Being there and Feeling Death

Abstract

In 2009, the death of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, recorded on a mobile phone, was heralded as one of the most watched deaths in history. (1) Widely disseminated across social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as well as in mainstream media, Neda was designated the YouTubc Martyr. Ten years earlier, in November of 1999, a representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) had clandestinely recorded the execution of a woman known as Zarmeena, (2) clad in a burqa, a full-body veil typical in Afghanistan. Yet it was not until the events of September 11, 2001, that the media would focus on the graphic imagery from Kabul, which by then had been used in Cassian Harrison and Saira Shah's 2001 British television documentary Beneath the Veil (3) Mainstream media, critical research, and nonprofessional mediamakers have celebrated the possibilities for political change opened by new technologies such as mobile telephony, while at the same time deploring the horror these same technologies record. As charged sources of debate in political science, gender studies, and new media theory, the Neda and Zarmeena videos and the discourse surrounding them demonstrate how the female body (particularly the Arab and Muslim body) is frequently used as a site through which to discuss the politics of military occupation, contemporary forms of Orientalism, and social change in repressive states. Critical discussion has also focused attention on visual signifiers, such as the veil, that contribute to framing both women as victims. To this conversation, I would like to offer a return to the image. Such a return would challenge the uncritical identification of both women as victims through examination of the sensory details that contribute to victim framing. I will not only consider the visual dimensions of the image but also take into account sensuous geographies and an engagement with the skin of the (to use media theorist Laura U. Marks's term addressing embodiment, cinema, and the senses), which touches and viewers in ways not yet fully considered. (4) I argue that a possible source of these image's potency is their sensuous, haptic qualities that offer immediacy, intimacy, and embodied spectatorship. Suffering, in this way, gains immediacy through the affective qualities of touch. Approaching these examples through an interdisciplinary lens of geography and visual culture means the images can be read both as textual two-dimensional and spatial encounters. Framing the essay are theories of the senses, notably those developed by phenomenologist and human geographer Paul Rodaway, and Marks, both of whom have a pronounced research interest in how the world is experienced, both visually and also beyond its visual representation. In Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (1994), Rodaway calls for geographers to: ... return in some way to a kind of sensual study, both intimate in its focus on the information of the senses--touch, smell, taste, hearing, sight and also wider ranging, inclusive not just of the visual dimension of experience, but also the other senses. ... reasserting a return of geographical study to the fullness of a living world or everyday life as a multisensual and multidimensional situatedness in a space and in relationship to places. (5) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Rodaway insists that touch geographies, particularly those relating to the haptic experience, are a way to describe how the body both moves through space and is in tactile contact with the environment. Marks considers the traceable paths of intercultural cinema--primarily cinema from Western metropolitan centers, which have been transformed by global flows of migration. Her interrogation of the materiality of cinema, and the way that film brushes up against and transforms the viewer, are influential concepts in the area of media and the senses. …