ABSTRACT
In the scandal over the American military’s abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, photographs were the primary evidence: indeed, it seems that these abuses were performed for the eye of the camera. Images of naked Iraqis in humiliating positions or dead circulated the Internet, and a handful of these became icons: Private Lynndie England with a naked prisoner on a dog leash; snarling dogs threatening a naked, cowering prisoner; a pair of jokers, grinning broadly, giving the thumbs-up next to a human pyramid of naked buttocks and plastic-hooded heads (“The Abu Ghraib Pictures,” 2004). “Shame and torture have a secret intimacy,” John Limon suggests, and we saw their “coalescence at Abu Ghraib” (2007, p. 556). The cruelty or torture particularly involved nakedness and exposure, particularly exposure of genitals, to a camera-the archetypal shame situation in a culture where nakedness is deemed to be shameful.
