From Grief to Grievance: Ethics and Politics in the Testimony of Anti-War Mothers

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the political purposes to which the complex and often powerful testimony chronicling loss of family members to the ‘war on terror’ is put in the United States. We argue that, it is critical to examine the different invocations of the family in these expressions of grief. In fact, we argue that it is crucial to do so in order to distinguish in ethical as well as political terms how the family is deployed, or sometimes dismissed in such testimony. By analysing testimony by Cindy Sheehan, Celeste Zappala, and family members featured in Ari Fleischer's Freedom's Watch ad campaign in support of the 2007 ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq, we address the following questions: How do grief narratives allow for the recognition of other people's losses? When do expressions of grief over the loss of a family member make one complicit with a disregard for the lives of others? Is grief used to justify policies that view other human beings—both American soldiers and Iraqis—as so much collateral damage, and that render the presumed ‘enemy’ as inhuman? We argue that Freedom's Watch mobilises a vicious, hyperbolic version of family as a national signifier, one that has violent consequences for both US foreign and domestic policy. The reprehensible uses to which the right puts family and family grief, however, should not lead to dismissing this potent ideological field. Cindy Sheehan and Celeste Zappala participate in a different ethics of grief, one that resonates with Judith Butler's contention that grief need not be privatising.