[lbo-talk] Abu Ghraib / Robert Mapplethorpe

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

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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