Description
The paper analyses the making of memory in the wake of terror attacks, and reveals how the production of and response to disaster is situated through gendered and racialized norms. The paper analyses the emergency planning industry in the UK, highlighting how what is considered disaster is constituted through particular privileges and exclusions within this industry. White and male interests dominate the production of knowledge, and inhibit alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and perceiving tragedy – with significant implications for what is (un)sayable and (un)thinkable in the memorialization of tragedy in contemporary Britain. Using interviews with emergency planners responsible for preparing for and responding to disaster, the paper highlights how 'learning' in the wake of tragedies like the 2017 Manchester Arena attack embeds the continuity of highly gendered discourses and praxis. Rather than existing knowledge of disaster being able to be critiqued and restructured, practitioners describe an inability to ask questions or speak in ways that might disrupt established norms and practices. Instead they articulate how White and male interests, and subsequently the very particular tragedies memorialized through these interests, are produced through laughter, professional courtesy, and banal bureaucratic processes. The structuring of memory through performance of Whiteness and masculinity within emergency planning enables certain moments of violence and disruption to count as disaster, and other violence and disruption to be maintained as the norm. The tragedies made (un)seen and (un)heard tells us about what counts as valuable life, and what doesn't, in what is often considered a ‘liberal democracy’.
