Violent Exceptions: Children’s Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics: New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality
Autor Wendy S. Hesforden Limba Engleză Paperback – 5 mai 2021
Violent Exceptions turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children’s human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional—erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814257906
ISBN-10: 0814257909
Pagini: 282
Ilustrații: 6 b&w
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality
ISBN-10: 0814257909
Pagini: 282
Ilustrații: 6 b&w
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality
Recenzii
“Hesford’s case studies of ‘exceptional’ children-in-peril in war zones, as victims of terrorism, and as complex figures in US gendered and racialized politics offer an extensive examination of the material-rhetorical methodologies and rhetorics of violent exception that underscore human rights and humanitarian logics. Violent Exceptions also justifies the vital need for deeper examination of the challenges that non-agentic and non-individualized subjects of rights pose to the human rights regime.” —Belinda Walzer, Rhetoric Review
“Violent Exceptions will likely interest scholars from different fields in different ways. Those working within rhetorical studies specifically, and feminist, decolonial, disability, materialist, and posthuman theory more broadly, will find Hesford helpful in thinking through new approaches to understanding dynamic intersections of materiality, history, ideology, and representation. Those focusing specifically on children’s human rights will appreciate her close attention to the political divide between support for the CRC and its optional protocols as well as to the ‘diffractive’ interpretations of her case studies.” —Alexandra S. Moore, Human Rights Quarterly
“This book is compelling and comprehensive—rigorous and also politically powerful. It offers new insights into humanitarianism and critical human rights literatures and will be of interest to scholars in this area as well as media and cultural studies, communication and rhetoric, and women, gender, and sexuality studies.” —Julietta Hua, author of Trafficking Women’s Human Rights
“Violent Exceptions offers a theoretically sophisticated approach to a heavily deployed, and tragically misunderstood, figure: the innocent child subjected to violence. At a historical moment in which the US is publicly—and tragically—reorienting its own approach to the allegedly universal appeal of childhood innocence, this book is especially timely and desperately needed.” —Anna Mae Duane, author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim
Notă biografică
Wendy S. Hesford is Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme at The Ohio State University. She is the author, most recently, of Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms.
Extras
The February 1, 2016, Time magazine cover features a closely cropped image of Sincere Smith, a Black two-year-old boy whose face is covered in a rash caused from drinking and bathing in the poisoned water in Flint, Michigan. “Every time he gets into contact with the water, he’s burning and itching,” Ariana Hawk, the boy’s mother, told reporters. The majority African American population of Flint, a Midwest postindustrial town, had been fed high dosages of lead, E. coli, and carcinogens for nearly twenty-one months through their public water supply. Regina H. Boone, the Detroit Free Press photographer who took the shot, claimed that the image “put a face to this issue.” But what kind of moral and political work did this image perform? What storylines did Sincere Smith’s bodily story and face have to fit in order to be recognized, and to whom was it recognizable? Did this image help frame what are essentially human rights violations against the children of Flint in primarily humanitarian terms?
Water may be the universal solvent, but clean water is neither universally available, nor are all bodies equally vulnerable to the toxins it carries. Access to water, water management, and exposure to environmental toxins and the harm that exposure to them causes are gendered, raced, and classed in particular ways around the world. The United Nations reports that in 42 countries, 100 percent of populations have safe drinking water, but the US is not one of them. In the US, 0.8 percent of the population does not have access to clean water. Who are these 2.5 million people? What do these statistics reveal? What do they conceal? Those most vulnerable to contaminated water are young children from marginalized communities. Unlike statistical abstractions, however, water does not dissolve the toxic particularities of racial, gender, class, age, or citizenship status. Yet it was not until the images emerged of young vulnerable children, such as Sincere Smith, that the story about Flint gained national attention. Indeed, the cover image juxtaposed with the title “The Poisoning of an American City” positioned the child as a stand-in for the city. In addition to the citizen residents exposed to carcinogenic drinking water, hundreds of undocumented Flint residents were unable to obtain bottled water because of security and identification checks at distribution sites and their legitimate fear of deportation, and these residents also were not counted for in the publicly released statistics (Settlage).
...
