Visuality and the ‘Jihadi-bride’ The re-fashioning of desire in the digital age

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture

Yasmin Ibrahim, Queen Mary, University of London

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1381836

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504630.2017.1381836

By Philip Burne-Jones, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=353102

Abstract,

This paper examines the controversial figure of the ‘Jihadi Bride’ through her visual depictions in media discourses where she is associated with danger, conflict and the evil Other. Such depictions often draw heavily on the Orientalist gaze of the Middle East in conflict; its atavism, servitude of womanhood and the incongruence of religion for secular modernity. These media discourses equally draw on the imagination of the internet as a space for the loss of innocence and for luring the vulnerable into inexplicable darkness. This paper, by drawing on the concept of desire and its relationship to the screen as well as the concept of ‘new media visuality’ where pervasive consumption of imagery mediates reality and fantasy, as well as sexuality and the forbidden, argues that the Jihadi Bride is a product of modernity and not of doctrine. As a technological subject with an insatiable desire ignited through the screen, the Jihadi Bride is a consequence of modernity and its invocation of desire sustained through the screen. The Jihadi Bride is equally part of a mediated visuality where viral circulation and instant gratification reconfigure notions of proximity and intimacy, and straddles earthly desires with the ethereal.

50 Free copies at link,

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PkVpqYp4pw64Gx8K5pdZ/full

Colescing the Mirror and Screen

Coalescing the Mirror and the Screen

Consuming the ‘Self’ Online

 Continuum
DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2016.1239066
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1239066

Abstract;

While humanity has always found means to represent itself through material artefacts, the digital age and its attendant screen culture offer interesting ways to ubiquitously capture and to produce the self as a digital artefact online for personal and public consumption. The non-stop capture of ourselves and our specular double are distinctive to digital living where the self can be objectified and consumed relentlessly, and where others can partake in consuming us. This paper argues that the self remains a primal subject of interest online sustaining our ‘mirror moment’ of self-discovery and recognition. Our fascination with the self is elevated further through our social and historical valorisation of the screen, which has over time stood for public spectacle and voyeurism. The screen, once the preserve of newsmakers, the celebrity or the morbid, has been disaggregated into a theatre for the consumption of the self. This ubiquitous consumption of the screen is premised through the concepts of the mirror and the screen in this paper. 

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 http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/25CTrAc2JqAJS44TEcf5/full

Neda, martyrdom and the media event: Death imagery as an iconic memory

The Poster, 
Volume 3 Issue 1-2,
 http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=21478/

Abstract;


Death imagery online is a conflicted area of examination. At times it can assume a virality that will change public opinion creating iconic moments where death functions as a transformative device. The Internet with its ineradicable features to preserve content makes death a performance that can be consumed stripped of time and space. Death imagery becomes immortalized on the Internet defying the physical mortality of the body as a site of decay and decomposition. This article examines the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, exploring the entwined notions of witnessing and how the death event courted virality, immortalizing Neda as a global icon. The Internet became a site of double articulation where the act of dying was both contemporaneous and historical – captured, disseminated and consumed non-stop on the Internet. This temporal dislocation of the Internet means death as a media event can be both banalized as part of popular culture and equally consigned to the iconic; igniting affective communities that can domesticate death for collective grieving, communion and agency.

 Neda Agha-Soltan grave site in Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Iran. Attribution:By Arashnikkhah (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons