Being Numerous Read online

  But the multiplicity of represented pleasures and perversions has not ended the fact of “female, male, or otherwise” sexuality (by which I presume she meant gender). Proliferating perversions, as represented in categories of online viewing and participation, may have created a multitude of norms, but this has not meant a disruption in the hierarchical powers that control which sexual identities get represented.

  And don’t speak to me about radical sexual preferences if you claim to care about intersectional struggle but search “BDSM gang bang” on a tube site of stolen content, which directly hurts workers, and which runs on a taxonomy of violently reductive tags.

  A survey conducted by Pornhub and Mic aiming to review the porn choices of millennials (of course) found that “‘ebony’ and ‘black’ were among the top 12” of their favorite search terms. Mic’s hot take was that the youths were, happily, not privileging white bodies. But, as I wrote for the Nation at the time: there’s an inherent limitation to the progressive-ness of such a porn landscape if bodies are primarily sought, categorized, and thus sexualized via their race. Especially when production companies still put a premium—with pay scales and exclusivity agreements—on “interracial” scenes (almost always a white woman and a black man), inscribing racism, through the notion of taboo, into the back end of the business.

  In a dismissive and cursory 2015 essay titled “Your Sex Is Not Radical,” writer and activist Yasmin Nair rejects the relevance of sexual practices in political organizing. I agree with her when she asserts, “The sad truth that many of us learn after years in sexual playing fields (literally and figuratively) is that how many people you fuck has nothing to do with the extent to which you fuck up capitalism.” But her totalizing view of the separation of politics from sex fails to consider the representation of sex and its role in constructing the truth of sex today.

  We must recognize that the pearl-clutching, anti–sex work moralists, who fear that porn is warping kids’ minds, have a point. Online porn plays a powerful formative role in our lives, especially the millennials among us, informing notions of what sex gets to be. Given this fact, the need is obvious for political and ethical work toward a world of porn with better taxonomies and worker protections. My ex saw political heroes in his favorite porn stars—which would be fine, if he had thought of them first as workers. There is no escaping economics.

  It’s perhaps unsurprising, given the picture I’ve painted, that my relationship with this man ended in violent catastrophe. I grew to hate him for many reasons, but not before I had spent months, which bled into years, rethinking my approach to sexual desire. It was a revaluation of values and assumptions about what I want, for which I’ll always be grateful, and in which I continue to engage to this day. In the years since we parted ways, I’ve had far more of the sex he would have deemed “radical” than I ever did with him. Some of it was transformative, some hot, some of it love, some boring and irritating—none of it revolutionary.

  Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci makes the point that traditional political movement tactics have gotten easier over the years, “partly thanks to technology”: “A single Facebook post can help launch a large march! Online tools make it easier to coordinate phone calls, and even automate them. Legislators have figured this out; they are less likely to be spooked just by marches or phone calls (though those are good to do: their absence signals weakness).” Her point is that tactics that once signaled “underlying strength” no longer do, by virtue of the ease of reiterability; the threat is neutralized and the ruling order knows it. The same might be said of sexual practices that were once considered threats to capital’s reproduction through the family form and property relations. Technocapital soothes the status quo: there can be polyamorous configurations with BDSM dungeons in the basement, but the houses are owned.

  To be blunt: When there’s a popular app for organizing your next queer orgy, how rupturous of our political status quo can the mere fact of such an orgy be? To be honest: that’s not a totally rhetorical question.

  9

  Looking at Corpses

  “Have you ever seen a white corpse in the news?” writer Ayesha Siddiqi asked on Twitter in 2015. “Seriously asking,” she followed up, “have you ever seen news media circulate images of a white person’s corpse?” Specifically, on the day Siddiqi asked, we did not. We did not see the bodies of two white journalists horrifically gunned down in Virginia by an ex-colleague on camera. Social media sites and major news outlets were swift to ban videos and images of their deaths.

  I thought for some days on her question. I asked friends and colleagues. And while my rudimentary survey was by no means conclusive, it struck me that, no, I have not seen a white corpse in the news in recent memory. Not, perhaps, since twenty years ago, when an image of a firefighter carrying a dying little white girl from the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing became iconic.

  I have seen images of white people close to death, and they alone have caused controversy. There was much censure directed at the New York Daily News for publishing a front-page picture of Alison Parker, the anchor murdered on air, as she, still alive, looked into a firing gun. The New York Post was condemned for showing James Foley, also still alive, with the Islamic State executioner’s knife pressed to his throat.

  There are often ethical reasons that media producers, media sharers and media consumers urge these images be excised from our visual landscapes. News institutions instead publish images of vibrant white lives. Alison Parker smiling with her boyfriend; James Foley, flak-jacketed and vital, reporting in the field. Decency, privacy, respect, we are told—and that is well and good.

