Missing Bodies

The Politics of Visibility

Monica J. Casper, Lisa Jean Moore

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814717158
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

We know more about the physical body—how it begins, how it responds to illness, even how it decomposes—than ever before. Yet not all bodies are created equal, some bodies clearly count more than others, and some bodies are not recognized at all. In Missing Bodies, Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore explore the surveillance, manipulations, erasures, and visibility of the body in the twenty-first century. The authors examine bodies, both actual and symbolic, in a variety of arenas: pornography, fashion, sports, medicine, photography, cinema, sex work, labor, migration, medical tourism, and war. This new politicsof visibility can lead to the overexposure of some bodies—Lance Armstrong, Jessica Lynch—and to the near invisibility of others—dead Iraqi civilians, illegal immigrants, the victims of HIV/AIDS and "natural" disasters.

Missing Bodies presents a call for a new, engaged way of seeing and recovering bodies in a world that routinely, often strategically,obscures or erases them. It poses difficult, even startling questions: Why did it take so long for the United States media to begin telling stories about the "falling bodies" of 9/11? Why has the United States government refused to allow photographs or filming of flag-draped coffins carrying the bodies of soldiers who are dying in Iraq? Why are the bodies of girls and women so relentlessly sexualized? By examining the cultural politics at work in such disappearances and inclusions of the physical body the authors show how the social, medical and economic consequences of visibility can reward or undermine privilege in society.

1

Introduction

The Bodies We See, and Some That Are Not Here

Gloria liked the idea that there were cameras watching everyone everywhere. Last year Graham had installed a new state-of-the-art security system in the house—cameras and infrared sensors and panic buttons and goodness knows what else. Gloria was fond of the helpful little robots that patrolled her garden with their spying eyes. Once, the eye of God watched people, now it was the camera lens.

Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (2006)

We live in an age of proliferating human bodies, both literally and figuratively. The world’s population is more than six and a half billion, a staggering number by any measure—and perhaps too many people for one fragile, embattled planet and current allocations of resources. Representations of these omnipresent, multiplying bodies are both enhanced and amplified via new biomedical, digital, and representational technologies, like MRIs and sonograms. Bodies are made visible and seen—or watched, to embrace the conspiratorial—via a range of globalized practices.¹ Indeed, the human body has never been more visible and rapidly mobile (and mobilized) than it is in the first decade of the 21st century. It should not surprise anyone that the U.S. National Library of Medicine sponsors an ambitious digital image library of adult anatomy called the Visible Human Project or that the exhibit Body Worlds, featuring plastinated, posed human cadavers, has been both wildly successful and intensely controversial.

From a very young age, human beings are trained to visually process and meticulously read bodies—our own and others—for social cues about love, beauty, status, and identity. Bodies are socially constructed within social orders, including patterns of dominance and submission along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, age, and physiological normativity. Accurately reading the body of another, beginning with our mothers and other care-givers immediately after birth, can sometimes mean the difference between survival and death. As such, the visualized body is powerfully symbolic in a multitude of ways and across often quite-contested domains. Increasingly, too, our bodies are under surveillance, digitized and processed for analysis. In a suspicious post-9/11 world, a marked hysteria accompanies the quest for visual proof of human beings’ whereabouts, activities, interactions, purchases, conversations, and migrations.

Cameras perch on lampposts and rooftops in towns and cities across the United States and in other countries, monitoring all sorts of public interactions, movements, and activities. Community activists in New York City, including the Surveillance Camera Players, estimate that there are at least 10,000 security cameras in Manhattan alone, while a European group estimates that London has some 500,000 public cameras. The Scripps Howard News Service reports there are about 5 million video surveillance cameras in use in the United States today and that the number of government-funded cameras has grown exponentially, courtesy of dollars earmarked for “homeland security” needs. The security and private protection industry is worth about $9 billion annually and is expected to grow to a $20 billion industry by 2010.

