Articles by Rebecca Scherr
Regarding the ruins: ruins and humanitarian witnessing in Satrapi and Sacco
The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2019
This essay considers the significance of images of ruins in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Joe ... more This essay considers the significance of images of ruins in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Joe Sacco’s works on Palestine. I discuss how these comics artists position the built environment in ruins as witnesses to human rights violations. I argue that Satrapi and Sacco use images of ruins to strategically document the extent of war’s devastation, and simultaneously, to advance complex arguments about the nature of suffering and trauma. Their works engage with human rights discourse and forensic architecture towards the inclusion of objects and things (the ruins) as legitimate victims of war and atrocity.
Framing human rights: comics form and the politics of recognition in Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza
It is a given that our media-saturated world is overflowing with images of war and trauma, from t... more It is a given that our media-saturated world is overflowing with images of war and trauma, from the daily news cycle to films and books and TV. Susan Sontag claims, rightly so, that such a proliferation of representations of atrocity shapes modern perception in the West. Sontag theorizes the politics and ethics lurking in this form of spectatorship, in particular examining the ethical questions that arise when it comes to looking at the pain of others. While Sontag writes about the role of photography in mediating this encounter, I find such a focus equally illuminating when applied to graphic narrative. In fact, the ideas Sontag formulates in Regarding the Pain of Others provides an ideal platform for talking about the ways in which graphic narratives shape an ethics of looking at-and therefore of reading-other people's pain.
(Not) Queering White Vision in Far from Heaven and Transamerica
A bstmct: Jn this essay, ! look at the various ways that Todd Haynes' 1996 independent film, Safe... more A bstmct: Jn this essay, ! look at the various ways that Todd Haynes' 1996 independent film, Safe, i11co1porates the discourses of whiteness, queerness, and subjectivity more generally. Drawing.from critical race theory,film theo1y, queer themy and phenomenology, I examine the various ways that Safe positions whiteness as a11 identity formed hy corporeal and spatial habits. By revealing whiteness as a habit, Safe renders whiteness, which is usually represented in American film as non-racial, as an embodied racial identity. By making what usually passes as in.visible visible, the.film exposes whiteness tu scrutiny and (potential) deconstruction. Safe is thus an example of radica/.filmmaking in its ability to expose the ways in which our identities are always shifting and contingent, and it opens new avenues for thinking and re-thinking the concept of whiteness.
Lit-literature Interpretation Theory, 2007
Papers by Rebecca Scherr
The ethics of vision in <I>With Raised Hands</I>
Short Film Studies, 2012
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Articles by Rebecca Scherr
Papers by Rebecca Scherr