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
3
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
4
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
5
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.
6
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
8
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
9
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
10
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.
15
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
16
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
17
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.
18
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
24
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
25
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?
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