[lbo-talk] Orientalist Torture, Cont'd

[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 
practioners) 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.

           
Yoshie