Running Head: Abu Ghraib: Genet’s Final Masterpiece

Abu Ghraib: Genet’s Final Masterpiece

Amina Asim

Visual Rhetoric

2

Northwestern University

The beauty of a moral act depends on the beauty of its expression. To say that it

is beautiful is to decide that it will be so. It remains to be proven so. This is the task of

images, that is, of the correspondences with the splendors of the physical world.

- Jean Genet “The Thief’s

Journal

Torture and questions of morality are intrinsically fused together. It

is no surprise that the Abu Ghraib prison photographs have created a

tiny storm in the social science and humanities circles. The

triumphant smiles on the faces of the American soldiers and the short

pornographic skits incarnated for the camera have not only disturbed

but have stirred up a need to understand and even relate. The

juxtaposition of the everyday gestures that we are all guilty of

making when the lens of a camera is pointed towards us, with the

violence and humiliation inflicted on the prisoners makes demands on

the viewer to re-question standards of human morality. These

photographs have naturally resulted in increased interest in the power

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of photography, converting critics like Susan Sontag into believers,

as she acknowledges the effect that these photos have had.

The importance of the events represented in these photographs is

not only restricted to the philosophical and psychological

implications on human behavior under the influence of power; but the

essence of the forms of violence being meted is inextricably linked to

the performative aspect of these photographs. The understanding that a

camera can immortalize certain events in time and bring a large public

audience to private moments would make one expect discretion to be

employed when photographing morally suspect occurrences one’s self.

Two broad explanations to why the Abu Ghraib and similar photographs

were/are taken could either be that: 1) the acts being recorded were

not considered morally wrong, rather something to be celebrated,

perpetuated, established; 2) and/or something created in order to gain

secret pleasure from a morally decrepit act, through re-visitation or

through the voyeuristic gaze of another on self in an erotic setting.

While critics like Susan Sontag and Judith Butler seem to contend

more in favor of the first one, they are certainly not mutually

exclusive. Where the former blames the existence of such photographs

on “the culture of shamelessness” as well as “the reigning admiration

for unapologetic brutality” that for Sontag seems to be replete in

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present day America and how its political ideologies have been formed.

The latter also blames Western culture, but argues that indifference

to these photographs and what they represent is part of the ‘not

seeing’ in the midst of ‘seeing’ that has been perpetuated by the

dehumanizing of the other. In the same vein, Stephen Eisenman, in his

book “The Abu Ghraib Effect” wonders about the “moral blindness” of

the US public and the photographers themselves in the face of these

brutal and inhuman acts of torture meted upon unarmed, bound men and

women. For him though, what is more disturbing is the “familiarity” of

these photographs, especially for the art critic or historian. He,

like Butler, suggests that this familiarity emerges from a long

history of the demonization or de-humanization of the victims to such

an extent that extreme violence towards them becomes acceptable; this

relationship in turn has been portrayed through art for hundreds of

years.

Thus, much of the reaction to these photographs seems to stem

from a fearful awakening that acceptable standards of morality, which

had seemingly been progressing toward a more humane level, especially

in certain societies, have not progressed at all. Rather, familiarity

is found in the most ancient of ideals and most violent of “immoral”

acts recorded in history. But in this paper I would like to focus more

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on the second broad explanation mentioned earlier and extend this

disquieting sense of familiarity that Eisenmann relates, to the realm

of literature.

By drawing parallels between Jean Genet’s elaborate descriptions

of his homoerotic fantasies in the confines of a prison cell and the

performative aspect of the Abu Ghraib photographs, I contend that like

Genet who admittedly used his writings (especially his earlier works)

to experience ecstasies of sexual pleasure, the Abu Ghraib prison

guards used the camera in order to enact their own homoerotic or other

sexual fantasies. Where Genet asserted his own moral code in front of

the gaze of the reader through his words, the Abu Ghraib prison guards

enacted their moral standards (of torture) in front of the gaze of the

camera by architecturing elaborate scenes of sexuality and domination.

Both are autobiographical in nature and recording events as they take

place, at the same time engineering scenes and characters for the sake

of increased pleasure. This very auto-fictitious nature of Genet’s

work is what provides the claim credibility as the alterity of the

prison world where morality is re-defined is emphasized and which we

witness in the continued use of such torture techniques and the large

number of these photographs.

