The preemptive voice of enemy images: The before-and-after motif in news coverage of women homegrown terrorists

Abstract

This essay is about images of the enemy. But a particular enemy and a peculiar motif of representation: the woman homegrown terrorist and the before-and-after image as they appear in US online and broadcast news. The case of Shannon Conley, a young white American who attempted to join Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014, is used to examine these against an already-gendered orientalist discourse about women and terrorism. The before-and-after motif includes the composite image as well as its disaggregation into juxtapositions and sequences, some of which use surrogate images. I utilize the ‘voice of the visual’ against the temporality of preemption to parse out how the before-and-after image ‘speaks security’. In the context of a paradigm centered on anticipating threats, I argue the motif invites viewers to re-examine the ‘before’ image and ask what they might spot in it to help forestall such a transformation, next time.