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

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although a wide range of media interventions have been at the forefront of global humanitarian campaigns aimed at eradicating cultural body modification practices categorized as “harmful” in global health and development policy, such practices continue to persist. In this article, 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, by extension, inadvertently contributed to the very persistence of those “harmful” practices.