Gendered Tropes in War Photography

Marta Zarzycka is Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies Department at the Institute of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

• Introduction1. Mourning Bodies: Photographs of Grief2. On Anger, Love, and Shame: Affective Politics of Protest Photographs3. Affective Transactions and Faces of Horror: Portraits of Children4."The Uniqueness of its Figure": Photographs of Corpses in War Reporting5. Stillness en Route: Photographs of Refugees6. Postcards from the War Zone: Representing Women SoldiersConclusion

Gendered Tropes in War Photography makes crucial contributions to our thinking about the changing functions of the photographic image in an era of global shareability. Cataloguing and then nuancing the simplifying logics of the always-gendered tropes at the heart of the representation of combat, Zarzycka models feminist reading practices that can sustain, reanimate or reframe the to-be-expected representations of women caught in conflict zones. Attending closely to the productions of photo-journalism, NGOs, and artists, Zarzycka establishes that while most iconic photos leave out cues of causality, responsibility, and impact, a political capacity for contemporary war photography emerges through practices of looking, invoked through affect and its impact, that might lead to care, social responsibility, and the civil contract of citizenship.Alexandra Juhasz, Chair of the Fim Department, Brooklyn College, CUNYMourning women, women protesters, the non-Western girl, the female corpse, the refugee woman, women soldiers – after reading Marta Zarzycka’s incisive analysis of these gender tropes, you will never see war photography– or indeed the world – in the same way again. Especially valuable is her use of affect theory for feminist critique of emotional responses such as empathy, mourning, and shame. Picking up where Susan Sontag left off, Zarzycka makes an ambitious and powerful appeal for an ethical spectatorship that can reframe the deployment of gender for documentary purposes.Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.Mourning, protesting, suffering, dying or fighting: images of the female body in war emerge, in Zarzycka's book, as themselves a battlefield where ideas and emotions about territory, belonging and community struggle for power. Richly theorised and insightfully argued, her benchmark volume on the gendering of war photography is the first to focus systematically on the visual tropes of the female body and their capacity to produce dominant imaginations of collective identity. Zarzycka's is an original and powerful voice that compels us to rethink the crucial interfaces between mediation and gender, affect and politics, nationality and solidarity, 'self' and 'others'. Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.