Recent congressional debate in the United States centered on H.R. 418, the Real ID Act, which mandates the creation of a national identification card with multiple data storage points. In conjunction with the Departments of Motor Vehicles, all states will be required to comply with provisions of the act by December 31, 2009. These may include the Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS) of the FBI, Medicare and Medicaid records, military records, criminal records, immigration status, employment information, credit reports, and so on. The Real ID Act and other government and private surveillance efforts, coupled with the explosion of visual and biometric technologies, are making human bodies partially and wholly legible with limited to no public discussion and shockingly little regulation. In the name of national security, it seems, the neoliberal state is watching all of us—and it is marking the bodies of citizens and especially noncitizens at an unprecedented level and with as yet largely unknown consequences.

This surveillance by our paternal uncle, let’s call him Sam, and his cronies is taking place in a culture that seems obsessed with, and made almost frantic by, “real” bodies doing “real” things in “real” time. It sometimes seems as if we are more attuned to the daily activities of America’s Top Model, Paris Hilton, college football players, and al-Qaeda than we are to those of our own teenage children or our neighbors in gated communities whose names we may not even know. And yet, despite this escalating Orwellian practice by which the government and corporations visually locate and define bodies so as to regulate (and perhaps punish) them, some bodies are conspicuously missing in action.

Not all bodies are equally visible to the cameras, the watchers, or the analysts; indeed, some bodies may not necessarily want to be seen at all. Nor do all of the discursive, visual, and geographic sites show the full panoply of human bodies that might be present. Certainly there are bodies that we see so routinely that they appear in our dreams; we ourselves may be watched regularly, skin crawling, at every turn. But there are some bodies that are invisible, that have disappeared, or whose absence is unaccounted for and not remarked on in popular culture or by government agencies such as, to name just one example, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency).

In Missing Bodies, we are interested in exploring how certain places, spaces, policies, and practices in contemporary society, particularly in the United States, exhibit and celebrate some bodies while erasing and denying others. What can account for the fact that certain bodies are hyper-exposed, brightly visible, and magnified, while others are hidden, missing, and vanished? We believe there are dimensions of corporeal visibility and erasure that need to be charted and interpreted, for intellectual and political reasons, and we attempt to do so here. Interested in social processes and conditions of local and global stratification, or the many ways in which the world’s people are unequal, we investigate in this book the traffic between and among visible, invisible, and missing bodies.

At the same time, we strategically deploy the multiple uses of the term “missing” to interrogate the ways in which we are affectively missing certain bodies. For to be missing means that something or someone was once visible and is now lost. Thus “missing” is a kind of invisibility, one usually characterized by a high degree of emotion, as with missing children or soldiers M.I.A. (missing in action). As feminist sociologists of the body committed to ethical practices and social justice, we find ourselves longing for these missing bodies and for stories about them. For example, why did it take so long for the U.S. media to begin telling stories about the “falling bodies” of 9/11, those tragic figures who leaped from the burning, crumbling towers rather than be obliterated by flames (Flynn and Dwyer 2004)? Why has the U.S. government refused to allow photographs or filming of flag-draped coffins carrying the bodies of soldiers who are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan?

In addition, as mothers of young children—we each have two daughters—we have been outraged by the media erasure of women and children devastated by recent “natural” disasters along the American Gulf Coast and in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, we are incensed that even though the United Nations estimate for the Iraqi death toll exceeded 34,000 in 2006, there is almost complete lack of media coverage of, and government accounting for, the men, women, and children of all nationalities killed by American troops and their allies in Iraq or caught in the fatal crosshairs of ethnic and religious intolerance.² We wonder: Where are the “missing girls” of China and India and other patriarchal cultures, these young victims of “sex-selective” abortion and female infanticide? And we lament the massive incarceration of our own nation’s young Black men, and increasingly Black women, hundreds of thousands of them warehoused behind bars and out of sight.

In short, because we care deeply about missing bodies in both a pragmatist and a humanist sense, we have turned our analytical lens to questions of corporeal presence and absence. Following scholars of the visible, whose work we highlight below, we suggest here that the visible and invisible dimensions of human life, including representations of bodies, work together to create social order as we know it. In this book, through a series of empirical case studies, we investigate the mechanisms by which some bodies can be found with varying degrees of ease in American popular culture, policy, and social theory, while others cannot. While seeking to develop new intellectual understandings of bodily visibility and erasure, we are also deeply committed to the redistribution of political and theoretical attention to missing bodies and to revealing the consequences of chronic inattention and inaction by scholars and others. This book, then, is a recovery project, forged with equal parts hope and fury.

