Last week I found the comparison of the bodies of Indigenous women’s to bodies of land referenced in the Simpson lecture/Consmo reading to be not only interesting but also incredibly applicable to a number of other situations. With that analogy, being the vulnerability of land allowing it to be taken and/or extracted from without consent much like human bodies, I wanted to bring up another example of such “phenomenons” that is also extremely relevant and extremely infuriating. I can imagine that the majority of people in this class know about the circumstances over in Syria resulting in the current refugee crisis. Circumstances that, for what I’ve noticed at least, seem to have recently become more and more pressing in the media. After the picture of a young Syrian boy’s lifeless body washed up on the shore was all over Facebook, Twitter, and most major social media platforms and news outlets, there was an unmissable outcry. It was only after the body of this boy, a body that solely belonged to him before it was used to gain international sympathy, was there an outburst over the dispossession of Syrian citizens. I can’t really express the range of emotions and overall confusion I felt when I saw that picture but the discussion in class helped me refine my thoughts to articulate how inconceivably wrong and inappropriate I believe the sharing of this image was.
Was it okay that this child’s body was exploited in order to acquire worldwide distress and awareness? It worked, so does that legitimize it? Justify it?
When we broke up into smaller groups to discuss, my group centralized on how the “women and children” argument used to perpetrate sympathy in certain situations is one phrase that is overused tenfold. Yes, the bodies of women and children matter but it is ironic when in Canada, the lives of aboriginal women and children are constantly looked at as a problem, and structural violence is the unspoken act against that “problem”. The bodies of women and children, whether in Canada or in Syria, are used without their consent alive or dead. They may be plastered on national news with raging headlines to evoke a response or swept under the rug, their names not even whispered by the federal government. My initial feelings are screaming that the world only cares when there’s a body and when they cannot escape the image of that body. The voices of family and loved ones are finally heard but only when there is a body. Sure, that picture may represent what is happening on a larger scale and bring more attention to an already massively acknowledged issue, but I cannot shake the hollowness of this in it’s entirety. I would really like to hear someone else’s thoughts on the topic!
When we broke up into smaller groups to discuss, my group centralized on how the “women and children” argument used to perpetrate sympathy in certain situations is one phrase that is overused tenfold. Yes, the bodies of women and children matter but it is ironic when in Canada, the lives of aboriginal women and children are constantly looked at as a problem, and structural violence is the unspoken act against that “problem”. The bodies of women and children, whether in Canada or in Syria, are used without their consent alive or dead. They may be plastered on national news with raging headlines to evoke a response or swept under the rug, their names not even whispered by the federal government. My initial feelings are screaming that the world only cares when there’s a body and when they cannot escape the image of that body. The voices of family and loved ones are finally heard but only when there is a body. Sure, that picture may represent what is happening on a larger scale and bring more attention to an already massively acknowledged issue, but I cannot shake the hollowness of this in it’s entirety. I would really like to hear someone else’s thoughts on the topic!
Abigail, I really liked a lot of the points that you made in this post, especially about the photograph of the Syrian boy that covered so much of the worlds social media and news channels. While I agree that this photo was used to successfully “spark” national interest/protest, I also wonder if there would have been such the national reaction if the Syrian boy’s body had not been photographed, or if it had been a middle aged Syrian man? Would people have mourned over the thousands of other refugee’s that had lost their lives if there had not been, as you describe, the image of the boy’s body that they could not escape? I would hope that there would be, but the other thousands of refugees that die each year says otherwise.
ReplyDeleteAnother issue that you bring up is the use of the phrase, “the women and children” as being problematic. The use of this phrase during combat tends to bring about more sympathy for the innocent lives lost at war. This however I agree is very different when it comes to Indigenous women and children, who are not seen as innocent. Unfortunately, even though we are not at war here in Canada, Indigenous women have to continuously fight for their oppression's to be merely recognized in our society.