Thinking about the “Ocular Ethic” in the book Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility by Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore

This book, not an introductory academic text, introduces an “ocular ethic” to the reader by drawing on the body as a unit of analysis among many approaches and theories. Casper and Moore (2009) urge us to “see” or notice those bodies of people that don’t matter as much or matter for the wrong reasons. Some bodies get more attention and access to resources than others. Some bodies simultaneously are under more surveillance and dismissal. Some bodies suffer from the impact of structural oppression more than others or in different ways. Rhetoric or discourse, statistics, and physical segregation make invisible specific bodies and their experiences, both while living and in death. “All discourses and practices rely on the actions, regulations, interactions, and positioning of human bodies and the agents inhabiting them. But because society is stratified along lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, disability status, citizenship, geography, and other cleavages, some bodies are public and visually dissected while others are vulnerable to erasure and marginalization.” (Casper & Moore, 2009, p.9) The chapter that attracted me to this book was on the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) because I include a section on this topic in my introductory ethnic studies course.¹

Casper and Moore show us that behind the IMR statistics are actual lives and deaths, pain and loss. The number reduces the actual experience of loss to a neat and tidy numerical indicator without considering human experience or how “[i]t is, in fact, fundamentally shaped by racialized disparities of income, status, and access to preventive health care.” (p. 62) African American families in states such as Louisiana have the highest rates of infant mortality in the U.S. An often cited statistic hidden in small news articles once in a while is that the U.S. has the highest IMR of all industrialized countries. Other countries around the world with even less resources face similar issues with their youngest and most fragile.

 This is not a key concern in public opinion, but it does come up in academics and in organizations such as Annie E. Casey’s Kids Count. Scholars that study security and conflict rely on high infant mortality rates as one indicator to determine the risk of civil conflict in a country (Hewitt, Wilkenfeld, & Gurr, 2008). In that context, IMR is viewed as a symptom of a lack of basic structural and social assistance mechanisms. However, this is not always how it is understood by medical practitioners or policy makers. Very explicitly, Cooper and Moore write, “Yet because numeric data often conceal social structures (e.g., hiding dead bodies in a table or graph), they also shape policy and biomedicine in narrow ways that can place potentially quite restrictive burdens of surveillance and behavioral modification on women” (p. 77). The “ocular ethic” mentioned earlier helps magnify those structural aspects rather than simply relying on the discourse used to explain away the structural influences.

 Several current event issues could benefit from the use of an “ocular ethic.” One with a similar pattern of structural complicity is the new legislation signed in Arizona, called the harshest immigration law in the country, against people moving across human-made boundaries, neighbors, immigrants, and those who help them. The recession also provides examples of how an unemployment number hides the experience and causes of unemployment and that communities of color have faced such high unemployment numbers in pre-recession conditions.² Lines to apply for social assistance and full homeless shelters also reveal missing voices and lives. But we must also realize missing people exist who, as Casper and Moore point out, we can’t conceive of because we don’t know about their lives, struggles, decisions, resistance, actions, or deaths and how larger social forces impacted them.

1. IMR is the number of infant deaths per 1000 births (often measured to be those infants that die before the age of one year old).

2. African American men have faced double digit unemployment rates for multiple years before the 2009 recession. Additionally, it is well known that the unemployment rate only measures those who are actively looking, not those who have given up on looking for paid work.

 References

Casper, M. J., & Moore, L. J. (2009). Missing bodies: The politics of visibility. NY: New York University Press.

 Hewitt, J. J., Wilkenfeld, J., & Gurr,T. R. (2008). Peace and conflict 2008. Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishers.

Comments

[Cynthia Jordan]

What a timely piece. We do indeed need "ocular ethics" more than ever since the passage of Brewer, et al, "put a target on the dark-skinned people" edict. What a tragedy.

[margaret]

Thanks Cynthia! The idea of the "ocular ethic" is really applicable to so many social injustices. I have not yet taught about this approach of seeing and understanding, but hope to.