Bodies in and of Social Theory

At the dawning of the 20th century, sociology emerged as a method of inquiry aimed at explaining the social causes and effects of seemingly personal acts. Importantly, sociology offered an alternative to the biological, psychological, and individualistic definitions of human action. If one conceives of the intellectual history of sociology as different strands of thought, one tendency is to treat the individual as a rational, disembodied, decision-making agent, a kind of talking head with no recognizable body. In many ways, this line of inquiry against the biologically determined notions of social order meant that corporeality—or the flesh, bone, functions, physiology, sensations, and materiality of the body—was for over a century ignored or merely taken for granted. But within the past three decades, social science, spurred by feminist theory and practice, has contributed robust analyses to academic explorations and explanations of the human body and its representations.

Because we are medical sociologists and feminist scholars, we work in a tradition of material social constructionism and thus ground our analysis in the historical sociocultural forces that have shaped and created bodies. We consider these bodies as shifting and plural, alive with multiple potentials. Conversely, essentialists believe that a pre-social natural body exists (Connell and Dowsett 1993), an idea that is anathema to our project here. Although corporeality must be acknowledged and integrated into social theory, corporeality itself is not static; it changes as our interpretations of it are modified over time (Clarke 1995), and it also changes in response to the physical world. Social scientists must resist the temptation to see corporeality as sui generis, even though bodies might appear to have obdurate and consistent physical characteristics. For at the same moment that actual physical bodies exist, our understandings of these bodies, our interpretations and explanations of bodily processes, give meaning to their materiality.

Sociologist Bryan Turner (1987, 1992) suggests four key social developments that contributed to growth in the sociological and cultural investigation of bodies:

1. The growth of consumer culture. Shifts in mass consumption from the 1920s led to the availability of cheap, durable goods, such as cosmetics, health aides, and fashion accessories, which helped to secularize the body into a vehicle of identity display. Further, Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan Turner’s (1991) analysis of “the body in consumer culture” is helpful in understanding the Western cultural imperative of maintaining bodies in late capitalism. They argue, “self preservation depends upon the preservation of the body within a culture in which the body is the passport to all that is good in life. Health, youth, beauty, sex, fitness are the positive attributes which body care can achieve and preserve” (1991:186).

2. The development of postmodern themes in the arts, architecture, and the humanities. Postmodernist theorists problematize subject/object distinctions prevalent in modernist representations. The human body is not distinct from the self, they argue, but is deeply interrelated to identity and self-expression. Postmodern scholarship and methods of inquiry provide tools to read and “deconstruct” the human body.

3. The feminist movement. Although Turner cites the feminist movement in a broad sense, the women’s health movement especially challenged predominant biomedical ways of constructing bodies (Ruzek 1978, Lewin and Olesen 1985). As both consumers and scholars, many women rebelled against the hegemonic medical establishment’s strategies of medicalization and mystification of female bodily functions. These challenges to “thinking as usual” within medical settings encouraged many women to wage feminist critiques against the standardization of male bodies as the model for individualism and better health. As Moira Gatens (1992) argues, women are often forced to “elide” or suppress their own “corporeal specificity” to participate in liberal democracies.

4. The impact of Michel Foucault’s scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. Foucault’s work brought forth a rich anthropological, sociological, and historical analysis of the social production of individual bodies and populations through his understanding of discipline and surveillance. He argued that disciplinary power, focused on individuals, operates through institutions and discourses to make docile subjects and productive bodies. When these bodies are considered in aggregate—in other words, defined as a population—a new but related form of power emerges. In his genealogies, Foucault establishes biopower emerging at the beginning of the 19th century in the West. This power led to the proliferation of new regimes, each participating in the social production of distinctive populations: incarcerated bodies, homosexual bodies, insane bodies, reproductive bodies.

