Re-Envisioning the United States' Search for Re-Empowerment after 9/11: Vulnerability, Visual Framing, and Violence

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the relationship among vulnerability, violence, and the framing of images right after the 9/11 attacks and throughout the subsequent war on terror. It examines eight prominent images circulated in the United States at that time. The thesis argues that the revelation of US vulnerability on 9/11 was not merely suppressed or denied by the US state, but instead was strategically mobilized to (re)construct a dominant framing that could justify the US violent conduct of its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In part, this was done to reassert the United States' identity as a hyper-powerful and masculine power. Drawing from the work of critical political and international relations theorists like Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Cynthia Weber, Tim Luke, and others, I show how the visual framing of the eight images selected in this study helped to produce, but also sometimes to destabilize, the social and political conditions that enabled certain, often "othered," bodies to be relegated to what I call "zones of endemic precarity" —that is to say, spaces where suffering was permissible and ongoing, yet often unaddressed or unrecognized by the US public and the US government. I emphasize the differential experience and representation vis-à-vis vulnerability as the United States and "othered" bodies during the war on terror generally do not experience violence and vulnerability in the same way. This study ultimately finds that the violence undertaken by the US during the war on terror—in part, as a response to the violence the US experienced on 9/11— does not manage to fully re-empower (or re-masculinize) the US and does not remove the vulnerability that was first represented in images right after the 9/11 attacks. I conclude the study by calling for a more critical approach to viewing violent images so that we may be better able to resist the power-infused visual frames through which such images (and their meanings) are often understood. This thesis contributes to critical IR scholarship on visual politics and contemporary violence by demonstrating how visual media frame, construct, reproduce, or render invisible many of the vulnerable subjects of global politics.