ABSTRACT
The trope of the mourning woman, deployed by both mainstream media and humanitarian organizations to denote the ravages of war, conveys trauma and loss in a way that is both emotionally engaging and immediately recognizable to global audiences.1 This recognition comes partly-at least for Western audiences-from the trope’s provenance in art history (e.g., Bellini’s or Michelangelo’s Pietà, a weeping woman in Picasso’s Guernica), partly from its resonance with broader traditions that associate loss with the feminine and the maternal (Kristeva, 1989; Kübler-Ross, 1969). This trope has been well represented in documentary photography since its inception: examples include Agustí Centelles’s images of women grieving victims of bombings in the Spanish Civil War; Don McCullin’s Cypriot woman mourning the death of her husband at Ghaziveram; the photograph of a Cambodian tuberculosis patient by James Nachtwey in 2004; a Japanese victim of Minamata disease photographed by W. Eugene Smith in 1971; and Georges Merillon’s image of the dead body of a protester against the Yugoslavian government surrounded by his family, a winner of the World Press Photo prize in 1990. Such photographs captivate global audiences through their spectacle-like qualities-the theatrical powers of gestures and faces, the graphic immediacy of dying bodies or corpses, the intensity of emotion expressed by the subjects. Repetitive encounters with these images have made them part of the visual economy, marked by the legacies of slavery, decolonization, exile, and war (Campbell, 2004; Hariman and Lucaites, 2007). Using insights from gender, postcolonial, and queer theory, in this chapter I examine the way female bodies in the visual sphere function not only as symbols of an individual psychological state, but also as indicators of losses suffered by communities.
