Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Considering representations of torture in such television series as 24, Alias, and Homeland; the documentaries Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), and Standard Operating Procedure (2008); and "torture porn" feature films from the Saw and Hostel series, Hilary Neroni unites aesthetic and theoretical analysis to provide a unique portal into theorizing biopower and its relation to the desiring subject. Her work ultimately showcases film and television studies' singular ability to expose and potentially disable the fantasies that sustain torture and the regimes that deploy it.
Price: $29.00
Pages: 200
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publication Date:
05 May 2015
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231170710
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
One of the clearest signs of the ethical regression that characterizes the last decade is the changed status of torture in public discourse: no longer a taboo, something that is to be done in secret, torture is today a topic of 'rational' legal, ethical, and medical debates. This renormalization of torture would not have been possible without movies and television series that gradually rendered it acceptable. This is why Hilary Neroni's The Subject of Torture reaches well beyond cultural studies and provides a courageous examination of the ongoing moral catastrophe—everyone who cares about our ethical predicament should read it. The book is not only very readable and simultaneously a work of highest academic standards, it is much more: an alarm call that should awaken us all from our moral slumber.
Hilary Neroni teaches in the Film and Television Studies Program at the University of Vermont and is the author of The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Confronting the Abu Ghraib Photographs
1. Torture, Biopower, and the Desiring Subject
2. The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer in Post-9/11 Documentary Films
3. Torture Porn and the Desiring Subject in Hostel and Saw
4. 24, Jack Bauer, and the Torture Fantasy
5. The Biodetective Versus the Detective of the Real in Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland
6. Alias and the Fictional Alternative to Torture
Notes
Index