Description
This paper examines the politics of (in)visibility of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, a tool aimed at mainstream gender in the international peace and security arena, by analysing the images in the UN Secretary General’s Annual Reports on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SVC). These images are not the main elements of the reports but work as visual landscapes with underlying ideologies. This paper aims to answer three key questions borrowed from Fairclough (1995) to enquire media outputs, drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories. First, it answers how the is world represented, using Hansen’s intertextual framework and through document analysis, exploring the images’ (con)text. Second, it examines what identities are set up, focusing on how gender, sexuality, and coloniality are represented in these images, revealing the underlying power dynamics. It uses visual qualitative content analysis as a key method for organising image content into major themes. Third, it explores what relationships are set up between those (subjects) involved, through discourse analysis, testing Pratt’s (2013) feminist postcolonial critique of the WPS agenda, which illustrates how the WPS agenda reproduces the concept of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, identified by Spivak (1994), but with a particular modification as some ‘brown women’ become international community auxiliaries. This dynamic also bears resemblance to the war on terror subsequent to the 11S (2001). The paper concludes that the images from the Annual Reports represent gendered, sexualised, and racialised subjects perpetuating militarised actions in the name of ‘saving the brown women’.
