The Spectacle of the Veiled Woman and the Mutilated Child

Abstract

When we imagine a body we imagine it whole, but, in fact, it is always in pieces. Pieces that are imagined held together in the image of a person before the law, or pieces that break apart in the image of the person who is outside this law. The person who recognises themselves before liberal law, we contend in this paper, references the images of those who are to become before law: savages, barbarians, children, animals. These categories frame the images of the body in pieces, waiting in the wings of a liberal imagination of the subject, recruited for the purposes of holding forth a difference; one which suggests pending prohibition which will in turn result in pending pieces. Here, we analyse several images of mutilated children and veiled women, and consider how they form a new colonial imagination as spectacle and, understood through the theories of Jacques Lacan, as specular. These images, we suggest, present an imagination of not only The Body that could ‘be’ beneath the veil, or beyond the knife, but of another's body which could be, and we suggest is represented as what should be broken into pieces to the point of disintegration in a post-9/11 world.