Journal article
Resignifying Alan Kurdi: news photographs, memes, and the ethics of embodied vulnerability
Critical studies in media communication, Vol.35(3), pp.240-258
05/27/2018
DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2017.1408958
Abstract
The Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir's photograph of the drowned refugee child Alan Kurdi attained worldwide recognition as a media spectacle, initially prompting humanitarian responses and political action, but later morphing into online memes and inciting public backlash as "war porn." The author argues here that the ethical motivations of photojournalism and memes are oppositional with regard to their representations of embodied vulnerability. While photojournalistic depictions of vulnerable bodies are motivated by an ethics of care intended to generate empathy and progressive social change, memes disrupt those affective connotations through processes of mimicry and replication. By means of a comparative semiological analysis, this paper examines the way the sign system of Demir's photograph was mutated into memes, radically changing the ethical connotations of the former. The differing ethical affordances of news photos versus memes, and their relationship, explain the reversal of the cosmopolitan humanitarianism initially sparked by the Alan Kurdi photograph and tell us more about the ethical frictions and contrapositions at work in the contemporary media environment.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Resignifying Alan Kurdi: news photographs, memes, and the ethics of embodied vulnerability
- Creators
- Meenakshi Gigi Durham - School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Critical studies in media communication, Vol.35(3), pp.240-258
- DOI
- 10.1080/15295036.2017.1408958
- ISSN
- 1529-5036
- eISSN
- 1479-5809
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 05/27/2018
- Academic Unit
- Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies; English; School of Journalism and Mass Communication
- Record Identifier
- 9984002460302771
Metrics
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