Spectacular rhetorics
Subtitle: human rights visions, recognitions, feminisms
By: Wendy S. Hesford
Series: Next wave; Next wave
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Durham, NC
Language: eng
Number of pages: 275
ISBN-13: 9780822349334; 9780822349518
Subjects: Human rights; Human rights advocacy; Women's rights
Description: "Spectacular Rhetorics is a rigorous analysis of the rhetorical frameworks and narratives that underlie human rights law, shape the process of cultural and legal recognition, and delimit public responses to violence and injustice. Integrating visual and textual criticism, Wendy S. Hesford scrutinizes 'spectacular rhetoric, ' the use of visual images and rhetoric to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners, chiefly Americans. Hesford presents a series of case studies critiquing the visual representations of human suffering in documentary films, photography, and theater. In each study, she analyzes works addressing a prominent contemporary human rights cause, such as torture and unlawful detention, ethnic genocide and rape as a means of warfare, migration and the trafficking of women and children, the global sex trade, and child labor. Through these studies, she demonstrates how spectacular rhetoric activates certain cultural and national narratives and social and political relations, consolidates identities through the politics of recognition, and configures material relations of power and difference to produce and, ultimately, to govern human rights subjects"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 233]-256) and index.
Table of contents: title: Human rights visions and recognitions; title: Staging terror spectacles; title: Witnessing rape warfare : suspending the spectacle; title: Global sex work, victim identities, and cybersexualities; title: Spectacular childhoods : sentimentality and the politics of (in)visibility.