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The visuality of terror: gender, sex and desire in war

ABSTRACT The constitutive relation between visuality and terror has been underscored in the early twenty-first century, from the broadcast of the 9/11 attacks to the front page coverage of the invasion of Afghanistan, from the prime time bombing of Bagdad to the Abu Ghraib photographs. However, the global transmission of these images rendered invisible this mutuality by rupturing the link between the political and the cultural, the historical and the contemporary, the individual and the social, disciplining the viewing subject into the discourse of terror. This paper examines the visual strategies at work in western cinematic treatment of war and occupation in the Middle East, by way of a reading of two award-winning Canadian films, Incendies (2010) and Inch’Allah, (2013). Highlighting the treatment of violence in these texts, I show how their underlying gender/sexual and religio-racial politics link terror to sexuality; desire to innocence; and death to the Muslim body, female and male. In my reading of the visuality of these linkages, I show how a distinct kind of heroic subject, the globally mobile white feminist, becomes coded as innocent of, and vulnerable to, the horrors emanating from the diabolical Muslim body, in the west as in the Middle East, through her engagement with terror.