The Politics of Protest and Us Foreign Policy: Performative Construction of the War on Terror by Cami Rowe

Author:Cami Rowe [Rowe, Cami]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Peace, Political Science, Human Rights
ISBN: 9780415523905
Google: 6Br_eM0gKl0C
Goodreads: 13711860
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

As can be seen from the accounts above, costuming of anti-war actions and utterances plays a key role in carnivalizing social structures that lay the foundations for waging war and campaigns for public support. It is clear that theories of carnival provide relevant insight into the liminoid nature of such incidents; However, in order to fully consider the political effectiveness of costuming in anti-war demonstrations it is helpful to once again turn to insights from dramatic theories of production and reception.

One of the most proficient users of costuming as a device for audience manipulation was Jean Genet. This author’s preoccupation with subversions of authority and social hierarchy have made his work attractive to Performance and Politics scholars alike (Finburgh et al. 2006). His characters often engaged in play-acting as part of plots, and taking the layers of performance further Genet went to great lengths to demonstrate the falsity of the characters and their separateness from the actors who temporarily embodied them. For example, in his play The Maids, two characters (maids) dress up as their mistresses and act out a scene. Audience perceptions are further complicated by the fact that the characters of the female maids are played by men. As Sartre explains in an introduction to an edition of Genet’s plays, the intent is mainly to highlight fakery at every turn.

It is this perverse intuition that Genet prefers to all else: it makes the nothing shimmer at the surface of all. Where is being? Can it be that something is?… When the deceptive appearances in the play are dispelled, they reveal in their place other appearances .… At this moment the spectator … [understands] that the only true thing is play-acting.

(Sartre 1954, 29)

Importantly, this effect is not about obliteration of identities and characters, but about revealing them as constructions – shallow appearances which can be less than the full truth. Audiences are forced to recognize that their images of others are incomplete, and often built out of preconceived notions rather than actual experience of characters and their actions. Genet uses costuming as one device to deliver this impact to audiences – and the same effect can summarize the performances of the activists described above. Code Pink achieves this emphasis on fakery by embracing a hyper version of “feminine” clothing, and in obviating the typical social construction of their gender they make possible the extenuation of such realization to other areas including foreign policy. Both groups make use of notions of authority attached to particular kinds of costuming, IVAW by redirecting the deference normally directed at military uniforms and Code Pink through parodies of authoritative garb like police uniforms. All of these actions are intended to reveal the artifice of social roles, and the possibility of altering the range of actions normally possible for certain individuals or groups. By performing acts of carnival on widely recognizable and “everyday” costumes, these organizations create an environment of communal questioning, going a long way towards their goal of widespread public criticism of the War on Terror.

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