  But we are often exposed to images of black and brown corpses and deaths. Major news outlets released the CCTV footage of police gunning down twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland. When Philando Castile was shot by a cop at point-blank range, while sitting in his car and obeying officers’ orders, his traumatized girlfriend pulled out her smartphone and documented her partner bleeding out as the police continued to hold her at gunpoint. The footage was published by every major publication, viewer discretion advised. We saw, too, the corpses of dead Palestinian children struck by Israeli missiles on a Gazan beach in 2014; we have seen dozens of bodies pulled from the rubble of Assad regime air strikes. We didn’t, for the most part, get their names.

  Multiple news outlets published a most terrible image of a drowned Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi (initially reported as Aylan Kurdi), one of twelve refugees who died, including his five-year-old brother, attempting to reach Greece. His tiny body washed up on a Turkish beach, waves lapped at his lifeless face. These images, originally captured by a Turkish news agency photographer, were featured on the front page of a number of major British newspapers, from tabloid to broadsheet.

  And there are ethical grounds for the inclusion of such pictures in our visual fields. These images tell stories of racist, deadly police violence, colonial oppression and genocide. The week following the publication of the Alan Kurdi pictures, donations to the Swedish Red Cross campaign for Syrian refugees, for instance, was fifty-five times greater. (But within weeks, the amounts had dropped back down.) The then–prime minister, David Cameron, had described the refugees’ coming to Europe as a “swarm” three months before Alan was found dead, one of 3,770 fatalities in the Mediterranean that year. One of the few to be seen.

  I want to interrogate this double standard in visual media culture around racialized and marginalized deaths (and lives). What does it mean that when reporting on horrors perpetrated against certain persons we show death, and when others are the victims, we hide it?

  If we do not see white corpses, it’s because we don’t need to. More precisely, the Western media and their interests don’t need us, the audience and consumer, to do so. News of the brutal murder of a white individual—especially someone straight, white, professional and middle-class—doesn’t need violent accompanying images to be registered by mainstream media as a violation, a brutality and (most i
mportantly) a magnet for the eyeballs of their presumed readership or audience. As such, it is judged gratuitous and exploitative for publications to offer up a spectacle of white death. Family members and loved ones, too, have called for footage of corpses and executions to be removed from public media on the grounds that such imagery is dehumanizing. The memories of lived lives are reduced to corpses; and corpses in turn reduced to commodified spectacles. “That’s not how life should be,” wrote one of Foley’s relatives, asking that the public not watch the journalist’s beheading. And, certainly, that’s not how life should be.

  This tells us something about our current state of white supremacy, and who gets to be human(ized) in the first place. It is only by virtue of looking at the deaths, the corpses, and the soon-to-be corpses of black people like Alton Sterling, Mike Brown, and Tamir Rice that the media even thought to ask about their lived lives at all and the structural plagues that cut them short. To be sure, were it not for the uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton Rouge and beyond, demanding that Black Lives Matter, the media would have continued to look away.

  It took nothing less than the brutal visual presentation of the black dead, at the hands of US law enforcement, to gain white establishment recognition of the statement that “black lives matter.” It is as terrible as it is true: the consistent condition for a non-white life, particularly if it is poor and black, to be humanized in the media is that it has been ended.

  The media’s double standards about showing corpses is a clear illustration of the brutal necropolitics to which so many black, Muslim, indigenous, colonized and refugee lives are subjugated—that is, under the threat of, and in proximity to, death and disposal. As the first scholar to use the term, Achille Mbembe stressed that necropolitics does not reside only in the exercise of sovereignty via the power to kill, but the power to organize others’ lives so that they are perpetually exposed to death, or experience a living death of slavery, imprisonment and segregation. In his 2003 article “Necropolitics,” Mbembe names a number of techniques of necropower, such as “the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilizations, even the forced sterilization of vanquished peoples.” With many of their origins in colonial projects, these terror formations were reinscribed in the Nazi state, the plantation, the Palestinian occupation and apartheid, and continue to this day. Inextricable from racism but applied in the necropolitical subjugation of queer and trans communities, too, necropolitics enacts the “syntheses between massacre and bureaucracy, that incarnation of Western rationality.”

  Black male teens are twenty times more likely to be killed by police than their white peers in the US, a ProPublica investigation found. Poet Claudia Rankine examined the behaviors that have led to black people being killed in recent years to produce a list of aligned prohibitions: “no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.” It makes sense—awful sense—that life so organized by proximity to death, to execution, finds an appropriate visual expression in the media.

  Judith Butler wrote in Frames of War (2016) that “we might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.” This formulation does not suggest that an ungrievable life is grieved by no one, but rather that “war or, rather, the current wars, rely on and perpetuate a way of dividing lives into those that are worth defending, valuing, and grieving when they are lost, and those that are not quite lives, not quite valuable, recognizable or, indeed, mournable”—it asserts a grievable “we” and an un-or less grievable “them,” whose existence and value is devalued when framed as a threat to ours.

