Bodies

There are a few stories I've read recently that have got me thinking about the way we use the bodies of less-privileged people for our own personal and political satisfaction. We use them as artifacts, we use them as objects, and we thoughtlessly invade them as if they were not truly human.

The most disturbing of these stories is well-covered Kate Harding at Salon, writing about why she doesn't want to watch the video of Iranian student Neda Soltani being shot in the chest and dying in the arms of her father, in the middle of the street. Kate captures what I think is a real problem with the assertion that it's somehow required revolutionary viewing to watch what is, essentially, a snuff film:

Watching a violent death caught on tape seems so ghoulish and exploitive to me; are people really watching to bear somber witness, or merely because it's so shocking -- perhaps even perversely thrilling, in a tiny, shameful way -- that we can watch? (Is it even possible to answer that question honestly?) My feeling yesterday, as it was in 2004, was that I could read the many graphic descriptions available and understand perfectly, painfully well what happened. What further purpose would watching the footage serve? Would I be honoring Neda, or just using her tragic death to feel better about myself for doing something a little more emotionally draining than putting a green overlay on my Twitter photo? Would it really teach me something important I wouldn't otherwise know?

Ever since the video came out, I've resisted watching it and have quickly clicked away even from posts that have the video embedded. Because I do not want to be witness to the very moment that a woman's life is leaving her body, quickly and unexpectedly. That is a private moment. Whatever the cause, when people die, they should be able to do it with dignity. The fact that the the Basiji who shot her (and the dictatorial government who gave the Basiji their guns) took away her dignity by shooting her in the street, does not mean that we can somehow give her back her dignity by watching it over and over again.

I think Megan makes a false analogy when she compares the Neda video to the photos of the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib. Witnessing those photos is important because it actually does serve a political purpose; like I argued in this post about torture, it serves to produce the emotional reaction that underlies our commitment to banning torture, and reaffirm that commitment.

There is no such necessity here. Our commitment that people should not be shot in cold blood in the middle of the street is not in need of affirmation. In contrast, the pictures and videos of torture aren't just emotional, they are educational, they do a better job than any description could of telling us what torture is. We all know what murder is. Most of the people on this earth have lost a loved one, and wrestling with our own mortality is perhaps the greatest philosophical-religious-artistic endeavor of the history of human culture. We understand the pain and suffering and existential angst that attends the fact that a living breathing human being could be there and, just moments later, not there.

To assert that watching the video of Neda Soltani, bleeding and perishing on the pavement, is going to somehow enlighten us about the plight of the oppressed, repressed, and politically disenfranchised people of Iran, is patently intellectually dishonest. No, as Harding says, we watch because we can. We watch for the same reasons we watched the video of Nick Berg's beheading and Saddam Hussein's hanging. We watched to gloat or to cry, to experience emotional release, epiphany, and to stroke the erections of our hatred of the violent other, while simultaneously experiencing a vicarious thrill at witnessing violence.

And it's just too much of a coincidence that the bodies that we use in this way happen so often to be female, brown, or both. As Tami at Racialicious said

We did not need to see bloodied bodies to understand the horror of Columbine. After the first live footage of people in the World Trade Center jumping to their deaths, those gruesome images disappeared. It was too much. We don’t need to see carnage to understand horror when the bodies involved are mostly white.

When it comes to white bodies, especially white male bodies, it seems to disrespect their dignity to broadcast the violence done to them. Recall that not only were networks not broadcasting the beheading video of Nicholas Berg, two DJs in Oregon were actually fired for playing just the audio.

Meanwhile, CNN links to the Neda video right from its website. Think about that.