The sexualized Abu Ghraib imagery drew on familiar pornographic and racist iconography.

Evidence

Finally, why the sex? (This last question is often connected to the question of women’s participation.) There is something too disturbing about the deeply sexualized acts and the grins. There is also something too familiar. Certainly the leash that Lyndie England held to lead around a naked Iraqi man reminded many of pornography, and the black-hooded figure from whose arms electrodes were suspended seemed to one scholar a spectacular and telling inversion of the white hoods of the KKK. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 156

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to analysis of racialized sexual domination in imperial iconography, and to the ‘black-hooded figure as inverted KKK’ reading which resembles scholarship on the visual grammar of racial terror. — connects to: Abu Ghraib photographs revealed American culture’s dependence on the sexual-humiliation equation. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 194