‘Doing a Lynndie’ : Artist Responses to Representation of Gender in Abu Ghraib Torture Photographs

This paper will address in a preliminary fashion the work of three artists who frame the gender politics of the Abu Ghraib photographs as a process that simultaneously defines and excludes women. Regina Jose Galindo’s ‘Confession’ (2006), Martha Rosler’s ‘Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, New Series’ (2004), and Coco Fusco’s ‘A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America’ (2006) all approach the figure of included/excluded woman as central to understanding and rethinking Abu Ghraib. Galindo’s reorientation of the fantasy of gender implicit in torture, Rosler’s rethinking of gender through the historicisation of antiwar narratives, and Fusco’s pushing of military egalitarianism to its extreme logical conclusion attempt to carve out a space for feminist responses to Abu Ghraib images beyond the conservative appropriation of feminism.

© Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011. All rights reserved