Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics by Wendy S. Hesford

Abstract

Reviewed by: Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics by Wendy S. Hesford Alexandra S. Moore (bio) Wendy S. Hesford, Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics ( Ohio State University Press, 2021) ISBN 978-0-8142-1468-8, 260 pages. The recent New York Times story, "A Viral Photo Helps Bring Syrian Refugee Family to Italy," recounts how photojournalist Mehmet Aslan's award-winning photo of a father and son, both maimed by the war in Syria, spurred a successful humanitarian campaign to offer the family asylum and medical care in Italy.1 The photo titled "Hardship of Life" shows Munzir El Nezzel, who lost a leg in the bombing of a market in Idlib and is balanced on his crutch, raising his son Mustafa high in the air. Its caption explains that Mustafa was born without limbs as a result of the medication his mother took while she was pregnant with him to counter the effects of her exposure to nerve gas, and it is the composition and combination of father and son's loving expressions with their physical conditions that give the image its power.2 The photo and celebratory story of the family's arrival in Italy raise the questions driving rhetorical studies scholar Wendy Hesford's Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics: how and why might the photograph mobilize viewers; how does the image of Mustafa combined with the promise of prosthetics in the Global North distract readers of the New York Times from environmental poisoning and violence affecting primarily poor children of color in the US; and, how might the successful humanitarian effort undertaken on behalf of Mustafa and his family deflect attention away from or substitute in public consciousness for the human rights claims of millions of Syrians affected by war? In Violent Exceptions, Hesford analyzes the figure of the "child-in-peril" in contemporary legal and cultural discourses that circulate in the United States. The book has two central aims. First, Hesford develops a material rhetorical methodology to analyze human rights-related case studies concerning children in vulnerable or violent contexts ranging from war and displacement to trafficking to disability to race, gender, and sexual identity. Second, she shows how the figure of the child-in-peril elides collective human rights struggles in favor of humanitarianism on behalf of select victims. In Hesford's words, the book "argues for the recognition of the limits of the humanitarian paradigm of human rights to address systemic violence and scale the magnitude of the risks that imperil the human rights, lives, and futures of children growing up in the midst of violent conflicts, racial dispossession, [End Page 640] and environmental degradation, and in contexts governed by the rise of authoritarian regimes and leaders."3 Hesford grounds the methodological framework of Violent Exceptions in a set of key theoretical concepts: genealogy, material rhetoric, diffraction, and exceptionalism. Drawing on Michel Foucault's genealogical method, she situates normative human rights and the rhetorics that engage them in their historical contexts. Each case study begins with a concise overview of the circumstances from which it arose. That attention to context, including the context of the relevant human rights norms and of the example's social and cultural representations, undergirds her material rhetorical approach. While she makes a sustained argument against humanitarianism when it functions as a neoliberal substitute for collective human rights claims concerning structural and systemic violence, she also considers the multiple, contradictory ways a given text might circulate and be consumed by different local, national, and transnational publics. Employing feminist physicist Karen Barad's concept of "diffractivity" to refer to those differences in meaning and significance, Hesford repeatedly asks how discourses are mobilized, by whom, within what contexts, and with what effects. In probing these questions of which stories and images of the child-in-peril circulate and to what ends, Hesford aims to refigure the idea of agency. The problem of whether children may be direct human rights claimants or require some form of custodial representation rests at the heart of children's human rights. Hesford approaches this problem by redefining agency. Instead of being tethered to the individual (the...