The broad culpability of the local, state, and federal government officials who failed to anticipate and then acknowledge predictable consequences of cutting costs on proper water treatment spotlights how mechanisms of exceptionality—declared states of emergency—alibi systemic injustices and neoliberal capitulations to profit (Athey, Ferebee, and Hesford 1). The Time magazine cover photograph of Sincere Smith therefore points not only to how “human[s] [are] perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments” but also to how these environments are themselves agencies of the state (Alaimo 2012, 476). In her essay “Toxic Cities,” Terressa A. Benz likewise demonstrates the impact of neoliberal economics and legal decisions in promoting environmental racism and a racialized caste system of “worthiness” in which minority communities bear the burden of exposure to environmental toxins (49–50). How, then, to account for these material intimacies and the differential exposure of marginalized communities to environmental toxins and the denial of their basic human right to clean water? The Flint water crisis compels us to question how and when the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril accrues value in the documentation of structural violence or its obfuscation, and the consequences of these accruals and obfuscations for the advancement of children’s human rights. As I argue throughout, the global insubstantiality of children’s human rights is bound to the paradoxes of humanitarianism and state-of-exception mechanisms to which the political rationalities of neoliberalism and liberal internationalism are attached. Violent Exceptions focuses on the global fragility of children’s human rights and the failure of humanitarian orientations to address underlying structural inequities that perpetrate precarious childhoods.
Water may be the universal solvent, but clean water is neither universally available, nor are all bodies equally vulnerable to the toxins it carries. Access to water, water management, and exposure to environmental toxins and the harm that exposure to them causes are gendered, raced, and classed in particular ways around the world. The United Nations reports that in 42 countries, 100 percent of populations have safe drinking water, but the US is not one of them. In the US, 0.8 percent of the population does not have access to clean water. Who are these 2.5 million people? What do these statistics reveal? What do they conceal? Those most vulnerable to contaminated water are young children from marginalized communities. Unlike statistical abstractions, however, water does not dissolve the toxic particularities of racial, gender, class, age, or citizenship status. Yet it was not until the images emerged of young vulnerable children, such as Sincere Smith, that the story about Flint gained national attention. Indeed, the cover image juxtaposed with the title “The Poisoning of an American City” positioned the child as a stand-in for the city. In addition to the citizen residents exposed to carcinogenic drinking water, hundreds of undocumented Flint residents were unable to obtain bottled water because of security and identification checks at distribution sites and their legitimate fear of deportation, and these residents also were not counted for in the publicly released statistics (Settlage).
...
The broad culpability of the local, state, and federal government officials who failed to anticipate and then acknowledge predictable consequences of cutting costs on proper water treatment spotlights how mechanisms of exceptionality—declared states of emergency—alibi systemic injustices and neoliberal capitulations to profit (Athey, Ferebee, and Hesford 1). The Time magazine cover photograph of Sincere Smith therefore points not only to how “human[s] [are] perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments” but also to how these environments are themselves agencies of the state (Alaimo 2012, 476). In her essay “Toxic Cities,” Terressa A. Benz likewise demonstrates the impact of neoliberal economics and legal decisions in promoting environmental racism and a racialized caste system of “worthiness” in which minority communities bear the burden of exposure to environmental toxins (49–50). How, then, to account for these material intimacies and the differential exposure of marginalized communities to environmental toxins and the denial of their basic human right to clean water? The Flint water crisis compels us to question how and when the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril accrues value in the documentation of structural violence or its obfuscation, and the consequences of these accruals and obfuscations for the advancement of children’s human rights. As I argue throughout, the global insubstantiality of children’s human rights is bound to the paradoxes of humanitarianism and state-of-exception mechanisms to which the political rationalities of neoliberalism and liberal internationalism are attached. Violent Exceptions focuses on the global fragility of children’s human rights and the failure of humanitarian orientations to address underlying structural inequities that perpetrate precarious childhoods.
Cuprins
Preface Handprints and Humanitarian Violence at the Border Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 “No Tears Here”: Humanitarian Recognition, Liminality, and the Child Refugee Chapter 2 Trafficking Global Girlhoods, Terrorism, and Humanitarian Celebrity Chapter 3 Humanitarian Futures: Disability Exceptionalism and African Child Soldier Narratives Chapter 4 Humanitarian Negations: Black Childhoods and US Carceral Systems Chapter 5 Queer Optics: Humanitarian Thresholds and Transgender Children’s Rights Coda “Walls as We See Them” Notes Bibliography Index
Descriere
Exposes how humanitarian discourses privilege certain children’s lives and rights over others.