movement

Abstract

Feminist Security Studies has focused on expanding the referent object to individuals and nonstate collectives, looking beyond the military sector to include questions of identity, and uncovering (in)security in unexpected places. An important part of this debate is over silence, particularly about how certain individuals are silenced and how they might be brought into view. This article looks at the ways images can be used to make gender-specific security problems visible. It holds that text, images, and practices interact to construct (in)security and it outlines a tripartite text-image-practice model for analysing these interactions. Through a case-study of the British women's suffrage movement it illustrates the potential of the text-image-practice model. The suffrage movement leveraged visuals, militancy, and practices like hunger striking to resist attempted silencing by the government across textual, verbal and visual planes. Using the suffrage campaign, the article shows how posters were used to try to silence Suffragettes and how Suffragettes resisted that silencing. Thus, it demonstrates that images are important sites of feminist resistance and security politics that can also communicate a politics of the body. The article also offers an illustration of how historical cases of gender insecurity and resistance as well as their visualisation can be brought into Feminist Security Studies.

‘Both needed and threatened’: Armed mothers in militant visuals

“…Here, I specifically analyze images that denote armed motherhood: those that show armed women, who are carrying or in direct proximity to children or who are referenced in text as mothers, and who are depicted in support of the militant organization or its goals. Channeling Barthes (1977), Cooper-Cunningham (2019: 391) defines the denotative meaning of images as the ‘explicit, literal meaning’ that ‘captures or depicts embodied acts [and] holds regardless of genre’. But militant images complicate this interpretation.…”

“…The ‘embodied act’ of armed motherhood is not always explicit, nor does it hold regardless of context. Barthes (1977) and Cooper-Cunningham (2019) view denotation as connotation’s fixed counterpart. Here, I suggest instead that a subject’s denotation can also rely on context for explication.…”

“…Summarized, Hansen’s (2015) analytic strategy for researching icons involves interrogating the image itself, including its denotation, reference to other related icons, and reasons for its iconic status; the icon’s circulation and interpretations; and how reproductions of the icon appropriate its imagery in other contexts. This means interrogating how color is used (Cooper-Cunningham, 2019); how text supplements or explains images to specific audiences; the differences in image type (Barthes [1977], for example, suggests that photography offers a more ‘realistic’ and ‘objective’ documentation of individuals than illustrations); and how images are co-opted. Hansen (2015) deeply engages one icon, the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib, in a variety of political and media contexts to show how different environments employ and interpret the same image.…”

Drawing Fear of Difference: Race, Gender, and National Identity in Ms. Marvel Comics

“…19 Discourse is never purely verbal/ textual: the visual and/or bodily show and tell stories in conjunction with and/or separately from text/word. 20 These representations constitute identities wherein certain bodies, actors, get meaning(s) attached to them through discourse. 21 This often takes place through processes of linking and differentiation in relation to others.…”

The security captor, captured. Digital cameras, visual politics and material semiotics

“…So far, the idea that cameras have agency has received little attention in scholarly debates about visual security. Images-as-representation, their interpretants, and the schemes we draw upon in making sense of them have been in focus, not the cameras and media that afford all this (see contributions in Vuori and Saugmann 2018;Bleiker 2018;Hozić 2017; as well as Möller 2007;Shepherd 2008;van Veeren 2010;Lisle 2011;Schlag and Heck 2013;Cooper-Cunningham 2019). For David Campbell, for example, 'the dominant social understandings existing at the moment of production and reception are more important than the specific form or content of the image for the creation of meaning' (Campbell 2004, 71).…”