  Such was the violence in the media framing of the Iraq war and the entire demonizing War on Terror narrative that treats Muslims as only grievable if they are perceived as victims (of other Muslims) who could justify American military intervention, and ungrievable threats otherwise. We see divisions of grievability in Cameron’s and many others’ fearmongering over a refugee “swarm,” an alleged threat to mythic “European values” (values that deserve, if they exist at all, to crumble if they entail such treatment of refugees); we see it in Trump’s vicious immigration policies that would send refugees back to death and rape in Central America; we see it in every killing of a black person legitimized by the stand-your-ground logics of racialized policing enshrined in US law. We see it enforced by the New York Times obituary that called Michael Brown “no angel,” and when the only photos newspapers bother to find of murdered black men are their mugshots.

  In another important Twitter comment from Siddiqi on this issue, she asked, “When does documentation and archive continue dehumanization? When does bearing witness become spectacle?” She specifically highlighted how images of lynchings used to be sold as postcards. Documentation and archive, especially of corpses, always risks continued dehumanization. The desire that white lives be removed from such corporeal archiving highlights this point. Whether the publication and sharing of images of people’s corpses intervenes with, upholds or simply reflects these necropolitical hierarchies of (un)grievability has no simple answer. It depends on who does the producing and sharing of such media, how it’s done, and how we, as viewers, choose to respond.

  There is a deplorable history of oppressive power structures using the spectacle of torturous killing to affirm their sovereign control, including the Islamic State’s taped executions, public lynchings in the South, and all medieval public torture. Yet, as a mode of social control, such spectacles have not proven reliable. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish opens with accounts of the gratuitous, public, hours-long torture and execution in France of Robert-François Damiens, a domestic servant who had attempted to assassinate King Louis XV. His flesh was torn away with hot pincers and molten lead poured on the wounds; his right hand was burned in sulfur, and after hours of attempting without success to tear him limb from limb with the power of six horses pulling him apart, the executioner hacked off his arms and legs with a knife. Foucault noted that “the few decades” that followed this, France’s last drawing and quartering, “saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared.”

  The punitive system’s shift away from corporeal visibility to more “discretion in the art of inflicting pain” was not attributable, as Foucault noted, to some progressive idea of “humanization” alone, but rather to the state’s concern that public executions were catalysts for civil disturbances and mass mobilizations, at the same time as an expansive administrative apparatus grew to make the act of punishment a sequestered affair. Behind the prison gates, the state could control a narrative of legitimized, procedural killing, foreclosing public pity and outrage on behalf of the ungrievable, unpitiable criminal other.

  If there were no political potency in pathos, then Joseph Goebbels would not have written in 1941 against Jews who “send out their pitiable,” as if their suffering were nothing but a ploy to manipulate those who witness it. It was a comment eerily echoed in the words of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he said that Hamas was trying to garner international support by showing Gaza’s “telegenically dead”—namely, some of the 448 children killed in nine months of Israeli attacks on occupied territory in 2014, according to the UN. Netanyahu’s comment was an inadvertent admission that Israeli fire was producing the sort of dead bodies that make news—children are often telegenic.

  There is a rich history of individuals and groups in righteous struggle choosing to make their beloved dead visible—a reflection, again, of a double standard, as so many white families urge that th
e bodies of their murdered loved ones remain out of public view. When Mamie Till insisted that the casket of her murdered, brutalized fourteen-year-old son, Emmett, be left open for public view in 1955, she said, “Let them see what I have seen.” Emmett was lynched after being falsely accused of inappropriate flirting with a white woman; he was kidnapped and beaten to death by two brothers, who were then acquitted by an all-white jury. Tens of thousands of people visited his coffin, and the image of his mutilated, unrecognizable face was circulated in magazines and newspapers around the country. In the postcards of lynchings, which achieved small circulations in the South, the framing was often one of the public spectacle itself: large crowds around hardly visible, butchered, hanging bodies. Viewers are invited to see themselves in the vile mob. The photographs of Emmett Till, while dreadful, repeat no such violent spectacle. They are images of grief. In a picture published in Jet magazine, Mamie Till looks gently over her son’s corpse; in another, taken at his funeral, she’s bent double over his open casket, weeping and surrounded by embracing mourners. These images assert that Emmett Till was grieved, against a world that denied him a priori grievability in life.

  It matters, when we question whether certain images of death serve to humanize or dehumanize the dead, that it was Mamie Till herself who declared, “Let them see.” With this call she redrew the power structure of the “them” and the “we” who get to determine grievability. The same was not the case when the 2017 Whitney Biennial included a painting titled Open Casket by white artist Dana Shutz, which depicted, in impressionistic strokes, Emmett Till’s casket surrounded by a blur of mourners. Once again, the pain of the Tills, black pain, was conferred on an exploitable “them.” An open letter by artist and writer Hannah Black, cosigned by dozens of artists, called for the painting to be removed and destroyed: