Abstract

The thousand-yard stare is a commonplace rhetorical convention in visual representations of US wars. This essay analyzes the stare in Tom Lea’s, David Douglas Duncan’s, and Luis Sinco’s war images, and asks: How does circulation of such images encourage civilian spectators to imagine their military representatives’ wartime experiences? Does this imagination support or constrain civic action on behalf of veterans? Unlike prior analyses, which critique the stare for constraining protest, this essay argues that the stare can encourage civilian action by productively mediating civilians’ distance from war’s violence. The stare indexes traumatic violence not presented in the image yet calls on spectators to imagine that violence in spite of its absence. Although Duncan’s framing of the stare offers a masculine, stoic, and sacrificial vision constraining its critical potential, Lea’s and Sinco’s framings offer multimodal depth, rendering originary violence, traumatic dissociation, and mental injury as public problems in need of redress.

Journal
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published
2019-03-15
DOI
10.1080/02773945.2019.1575461
Open Access
Closed

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

Cites in this index (0)

No references match articles in this index.

Also cites 16 works outside this index ↓
  1. 10.1080/00335630903512697
  2. 10.1177/147041290600500112
  3. “The Blessing of God.” Editorial.Life25 Dec. 1950: 20. Print.
  4. 10.1086/699574
  5. 10.1080/00335630.2015.1025097
  6. 10.1057/9781137406804
  7. The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship
  8. 10.1080/10253860701799918
  9. 10.7208/chicago/9780226337432.001.0001
  10. 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681297.001.0001
  11. 10.4159/9780674969889
  12. 10.3917/dio.201.0127
  13. 10.1177/1470412909347693
  14. Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol. University
  15. 10.4324/9780203113097
  16. 10.1353/rap.2010.0209
CrossRef global citation count: 0 View in citation network →