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ABSTRACT
Journalists have claimed that the 2015 European ‘refugee crisis’ is one of the most photographed crises in human history. It is important to understand what kind of messages these photographs convey, how they reproduce the hegemonic narrative, and how they become commodities. In this paper, we critique the visual economy of the ‘refugee crisis’ from a queer feminist perspective through the lens of reproduction. We show how the reproduction of images of ‘refugees’ is structured by, and naturalises reproductive heteronormativity, amongst other institutions, which we argue is essential to the functioning of bordered nation-states: the figure of the refugee is reproduced as presumptively heterosexual, and as reproductive. We focus on watching photographic images because, as we have seen over the past six years, through the use and control of photography, states seek to generate consent to the necropolitical management of ‘crisis’, to the undeclared war against refugees. We argue that by watching photographs, as opposed to merely looking at them, we can inhabit a queer feminist perspective that seeks to abolish state-imposed divisions between ‘refugees’, ‘migrants’, and ‘citizens’.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 At the time of writing (February 2023), UNHCR reports that there are currently 103 million people experiencing forced displacement (UNHCR Citation2023).
2 Sabiha Allouche’s analysis of ‘outer-queer-(y)ing,’ that is, ‘the forced and artificial subjugation of the fictive category of the Middle East to a queer analysis that is informed, shaped and delimitated by a US experience’ is highly relevant here, particularly as we question how categories of gender and sexuality travel, and under what conditions they become inscribed and legible on the bodies of people on the move. Allouche proposes a non-binary to outer-queer-(y)ing corrective methodology, namely, ‘(un)-queer-(y)ing inner queer-(y)ing’: a ‘pluralistic understanding of queer methodology’ which has ‘multiple starting points of queer narratives’ and traces ‘their multiple trajectories’ (Citation2020).
3 The number of people affected by displacement has risen in the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquakes in Syrian and Türkiye on February 6 2023 which have displaced an estimated 2.4 million people across the two states and claimed 50,157 lives as reported by Reuters (at time of writing, February 2023).
4 In the beginning of 2020, the Greek right-wing government of New Democracy announced their plan to build a sea barrier of 2,7 km off the island of Lesvos to deter refugees crossing from Turkey to Greece. At the same time, they announced the building of a 27 km long electrified fence on Evros region, to secure the land borders between Greece and Turkey as well. A 40 km fence (on which construction started in 2012) already exists along part of the land border and is being expanded by another 35 km (at time of writing, February 2023). These very costly plans are implemented at a time when the Greek economy is struggling to adjust to the regulations of its lenders and service its debt and to avoid a new financial meltdown due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the global recession.
5 By ‘institutions’ we refer to regulative, punitive, repressive, and productive forms of organisation of social life linked to the state, even if they sometimes formally exceed its control, which dictate normative ways of being and ways of seeing.
6 The photograph can be viewed here: https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2015/29550/1/2015-massimo-sestini-sn2.
7 Sestini is known for his aerial photographs, which are taken in collaboration with police and military, ‘to embark with special units, lean out of helicopters supported by a harness, dive for shooting the explosion of bomb devices and fly on any type of military and civil aircrafts’ (as stated on his professional website, https://www.massimosestini.it).
8 The image can be viewed here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_2000-0521-31
9 We are grateful to Bridget Anderson for suggesting we make this connection. At the same time, we recognise the limitations of comparison or analogy and agree with Camilla Hawthorne that visual comparisons between ‘geographies of the Middle Passage’ and those of the contemporary Mediterranean (‘juxtapos[ing] the famous diagram of the slave ship Brookes . . . with aerial shots of migrant boats in the vast blue of the Mediterranean’) elide as much as they reveal (Hawthorne Citation2021). Indeed, as Anna Carastathis argues, ‘the relationship between a photograph and a wood-cut print from the eighteenth century has already been forged in and through the visual economies of anti-Blackness before any comparative claim between the two is made’ (Carastathis Citation2022: 234): ‘The comparison between these two images, then, as inopportune and problematic as it may be for myriad other reasons, tells us some- thing about how people on the move – in particular when they are Black Africans – are objectified by the various racialised gazes to which they are subject: the military–humanitarian gaze, the gaze of photographers, and the gaze of “mpathetic” or “hostile” viewers of photographs of the refugee crisis, all of which embody white supremacy’ (Carastathis Citation2022: 235).
10 Sestini later launched a project titled ‘Where Are You?’ addressing people whom he photographed in Rescue Operation (not incidentally, without their consent), asking them or their loved ones to contact him: ‘We would like to hear your story and what happened after the rescue’. https://www.massimosestini.it/wru.html.
11 Still, as discussed below, they ascribe other identities (e.g. gender and kinship identities) to photographed subjects, without these being the subject of the analysis. In a different study, based on a ‘systematic content analysis of European press coverage surrounding the ‘migration crisis’ in 2015’ (not focussed on photography), researchers found that whilst 62 per cent of news items studied reported nationality, only 24 per cent ‘distinguished between men and women’ and less than one third referred to age; only 16 per cent included refugees’ names and a mere 7 per cent their professions (Chouliaraki et al. Citation2017: 12, 19).
12 The photograph may be viewed here: https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/04/18/blogs/photography-pulitzer-for-coverage-of-refugee-crisis/s/18-lens-refugees-slide-6SQW.html
13 And in the photographer’s, Daniel Etter’s, own account of photographing the scene (Citation2015).
14 For instance, a policy working paper published by the World Bank on ‘The Economics of Forced Displacement’ observes that ‘the heavy burden of refugees and IDPs is carried by low and middle income countries and not by wealthy OECD countries’ (Verme Citation2017: 4, emphasis added).
15 The image can be viewed here: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0E84/production/_85561730_gettyimages-487872042.jpg
16 The image can be viewed here: https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/201078f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2048×1152±0±0/resize/840×473!/quality/90/?url = https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F7d%2Fbf%2Faf4e1f516511cda187e712472386%2Fsd-1518125410-r4uix9etmt-snap-image
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Notes on contributors
Anna Carastathis
Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi wrote Reproducing Refugees: Photographia of a Crisis (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) and are co-directors of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research.