Global Corpse Politics
The Obscenity Taboo

What makes a photograph of a dead body obscene? Auchter's genealogy of obscenity argues that this process is highly political.

Jessica Auchter (Author)

9781009054386, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 July 2023

208 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.311 kg

'What can the dead tell us about global politics? In this thoughtful and considerate book, Jessica Auchter refuses to see dead bodies as the grisly remnants of global politics. Instead, she explains how corpses work to constitute global politics, focusing particular attention on how dead bodies have been used to both re-humanise and de-humanise the people that populate international landscape. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in images of death that circulate in the media because it provides the theoretical tools we need to understand how death is seen, whose deaths are seen, and what these death reveal about the living world we inhabit.' Thomas Gregory, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland

Taboos have long been considered key examples of norms in global politics, with important strategic effects. Auchter focuses on how obscenity functions as a regulatory norm by focusing on dead body images. Obscenity matters precisely because it is applied inconsistently across multiple cases. Examining empirical cases including ISIS beheadings, the death of Muammar Qaddafi, Syrian torture victims, and the fake death images of Osama bin Laden, this book offers a rich theoretical explanation of the process by which the taboo surrounding dead body images is transgressed and upheld, through mechanisms including trigger warnings and media framings. This corpse politics sheds light on political communities and the structures in place that preserve them, including the taboos that regulate purported obscene images. Auchter questions the notion that the key debate at play in visual politics related to the dead body image is whether to display or not to display, and instead narrates various degrees of visibility, invisibility, and hyper-visibility.

1. Visualizing corpse politics
2. Horrifically graphic: the obscene corpse
3. The visual politics of ISIS beheadings
4. Dead terrorists and dead dictators
5. Proof of death: evidence and atrocity
6. Displaying the dead body: Some conclusions.

Subject Areas: International organisations & institutions [LBBU], Media, information & communication industries [KNT], International relations [JPS], Politics & government [JP]