#5: Frames of War 23/01/2019

Wednesday 23 January | 5 - 6.30pm | LHRI | All welcome 


A Happy New(ish) Year from Quilting Points! We have a few changes to announce. Firstly, our sessions will now take place on Wednesday evenings (23 January, 13 February, 6 March and 27 March). Secondly, and more excitingly, this semester’s programme includes the following two special events:
  1. Film Screening, 27 February: Paris Is Burning (a collaboration with Leeds Cineforum)
  2. Guest Seminar, 27 March: Griselda Pollock on Anne Emmanuelle Berger’s The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theatre of Gender
The first session of the semester will take place on Wednesday 23 January. We will be reading from Butler’s ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag’ from Frames of War (2009). Written as a critical response to Sontag’s On Regarding the Pain of Others, the essay uses the Abu Ghraib torture photographs to ask whether Sontag is correct to argue that photography has lost its power to incite an ethical response and to develop her investigation of the ways in which the modern American state uses war to frame hierarchies of grieveability. Taking issue with Sontag’s separation of affect and cognition in analysing the photographic form’s effects on the viewer, Butler argues that the photographs and their widespread circulation act to expose and disrupt the normative frames that legitimise modern warfare. 

In the session, the discussion will focus principally on pp.74 - 101 of the chapter, but you are welcome to read the whole chapter, and to glance at Sontag’s On Regarding the Pain of Others, if you wish.  

We look forward to hearing your thoughts! 


Wednesday 23 January | 5 - 6.30pm | LHRI | All welcome 

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