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I begin the explanation with a theoretical discussion of the

power of the gaze (the camera’s in particular) and the performative

aspect it incorporates or encourages, hopefully developing an argument

toward similitude. This follows with the identification of a number of

tropes found in both enactments that allows the reader to understand

the basis of the argument and maybe approach the discussion in a new

way. Most examples are drawn from Genet’s earlier works, like “Lady of

the Flowers” and “The Thief’s Journal” as well as some of his plays

and other work.

Morality, Gaze and Fantasy:

… it is […] obvious that the taking of pictures was not

incidental but integral to the notorious events at Abu Ghraib.

Torture in the prison could, of course have been carried out

without the aid of photography, as it has been on countless

other occasions throughout history, but the cameras that

were, in this instance, ubiquitous did not merely record

what happened: they were instruments used to abuse and

humiliate prisoners.1

1 Reinhardt, M. (2007). Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety ofCritique. Beautiful Suffering. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.16

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The gaze of the camera is not objective. It is not absent. It is

the gaze as if that of a person. Not one, not two. Possibly, of many,

which makes it more powerful than the gaze of another person, or ten.

The photographs taken by the prison guards at Abu Ghraib were

apparently not meant to be distributed publicly, but were only for

their own selves or to show to their friends and families as a

memorialization of their power and triumph - of their ability to

sexually denigrate the prisoners any time they wanted, no matter how

humiliating. Similarly, Genet is constantly in dialogue with a reader.

He is telling his story and he expects someone to be reading it. Even

though he claimed that he expected to get a life-sentence in prison

and never expected anyone to read his words, he is well-aware of a

gaze, maybe of one, two, or many more. He even engages with the reader

actively, as in the following passage:

“Here are some “Divinariana” gathered expressly for you. As I

wish to show the reader a few candid shots of her, it is up to him to

provide the sense of duration, to feel the passing of time, and to

agree that during this first chapter she will be between twenty and

thirty years of age (42)”

But where for Genet, his writing is voluntary in front of the

reader, Azoulay stresses an involuntary performative aspect in front

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of the gaze of a camera. In the “The Civil Contract of Photography”,

she asserts that whether the photographer is there or not, a subject

smiles involuntarily the moment a lens is pointed at her. “The smile

is an effect of the photographed person’s posture in front of

something – the camera – before which she is supposed to simulate

standing in front of someone and therefore is supposed to smile in

response to the person acting as proxy for that something or someone.”2

The photographer can only point the camera in a specific direction;

the gaze of the camera might see something completely different, or

something more. Sontag also comments on the necessary role that the

presence of the camera plays where being photographed is the only way

to have a record for one’s life; thus, “to live is to be

photographed.” For her the performative aspect of photography is

ingrained in the very essence of being alive in the modern world. She

says:

But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the

community of actions recorded as images. The expression of

satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on

helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story.

There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to

2 Azoulay, A. (2008). The Civil Contract of Photography. New York, Zone Books. 379

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which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff,

direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events

are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin

for the camera. There would be something missing if, after

stacking the naked men, you couldn’t take a picture of

them.3

Thus reality seems to have become a performance because of the

ubiquitous nature of photography. The camera can be used as a tool for

voyeuristic pleasure at any given moment. The very fact that the

pictures were taken at specific moments requires an understanding of

thıs sort to be important. Butler contends that Sontag seems to put

all the blame on the photograph for making her go through the process

of witnessing these events, but acknowledges the performative aspect

incited by the lens of the camera by calling it the “festive cruelty”

of the camera: “‘Oh, good, the camera’s here: let’s begin the torture

so that the photograph might capture and commemorate our act!’” 4The

camera creates a setting where fantasies can be played out and passed

off as reality. Joanna Bourke seems to put the blame on the

photographers of the events calling the sado-masochistic depiction of

the prisoners “torture as pornography”; she says: “Torture is an

3 Sontag, 1344 Butler, 959

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embodied violation of another individual. The sexual nature of these

acts shows that the torturers realise the centrality of sexuality for

their victims' identity.”5

The gaze of the camera is used as a witness to the exploitation

that the guards can do. The guards create their own moral code, under

the complete and utter freedom granted to them by higher officials.

Their performance can take whatever form they wish; they can play out

any fantasy they wish to and record it, especially with the help of

digital cameras today. Schwarz explains that this “autobiographic

twist” of pornographic consumption stems from a visual culture of sex,

which has become more engrained with the arrival of cameras and since

the “emancipation” of the sexual act in the 20th century. Sexual visual

pleasure is a natural part of our lives; the camera serves the purpose

of a mirror, in which we can see our sexual selves. Thus, “once, the

eye has been given so major a role in the production of sexual

pleasure, it can prosthetically utilize optical instruments in order

to see more, from other views and for longer periods of time.”6 For

Genet though, being in prison, the mirror was created with the help of

his pen, in front of the gaze of an imaginary reader.

