Premium
Suffering Bodies and Scenes of Confrontation: The Art and Politics of Representing Structural Violence
Author(s) -
Stone Livia K.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
visual anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.346
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1548-7458
pISSN - 1058-7187
DOI - 10.1111/var.12080
Subject(s) - injustice , focus (optics) , structural violence , social injustice , politics , power (physics) , inequality , structural inequality , sociology , social power , aesthetics , criminology , political science , social psychology , psychology , art , law , mathematical analysis , physics , mathematics , quantum mechanics , optics
This article argues that a visual focus on suffering bodies can obscure the power relationships that result in inequality and injustice through (1) obscuring the mechanisms and perpetrators of violence, (2) not disrupting dominant conceptual frameworks, and (3) not leaving room for solutions. I use a corpus of films made about and by a M exican social movement in S an S alvador A tenco to ask a practical question: How might we represent issues of structural violence without focusing on images of suffering and victimization? The solution that these films present is a focus on what I call “scenes of confrontation.”