This book examines the different ways war has been framed to create the illusion of a "war without bodies," framed so that the deaths of soldiers and noncombatants were made invisible, from the British involvement in the Crimean War to the American media coverage of the Gulf and Iraq Wars. It discusses the Crimean War and the ideology of the sacrificial male warrior that was reinforced by Victorian concepts of duty as obedience; the shift in the representation of soldiers' bodies after the war in the wake of newspaper reports describing the awful conditions endured by troops in dispatches by William Howard Russell, the myth that grew around Florence Nightingale, and how the representation of soldiers shifted to images of the wounded body; the history of the gamification of war and how it encourages a war culture and replaces the body of the soldier with a virtual one; the emphasis on the aftermath of trauma for soldiers, particularly in the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder; and how photographs by Sophie Ristelhueber of post-battle landscapes without bodies reinforce the image of war without bodies. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Thanks to the invention of photography and the telegraph descriptions and images of war have proliferated from the nineteenth century onward, yet wars continue to be fought. The way descriptions of war are framed blunts the impact of images of death and makes war an acceptable option by representing it as war without bodies therefore without casualties. Beginning with Crimean War, War Without Bodies traces the ways that death was framed in poetry, photography, video and video games up to and including the Iraq War.
Historically the bodies of civilians are the most damaged by the increasing mechanization and derealization of warfare, but this is not reflected in the representation of violence in popular media. In War Without Bodies, author Martin Danahay argues that the media in the United States in particular constructs a war without bodies in which neither the corpses of soldiers or civilians are shown. War Without Bodies traces the intertwining of new communications technologies and war from the Crimean War, when Roger Fenton took the first photographs of the British army and William Howard Russell used the telegraph to transmit his dispatches, to the first of three video wars in the Gulf region in 1990-91, within the context of a war culture that made the costs of organized violence acceptable to a wider public. New modes of communication have paradoxically not made more war real but made it more ubiquitous and at the same time unremarkable as bodies are erased from coverage. Media such as photography and instantaneous video initially seemed to promise more realism but were assimilated into existing conventions that implicitly justified war. These new representations of war were framed in a way that erased the human cost of violence and replaced it with images that defused opposition to warfare.
Analyzing poetry, photographs, video and video games the book illustrates the ways in which war was framed in these different historical contexts. It examines the cultural assumptions that influenced the reception of images of war and discusses how death and damage to bodies was made acceptable to the public. War Without Bodies aims to heighten awareness of how acceptance of war is coded into texts and how active resistance to such hidden messages can help prevent future unnecessary wars.
