Photography was used to manufacture visual proof of Dreyfus’s degeneracy

Evidence

A spectacular national use of the productive function of visual practices in a context not unlike prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib was evident in France at the end of the nineteenth century when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was charged (unjustly) with selling military secrets to the Germans. The military faced a terrible problem in that Dreyfus did not look like the prevailing stereotype of the degenerate Jew. How, then, to prove that although Dreyfus looked like a regular Frenchman, a sinister alien lurked below this exterior? The answer was to transform his body into text, offering visual proof of his degeneracy. Ceremonially ripping the military epaulettes from his clothes and photographing Dreyfus in ways that might make him appear non-military and effeminate, Dreyfus’s body then served to resolve the French military’s own concerns over its virility as well as French anxieties over Jews, especially those who too easily passed for being French. Photos, then, must be understood, as Shawn Michelle Smith suggests, as ‘visual codes of national belonging.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 159

A spectacular national use of the productive function of visual practices in a context not unlike prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib was evident in France at the end of the nineteenth century when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was charged (unjustly) with selling military secrets to the Germans. The military faced a terrible problem in that Dreyfus did not look like the prevailing stereotype of the degenerate Jew. How, then, to prove that although Dreyfus looked like a regular Frenchman, a sinister alien lurked below this exterior? The answer was to transform his body into text, offering visual proof of his degeneracy. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 159

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how photographic technologies have historically been conscripted to make ‘invisible’ racial or political enemies visible — from Dreyfus to Abu Ghraib to algorithmic bias in present-day surveillance.
• XREF: Directly pays off the book_so_far claim from ch8, and parallels the ch7 ‘sleeper cell’ logic where visible normalcy is treated as evidence of hidden threat. — connects to: Photographs function as proof of history even when fabricated — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1975
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 159