Spectacular Rhetorics ? Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms

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.

“Hesford’s insistence that we turn the gaze onto ourselves must be heeded if truth is to be valued within human rights discourses and movements. In the spirit of liberation psychology which seeks to expose ‘spectacular’ acts of bystanding through a holistic understanding of collective trauma (see Watkins & Shulman, 2008), such a call for the transformation of passive spectator to active witness demands that truth-telling actors of all kinds embrace more self-reflexive and critically conscious relationships with the subjects of their narratives, and reflect deeply on their research methodologies and representational choices. That is, indeed, a tall order for artists, activists, and scholars, but one certainly worth undertaking.” - Erin Kamler, International Journal of Communication