5 Bourke, J. (2004). Torture as Pornography. guardian.co.uk.6 Schwarz , O (2010). Going to bed with a camera On the visualization of sexuality and the production of knowledge. International journal of cultural studies, vol:13iss:6 pg:637 -656. 643

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Genet, like the prison guards creates a new world order, where

the deviant or the criminal is the saint, his crime is his virtue and

the “real” world is what Genet needs to be wary of. Our idea of

morality, as we know it, is completely toppled over in the

epitomization of rebellion practiced in the confines of a prison cell.

He describes the beauty and the unkempt manliness of the convict with

such ardor and poetry that he might very well have been talking about

flowers. Their crime makes them more beautiful; the more horrendous

the crime, the manlier they are, and all the more attractive.

Genet is constantly in dialogue with a reader. He is telling his

story and he expects someone to be reading it. Even though he claimed

that he expected to get a life-sentence in prison and never expected

anyone to read his words, he is well-aware of a gaze, maybe of one,

two, or many more. In Genet, we enter a new world order, where the

deviant or the criminal is the saint, his crime is his virtue and the

“real” world is what Genet needs to be wary of. Our idea of morality,

as we know it, is completely toppled over in the epitomization of

rebellion practiced in the confines of a prison cell. He describes the

beauty and the unkempt manliness of the convict with such ardor and

poetry that he might very well have been talking about flowers. Their

crime makes them more beautiful; the more horrendous the crime, the

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manlier they are, and all the more attractive. Sartre, in his

introduction to “Our Lady of the Flowers”, notes Genet’s awareness of

a gaze as a source of maximizing Genet’s pleasure:

Writing is an erotic device. The imaginary gaze of the gentle

reader has no function other than to give the word a new and

strange consistency. The reader is not an end; he is a means,

an instrument that doubles the pleasure, in short a voyeur

despite himself. Genet is not yet speaking to us; he is

talking to himself though wanting to be heard. Intent on his

pleasure, he does not so much as glance at us, and though his

monologue is secretly meant for us, it is for us as witnesses,

not as participants. We shall have the strange feeling that we

are intruders and that nevertheless our expected gaze will, in

running over the words on the page, be caressing Genet

physically. (17-18)

In interviews after the photos were released, the prison guards

at Abu Ghraib also suggested that the photographs were not meant for

the public, but the performative aspect of the photographs makes one

wonder whether in some corner of their minds, they were indeed

creating Genet’s world. They might not be aware of what they were

doing or might not be willing to recognize it, but Genet accepts his

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own interpretation of morality openly and indeed relishes in its very

perversity. Brigid Bropy argues that the whole nature of the book is

written as a “cult” and that there ıs an element of fame throughout

the way he writes.7 Moreover, Genet’s task in his writings is clearly

political as he embraces alterity and refuses to be reformed.

Genet “sees himself being seen and thus creates a sub-text for

all that appears to be.”8 He deliberately defies the system in his

perversion and in his beautification of the norm’s definition as

perverse. Genet defiles all these laws and measures by the very

essence of their joyful acceptance. By finding pleasure in what is

meant to be painful, Genet overturns the society’s moral ideals, and

proves it wrong in its application of its norms and ethics. Genet

exercises the highest form of metaphysical freedom in the midst of the

utmost form of physical unfreedom. His words seem to provide him with

this freedom, which he uses not only to enact the performance of

deviance, but to derive masturbatory pleasure from it.

In the introduction of “The Thief’s Journal” Sartre says of

Genet: “Genet sees himself everywhere; the dullest surfaces reflect

7 Brophy, B. (1979). Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet. P. B. a. J. Halpern.N. J., Prentice-Hall Inc. 70

8 Champagne, R. A. (2001). "Jean Genet in the delinquent colony of Mettray: The development of an ethical rite of passage." French Forum 26(3): 71(20). 79

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his image; even in others he perceives himself, thereby bringing to

light their deepest secrets.”9 Thus, Genet seems to see himself in the

gaze of all his characters, he humiliates himself and writes in order

to receive sexual pleasure from his meanderings and his imagination.

Sartre calls his work an epic – “an epic of masturbation”. This very

nature of Genet’s work is what makes the familiarity of the Abu Ghraib

photos disturbing, as the roles are reversed but something eerily

similar seems to be taking place. This time what is being recorded is

not done under a deliberate acceptance of a fantasy world, but with

the conviction of forced and justified reality, where the prisoners

are real life, uncooperative victims of carnal domination.

