Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Wendy S. Hesford

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.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Feminist Theory

275 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Lisa Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hesford blends rhetorical analysis, human rights, and visual culture within a feminist framework to consider how "spectacular" visual representations of marginalized bodies function to support or deter international human rights policies. Her analysis of documentary films that address human rights issues/conflicts is particularly valuable. Hesford deploys a series of case studies to address visual representations of torture, unlawful detention, ethnic genocides, rape warfare, and human trafficking of women and children for prostitution and other economic exploitation. That these studies demonstrate how "spectacular" rhetorics undergird cultural and national narratives in some instances presents a beacon with which we may examine how human rights discourses work (or don't) across differing cultural contexts.