Strange Selves: Photography and the Othered Body

Janice Yu
Rhetoric
UC Berkeley

This project makes the broad proposition that visuality has been intrinsic to the formation of the modern human subject, first and foremost as a distinct and unified entity. However, the self being constructed in response to visual likeness and difference, the modern human subject has oft relied on the othered human body to serve as the figuration of what it is not. As such, the other has been predominantly positioned as object or abject and visual representations serve to manifestly assert and exhibit these identities. This project takes up this broad proposition through a close examination of visual representations of dead and still bodies. Photographs of mass graves, lynchings, and anthropological portraits will serve as an entry into thinking about the intrinsic objecthood and heterogeneity of the human body and how this has determined historical efforts to visibly differentiate self from other, subject from object, and the living from the dead. This entails taking into account how these distinct categories have been collapsed into the figure of the othered body in varying formulations to serve as the marker against which the modern human subject has been constructed.