Abu Ghraib photos and Genet:

Self as Victim and Criminal:

Every night I get a few scraps of information. My

imagination does not get lost in them. My excitement seems

to be due to my assuming within me the role of both victim

9 Genet, J. (1964). The Theif's Journal. Paris, Grove Press Inc.

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and criminal. Indeed, as a matter of fact, I emit, I project

at night the victim and criminal born of me, I bring them

together somewhere, and toward morning I am thrilled to

learn that the victim came very close to getting the death

penalty and the criminal to being sent to the colony or

guillotined.”10

Genet conveniently moves between the role of the victim and the

criminal in his writings. He loves being the victim and being

humiliated, at the same time he basks in the glory of his crimes and

the crimes of those he knows or he is close to. He regales in tales of

his crimes and then seeks his victim’s forgiveness; for instance in

this scene he narrates where Our Lady finally appears before the judge

in all his glory and when the judge asks him where he got the idea of

murdering an old man the way he did. Our Lady replies that the victim

gave him the idea himself, which the judge cannot believe. Genet

describes the “fabulous impecuniousness” with which Our Lady carries

himself to make Our Lady a pedestal cloud; he was as prodigiously

glorious as the body of Christ rising aloft, to dwell there alone and

fixed, in the sunny noonday sky.”11

10 Ibid, 1611 Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers.186

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In “Regarding the Torture of Others”, Sontag quotes an American

senator to show the rationale behind the justification of torture at

Abu Ghraib: “These prisoners, you know, they’re not there for traffic

violations. If they’re in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners,

they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of

them probably have American blood on their hands, and here we’re so

concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”12 Sontag and

Butler both consider that many Americans would justify the torture and

humiliation of the prisoners on the basis of self-victimization.

The prison guards who are posing and smiling switch roles between

victim and criminal whenever they want. They have a sense of

victimization instilled in them, that allows them to perform acts of

torture and in their performance gives them a sense of exultation, a

sense of sainthood. The camera is not only recording their power over

the “victims” but also their own “heroism” – they are Genet’s

criminals in their own eyes. Masculine and saintly. Even the female

guards are masculine in demeanor. The more horrific the prison guard’s

violence, the nobler they are. In Abu Ghraib, the criminal and prison

guard, whom Genet cleverly defies, have changed roles.

12 Sontag, 141

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In one of the most famous photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib a

female prison guard is holding one end of a leash, the other end of

which is tied around the neck of a naked male prisoner as he lies

uncomfortably on the ground. The female guard looks onto the prisoner

from a dominant upright position, in a masculine posture, and seems to

be stretching the leash stressing her control over his movement. In

the background, we see a number of open cell doors with blankets and

cloths hanging out of them, which creates a sense of an ongoing

theatre of sadistic festivities; one can’t help but imagine similar

short scenes being enacted on different sides of the prison floors,

waiting for the gaze of the camera to move on them, so that the

perfect pose can be taken.

Another one of these photographs shows the words “Rapeist”

written on the naked posterior and thighs of two prisoners as they are

made to lie around on the floor. The explanation given for this by the

guards is that these prisoners raped another young Iraqi in their

cells. The prison guards thus fluctuate between defining the prisoners

as aggressors and aggressees, where this fluctuation provides them

with a good rationale to play with understood morality.

Another set of photographs, portraying this triumphalism are the

ones in which a prison guard poses with a dead or injured prisoners.

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In most of these photos, the guard gives a happy thumbs up, while

smiling and pointing at the dead or injured. There is a sense of “We

have killed the demon and now we can celebrate. We are heroes.” These

photos are very similar to those that came out of Afghanistan some

time back, where American soldiers were posing with a number of Afghan

dead bodies lying on the ground, some of which seemed to belong to

very young boys even. These also ring familiar with hunting

photographs, where the hunter poses with his/her catch to make a

record of the triumph of human over animal.

