ABSTRACT
Images of youth and children from the “global south”—the starving “third-world” child, the mutilated African girl, the terrorist Muslim youth, the promiscuous (Latina) teenage mother, the victim of sexual trafficking—comprise the iconography used to invoke and solidify human rights rhetoric, through mobilizing apparently contradictory scenarios of affective investment. These stories veer back and forth between moral panics and rescue narratives, sometimes within the very same image. Susan Shepler (2005), for instance, points to the ways in which the image of the child soldier invokes both the fear of the superpredator as well as the innocence of the child. These images also leak into the discourse surrounding youth within the United States to maintain racist and xenophobic narratives of victimization; the aptly titled “Superpredator Meets Teenage Mom” (Hendrixson, 2002) demonstrates how images of transnational youth become saturated with danger through a whole host of associations, such as violent or reproductive takeover, which would deprive “our” future generations of their rightful entitlements. While the discourses of youth as endangered and/or dangerous are apparently opposite, they are equally imperialist and work to solidify notions of adult (White) Western citizens as the ones in charge of (having) rights. These images, and their corresponding narratives, mobilize the necessary affect to support the dominance of human rights as a utopian framework that, despite, or perhaps because of, its claim to universality, upholds notions of humanness that depend on infantilized and pathologized less-than-human others.