As Foucault argued, sovereign rule under a monarchy was displaced and replaced by democratic systems of rules and regulations. The juridical competition of experts (legal, psychoanalytic, medical), the development of discourses of rights, and the concerted effort of disciplines to standardize and normalize the body have together enabled the construction of modernist knowledge of and about human bodies. On a broader scale, biopolitics is defined as the social practices and institutions established to regulate a population’s quality (and quantity) of life. Disciplinary power and biopower, which together can be understood as biopolitics, operate together to normalize individuals by coercing them, often by subtle mechanisms, to conform to standards and, in so doing, to create self-regulating pliant bodies and populations (e.g., Inda 2005, Rose 2007).

Further, Foucault uses the notion of the panopticon to illustrate the key role of surveillance and normalization in societies. Building on the work of 18th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Foucault expanded the theoretical scope of the panopticon outside of the prison industrial complex to everyday life. The metaphor of a circular prison, which enables an inspector to be an omnipotent functionary, explains how subjects learn to self-regulate their behavior. The panopticon model, when implemented in public settings, is virtually unnoticed. Briefly applied to contemporary life, we live in a panoptic society constantly inspected by regulatory agencies (like public health departments, the police, the fashion industry) that make the human body an object of the normalizing gaze. That is, bodies are objectified. And since we don’t know when we are being watched, we learn to police ourselves.

Certainly, we are quick to note, we each have the potential to be meaning-making agents, so we can and do resist these forces of normalization. Many of us are often participating in or resisting health precautions, legal standards, and physical enhancements. Self-help health movements, such as HIV/AIDS activism and the women’s health movement, provide just two examples of individuals resisting the dominant discourses of biomedicine (Clarke and Olesen 1999).

Inspired by Foucault and political theory, Judith Butler (1993) proposes a theory of materialization in order to confront the fear that certain social constructionists exhibit regarding physicality of bodies. She argues that it is how some bodies and parts of bodies come to matter that should be the focus of social constructionist analyses. Butler sees constructionism not as a one-shot fixed phenomenon but as “processes of reiteration”: no singular power acts; rather, a persistent yet unstable repetition process itself is powerful. Matter is “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface” (3). It is Butler’s contention that constructionists, even the most radical, must at some point concede to the materiality of the body. Instead of beginning these inquiries from the point that bodies exist, Butler asserts that we must ask what are the regulatory norms through which bodies are materialized. How, in other words, are bodies erected?

One of Butler’s most compelling arguments insists that agency must be reworked to avoid embracing the Enlightenment notions of voluntarism and free will while still retaining a theory of subversive performance. This free-willed agent is a regulatory myth. That is, to paraphrase Butler, the subject who resists these regulatory norms is also produced by these norms. Further, she argues that in order to understand the multiple forces of materialization, investigations should include looking at which bodies fail to matter: “How bodies which fail to materialize provide the necessary ‘outside,’ if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter” (Butler 1993:16).

Also highly influenced by Foucault, post-9/11 “security studies” is an emergent, interdisciplinary field that examines the intensifying of social control through the use of techniques of visibility directed at bodies and people’s internalization of such control. State-sanctioned institutions refine techniques to see and observe the movements and behaviors of bodies through biometrics (methods for uniquely recognizing humans based on physical properties) and biotelemetrics (implantable devices for transmission of biological data). Surveillance cameras exercise extraordinary power by monitoring criminal activity, maintaining security, and controlling anything deemed to be deviant according to the ideology of those in power (Currah and Moore 2009). Although contemporary security and surveillance activities may be experienced as unprecedented, states have a long history of making bodies legible, both individually and in the aggregate. Social scientists Jane Caplan and John Torpey track “the nineteenth-century development of documentary practices through which every citizen, not just the delinquent or deviant, was to be made visible to the state: not by physical marks on the body, but by the indirect means of registrations, passes, censuses, and the like” (2001:8).

These emergent identification procedures drew on a repertoire of physical signs and measurements but represented them in written and visual records, both individually portable and centrally filed. Examples include birth certificates, passports, and medical records. Caplan and Torpey further argue:

The elaboration of systematic regimes of representation disclosed a central tension in the project of identification, as opposed to mere classification. The identity document purports to be a record of uniqueness, but also has to be an element in a classifying series that reduces individuality to a unit in a series, and that is thus simultaneously deindividualizing. This discloses the fundamental instability of the concept of the “individual” as such, and helps to explain the uneasy sense that we never fully own or control our identity, that the identity document carries a threat of expropriation at the same time as it clai...