Feminization of Men:

Divine, the protagonist of “Our Lady of the Flowers” is a convict, who

is a drag queen, and thıs most vicious and beautiful of all the

murderers is called “Our Lady” throughout the text and described with

feminine the use of feminine metaphors. For instance while telling the

story of Divine, Genet describes an encounter of the protagonist:

Quite some time earlier, the appearance on the village road

of a bride wearing a black dress, though rapped in a veil of

white tulle, lovely and sparkling, like a young shepherd

beneath the hoar-frost, like a powdered blond miller, or

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like Our Lady of the Flowers whom he will meet later on and

whom I myself saw here in my cell one morning, near the

latrines – his drowsy face was pink and shaggy beneath

soapbuds, which blurred his vision …13

Genet is obsessed with the use of “flowers” as a metaphor

whenever describing the convicts, especially the convicts garb. At the

beginning of “The Thief’s Journal”, Genet writes “… there is a close

relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility of and delicacy of the

former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the

latter.”14 “Pink” is the color most commonly used to describe the most

violent and masculine of criminals and the more masculine, they are,

the more effeminately their “beauty” is described. Thus, there is a

perpetual feminization of the convict.

In a number of the Abu Ghraib photographs, prisoners are

stripped, tied, or handcuffed to bed frames and their eyes and faces

are covered with women’s underwear. According to Eisenman, the purpose

of this “ego down” approach is to sexually humiliate the prisoners,

especially since they are Muslim men. It is also believed that the

“victim might actually enjoy the violation” with some right-wing

13 Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers. 12,1314 Genet, The Thief’s Journal. 9

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commentators discussing that the prisoners actually welcome the sexual

violation.15

In one such photograph, a male prisoner’s arms are tied behind

him to the iron frame of his bed, he is stark naked and a his face is

covered with a white female underwear. In some photos male prisoners

are made to strip down and follow the commands of female guards, thus,

completing the process of the feminization of the prisoners. The

camera’s gaze, all this time is directed at the performance, which

creates a visual setting for the masturbatory desires of the prison

guards. The prison guards also seem to host Genet’s fascination with

male buttocks. In many of these photographs, male prisoners are

stripped down, piled on top of each other and then photographed from

the behind. In one such photo, a male and a female guard give a thumbs

up sign while posing in front of a stack of naked male buttocks where

six of the prisoners are made to sit on top of each other in a way

that their buttocks face the camera and their covered faces are not

visible.

Voyeurism and narcissistic display15 Eisenman. 97,98

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In “Un Chant D’ Amour” (A Song of Love), the only film ever made

by Jean Genet, in 1950, a prison guard spies on two convicts in

solitary confinement as they try to communicate with each sexually

through the wall between the cells. The film is laden with sexual

innuendos and the convicts are constantly masturbating. In the

article “In the Slammer”, John Mercer makes the case of contemporary

gay pornography being influenced by the likes of Jean Genet; he

identifies the themes of “voyeurism and narcissistic display, the

sexualization of seeing and being seen” as always evident in the

film.16 In A Song of Love, the prison guard peeps through a hole in the

doors of the two cells, switching from one to another, as he is

aroused by the “metaphysical sexual union” of the two convicts.

In a not so subtle Freudian way, the guard keeps playing with his

gun all along. At the end of the short film, he enters one of the

convict’s cells and puts his gun in his mouth. The convict takes it in

as a very obvious play at oral sex. Throughout the film, the two

convicts are masturbating, a theme that runs all through Genet’s early

work and apparently, through the Aby Ghraıb photographs as well.

16 Mercer, J. (2004). "In the Slammer -- The Myth of the Prison in American Gay Pornographic Video." Journal of Homosexuality 47(3): 151 - 166. 163

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The photographs are replete with pictures of the prisoners

stripped down completely. In one of the photographs, one can see a

prisoner and then maybe another prisoner in the background; both are

being made to masturbate in front of the camera. In another

photograph, one sees a pairs of prisoners, one standing upright and

the other kneeling in front of him, performing oral sex on a limp

penis. For Genet, the moment from where the limp penis becomes hard is

a moment of triumph. In one of his fantasies in “Pompes funebres”,

Genet creates the fantasy of Hitler and Paulo having sex together;

Michael Lucey considers this the non-erotic gaze in the experience of

eroticism. After quoting a passage from the book, he remarks: “This

passage seems to imagine a hard-on as coerced and to imagine the loss

of a hard-on as offering an appropriate, if unsustainably brief,

resistant response to a certain fantasy figure of Hitler serves as

foundation (91).”

Prisoners are stripped down, made to stand in lines and a female

guard points at their exposed penises laughing and posing for the

camera. The heads of the prisoners are covered in most such photos as

if to make their identity anonymous – after all, this way, one can

imagine anyone under the hoods. Thus, by making the prisoners (who are

evil, as Hitler for the guards) fake blow jobs and masturbation in

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front of the camera, the prison guards seem to be staging Genet’s most

political of fantasies.

