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

Revisiting Rousseau’s amour propre: Self-love and digital living

 Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication
Volume 8 Number 1, doi: 10.1386/ejpc.8.1.115_1




Abstract; 

By Maurice Leloir - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3913/3913-h/3913-h.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8745969

The digital culture of the Internet and the emergence of social networking sites online have made identity construction a salient aspect of this economy. It also signifies a ‘narcissistic turn’ with increasing emphasis on self-construction and self-love from social profiles, self-representations, self-search to ‘selfies’. The construction of ‘self’ online is mediated through the gaze of the others, this being an important validation in the construction of self. By drawing on Rousseau’s ‘amour propre’ the article examines how this concept is relevant in today’s digital culture and self narration online through everyday communication including imaging, uploading, tagging and ‘liking’ making others’ validation of us an important element of self-esteem. Rousseau’s notion of self-love has both constructive and destructive configurations and the article argues that these can take different manifestations online in today’scontemporary digital culture.

The re-aestheticisation of poverty: blogging hunger in the age of austerity

Yasmin Ibrahim

Social Identities

Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture

 

By New York Times Current History Magazine - Author, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10773923

 

This paper examines the re-aestheticisation of hunger and poverty with the emergence of austerity blogs. These blogs, which chronicle personal narratives while re-directing gaze in creating food through limited budgets and in sharing the intimate brutalities of hunger, bring a renewed focus and interest to poverty through daily lived experiences of hunger. Beyond personalising hunger in a climate of austerity, blogs as a symbol of articulation of the laypeople for the general public become interstitial spaces between government rhetoric and media representations, making poverty an intimate, personal and present proposition. Blogs as peoples’ archives of social history are hybrid spaces of personal iterations amenable to public consumption and media scrutiny. In the process these can re-mediate and disrupt the social reality of first-world hunger, inviting a gaze through first-hand narratives. Poverty becomes a contested entity online where blogs perform both resistance and reiteration of the neo-liberal stereotypes about the unemployed and those on benefits.

 

Full paper, 
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/f4ytRGpfyBVCHFzXk4R8/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. 

Copies at;
 http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/25CTrAc2JqAJS44TEcf5/full

Self-Production through the Banal and the Fictive: Self and the Relationship with the Screen

 

 International Journal of E-Politics

 Volume 7 • Issue 2 • April-June-2016, pp 51-61

 

 

The self is performed through the banal of the everyday on social media. The banality of the everyday constitutes an integral part of our communication on digital platforms.Taking this as part of our performative lives in the digital economy, the paper looks at ways in which we co-produce the self through the banality of the everyday as wellas a wider imagination and engagement with the world. These wider engagements are termed as ‘fictive’ not because they are unreal but through a conceptual notion of how the self is performed and imagined through wider world events in digital platforms and screen cultures where convergence of technologies allow us to be constantly consumed through the screen as we live out our daily lives. The narration of our lives through the banal and the fictive constantly co-produces the self through a situated domesticity of the everyday and equally through the eventful. In the process it reveals our ongoing relationship with the screen as an orifice for the production of self and the construction of a social reality beyond our immediate domesticity.

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