WAR PICTURES: THE GROTESQUE AS A MOBILIZING TACTIC *

Abstract

†This article examines the uses and effects of grotesque imagery in the antislavery and antiabortion movements and considers implications for theories of movement framing and mobilization. Grotesque images can produce strong emotions that may increase the resonance of movement frames and provide physiological “evidence” of immorality. Such images may also produce confusion and ambiguity that deeply engages readers or viewers and potentially breaks frames. But grotesque images can also be counterproductive for activists. They can cause readers or viewers to turn away in disgust, and their use can taint activists as prurient, irrational, uncivil, or manipulative. Finally, the effects of grotesque images are likely to vary across audiences, social contexts, and the skill of the activists that deploy them. The use of shocking and gruesome images has been a much remarked-upon feature of the antiabortion movement in the Untied States. But such images have been utilized by many other movements as well, including those against slavery, racial oppression, child labor, war, nuclear weapons, alcohol, drunk driving, tobacco, pornography, immigration, and the mistreatment of animals. In this article, we examine uses of such images in the antiabortion and antislavery movements and consider implications for theories of movement framing and mobilization. Utilizing the literary and artistic concept of “the grotesque”—images of distorted bodies and the border between human and inhuman—we argue that this aesthetic technique is available to most moral movements and discuss its tactical strengths and weaknesses. Over the last twenty years, scholars of social movements have made great strides in understanding the cultural frames that movements use to diagnose social problems, identify targets of action, and mobilize adherents (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Benford 1988; Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford 1986). Our analysis of the grotesque in the antiabortion and antislavery movements advances this literature in three ways. First, it builds on recent work on the role of emotions in social movements and framing processes (Aminzade and McAdam 2002; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001; Jasper 1997; Jasper 1998; Yang 2000a). Second, it examines not just the content of frames, but their aesthetic techniques. In doing so, it builds on a growing body of work that utilizes concepts from literary and aesthetic theory to analyze social movements (Jasper 1997; Kane 2001; Polletta 2007; Somers 1994; Steinberg 1998). Finally, we suggest that the grotesque is not only an available framing technique, but it can also break frames (Goffman 1974: 345). By provoking strong, often contradictory, emotions and challenging natural and social categories, the grotesque may provoke feelings of confusion and ambiguity that may aid mobilization.