Religious Symbolism:

Finally, Genet’s descriptions of the most violent criminals are

most often metaphors of religious exaltation, especially in Our Lady

of the Flowers. For example, describing Divine at a later stage “That

evening, undressed and alone in the garret, she saw with fresh eyes

her white, hairless body, smooth and dry, and, in places, bony. She

was ashamed of it and hastened to put out the lamp, for it was the

ivory body of Jesus on an eighteenth-century crucifix, and relations

with the divinity, even a resemblance to it, sickened her.”17 For, the

prison guards at Abu Ghraib the fact that the prisoners were Muslims

was a major part of the humiliation that they were put through.

Considering that the concept of shame or modesty (haya) is a major part

of the Islamic religion, prowling naked bodies of the prisoners around

the cells and then taking photographs of this in order with the threat

to make them public served as an addition to the pleasure being

derived from the whole exercise. Blow-jobs on other male prisoners

also signifies the religious connotations of the performance being

17 Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers. 70

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enacted, since homosexuality is a massive taboo in Islam, as in most

other religions.

The most iconic of the Abu Ghraib pictures is one in which a

prisoner is standing on box, with his head covered in a black cowl

with arms outstretched as if crucified and wires hanging down from

both his sides. Hariman and Lucaites describe it as a scene out of

Genet’s play The Balcony, in which “officials played their

sadomasochistic games in a brothel while the real revolution escalated

outside.”18 In another photograph, another prisoner, or maybe the same

one, is seen hanging limply from the balcony outside the cells as he

is handcuffed to the railing. The photograph is taken from below,

which cannot help but remind the spectator of how the pope stands at

his balcony and waves down at his followers below. Hariman and

Lucaıtes also compare the photograph to the hooded faces of the Klu

Klux Klan’s hooded members, in which case the irony of the setting

cannot be denied and the victim/criminal dichotomy emerges again.

In another photo, a prisoner stands naked once again in a

crucified position and is apparently covered in faeses as he is called

“shitboy”, an American soldier displays his gun and smiles for the

camera behind him. Thus, there is an exultation of the prisoners as a

18 Robert Hariman, J. L. L. (2007). No Caption Needed. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. 294

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religious figure, and at the same time there is a degradation of the

holy. The boundary between the sacred and profane seems to be

traversed with almost as much ceremony as Genet, who loathes the idea

of religion and takes pleasure in describing his most lurid of

fantasies with the use of the most religious imagery.

Conclusion:

An attempt has been made to draw parallels between the

photographic encounter in the Abu Ghraib prison photographs and

Genet’s conception of the prison as ground for his sexual fantasies to

allow the reader to access a more intimate explanation of the

performative nature of the photographs. I have argued that under the

gaze of the camera and in their freedom to enact whatever standards of

morality that they wished, the prison guards at Abu Ghraib ended up

embracing Genet’s moral code. But while Genet performs for his reader

and admittedly for his own sexual pleasure, his characters and his

fantasies never leave the realm of dreams; on the other hand, the

prison guards at Abu Ghraib could, because of their position in power

and lack of laws prohibiting them, actually materialize their

fantasies making the prisoners their show puppets.

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The autobiographical nature of both texts and the common tropes

that are observed in both as detailed in the paper, creates an even

more disturbing understanding of the events at Abu Ghraib. The fact

that such torture exists in this age tells us that there is exists in

human beings an innate perversity of nature which makes them behave in

certain ways if provided a position of power. It is very different

when this aspect is explored as a thing of beauty through writing from

when it is actually practiced by those in power to assert their

domination. The fact that the camera has become an integral part of

the whole process, also shows that when asserting such power there

might be a need in us to be acknowledged, to be revered and to be

immortalized. Or maybe people are just looking for ways to exorcise

their eroticity, which has been suppressed for too long, even if at

the expense of other. After all, rape is nowhere close to extinction

and neither is pornography, even of real forced encounters caught on

tape. Does that make the events at Abu Ghraib alright? Not at all.

But, is there more their than the Orient/Occident and political debate

going on there? Absolutely.

The prison guards at Abu Ghraib were allowed to defy

international laws of torture and abuse of prisoners. The awareness of

the presence of a gaze turned them into Genet’s criminals, who revered

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violence, masculinity and their own homoerotic game play. The role of

the photographic gaze and a previous rhetoric of victimization in

these events is crucial to the understanding of the encounter and the

eroticism and performativity imbibed in them. The question that

remains is that if Genet were to be put in a similar situation, would

the results still have been the Abu Ghraib photographs?