#3933. Landscapes of Distant Suffering: Interrogating Humanitarian Documentary Film Representation of “Harmful” Cultural Practices

September 2026publication date
Proposal available till 20-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

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Journal’s subject area:
Literature and Literary Theory;
Visual Arts and Performing Arts;
Music;
Cultural Studies;
Language and Linguistics;
Linguistics and Language;
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More details about the manuscript: Arts & Humanities Citation Index or/and Social Sciences Citation Index
Abstract:
In this research, I single out one such domain of intervention – transnational humanitarian documentaries – to interrogate how they visualize the spatial landscape within which women and girls participate in these practices and the implications of such visualization for interventions aimed at eradicating them. I articulate the landscape as: the body which is the ultimate inescapable place where women and girls must live, and as a geo-spatial location where that body lives. With illustrations from documentary films on one specific “harmful” practice, female genital mutilation, I show how the visual framing of the landscape engenders: a (mis)conception of the harmed body as only a dystopic place, thus foreclosing the utopic dreams that motivate persistence of mutilation as a path to inhabiting (an)other (heterotopic) place; a spatialized hierarchy of coercive paternalistic interventions with counter-productive effects that have not only compromised the efficacy of mediated eradication campaigns, but have inadvertently contributed to the very persistence of those “harmful” practices.
Keywords:
distant suffering; dystopia; Harmful cultural practices; humanitarian imagery; transnational documentaries

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