Abu Ghraib / Robert Mapplethorpe

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

George Neumayr wrote in The American Spectator: "Had Robert
Mapplethorpe snapped the photos at Abu Ghraib, the Senate might have
given him a government grant" ("The Abu Ghraib Collection," May 12,
2004). The outrageous equation of photographic evidence of prison
torture in the real world with works of art that stage scenes of S/M
(which is itself a kind of theater for its practitioners) has since
been picked up and gleefully mass-marketed by Rush Limbaugh: "I would
love to be able to claim the line that George Neumayr used, I can't
claim it because George Neumayr used it first in the American
Spectator. Neumayr said, 'If these prison photos had been taken by
Robert Mapplethorpe, the very senators condemning them would have
funded the exhibit at the National Endowment for the Arts'" (May 14,
2004). What is useful about the right is that they tend to bring out
a subtext in the dominant discourse in the liberal media, radically
exaggerate it, and thereby make it visible to all. The subtext in
question is the idea that the main problem of torture of Iraqi
prisoners at Abu Ghraib is that it was sexual and therefore
"particularly humiliating in 'Arab culture,'" rather than the
presence of compulsion and absence of consent that distinguish rape
and torture from consensual acts of sex in any culture.

<http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/05/orientalist-torture-contd.html>
--
Yoshie

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<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
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