Sunday April 20th, 9.50-11.10
PANEL 10
CONTESTED LABOURS: VISUAL CULTURE AND WAR
This panel proposes to examine the relations of labour, affect and material culture in the context of the
visual culture of war. Of especially interest are the problems of embodied experience and instrumentality in
relation to affective labour, gender dynamics around displaced labour and melodrama, and the insufficiency of a
recourse to the “real” in discussion of affect that necessitates a careful examination and critique of an equally
inadequate notion of “representation”. In part, our question here is what kind of work can these material artifacts
of war be said to do?
Derek Nystrom
Department of English and Cultural Studies, McGill University, Montreal
‘The Affect of Displaced Labour in The Best Years of Our Lives’
William Wyler’s 1946 film about the difficulties faced by three returning World War II veterans as they
attempt to re-integrate into post-war American life is, among other things, a film about displaced labour.
Numerous characters in the film remark on the potential economic and political crises that may follow from the
massive re-entry of returning soldiers into the domestic labour market—concerns that, as David Gerber has
demonstrated, were very much on the public mind at the end of the war. Gerber argues that the character of
Homer Parrish, a bilateral hand amputee who uses hooks for prosthetics, serves as a lightning rod for these
concerns—his alienation and occasional anger plays into popular anxieties about the return of this (reserve) army
of the newly unemployed. Yet in several moments of the film, all narrative movement comes to a halt while
Homer demonstrates for other characters (and for the viewer) the various tasks he can perform with his hooks:
lighting cigarettes, writing his signature, shooting and cleaning rifles, even playing the piano. My presentation
will focus on the particular kinds of cinematic affect created in these moments, as the viewer is invited to join in
a mixture of unease and fascination with these performances of labour—affects that are intensified by the wellpublicized fact that Homer is played by an actual bilateral amputee who lost his hands in the war (Harold
Russell). As Kaja Silverman points out, this “situates the image of Homer Parrish’s arms on a different level of
representation than the rest of the film.” I will argue that these moments of Homer/Harold’s labour open up
different possible relationships to the displaced labour of these returning soldiers; these moments serve not
simply as occasions for pity and horror, but also opportunities to imagine new potential affects of the labouring
body.
Alanna Thain
Department of English and Cultural Studies, McGill University, Montreal
‘Making a Virtual of Necessity: The Work of Melodrama in Brian DePalma’s Redacted and Michel
Brault’s Les Ordres’
This paper examines how visual culture as a response to terrorism doubles lived experiences, opening
ambivalent zones of affective suspension precisely around questions of affective labour. I examine two films
(Brian DePalma’s Redacted and Michel Brault’s Les Ordres) that both work at the blurred boundaries of fact and
fiction and which have been critiqued as “melodramatic” for reducing political analysis to the personal/
emotional. But I would argue it is at the level of affect (following Massumi’s definition as both prepersonal and
as uncaptured emotion) that these films stage the problem of the affective excess of terrorism and personal action
and responsibility. Redacted appropriates and transcodes found material (largely from experiences that hover at
the margins of recognized official labour, such as the blog of an army wife, or the video diary of an American
soldier) into fictionalized formats that uncomfortably straddle the divide between personal and public materials.
Likewise, Brault’s film (about the effects of five people arrested and held without warrants or explanations in the
wake of the Canadian government’s decision to impose the War Measures Act in October 1970 in response to
the kidnapping of a British diplomat and a Quebecois politician by the Front de liberation du Quebec) is
ambiguously fictionalized, featuring 5 composite characters based on the real life testimony of over 50 people
imprisoned at the time. Brault has his actors introduce themselves first as actors, and then as their characters,
and moves back and forth between depicting the events of arrest and imprisonment, and “”present day”
commentary on the events. All 5 characters are shown as affective labourers—housewife, social worker, a
doctor at a center for the socially disadvantaged, an unemployed man who is a stay at home dad. In films,
melodrama as a (feminine) “body genre” both becomes a way to stage the excessive nature of affective labour as
that which puts into questions the limits of “just doing my job”, as a well as a category of critical analysis that
troubles the representation of experiences of war and terrorism, where distinctions between combatants and
civilians, between work and leisure, between bodily identity and instrumentality are increasingly unclear.
Antoine Capet
British Studies, University of Rouen
‘Ordinary Women’ and ‘Extraordinary Women’ at Work in the Paintings of British Second World War
Official Artists’
Anybody familiar with the iconic piece by Dame Laura Knight, Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring
(1943), will readily admit that it is at the intersection between several of the strands suggested by the conveners
of the Conference: Class/Ideology/Workplace community/Visual culture and visuality/Gender and
Sexuality/Representation. Could ‘Ordinary working women’ identify with Ruby Loftus, the Superwoman? The
affective link derived from the old ‘working-class solidarity’ seems to have been broken by such ‘role models’,
out of reach for most female workers at the same workplace. Moreover, there is a dimension of ‘de-gendering’ or
‘un-sexing’ (Cf. Lady Macbeth clamouring ‘unsex me!’, i.e. make me a man) in these women, who are presented
as more efficient manual workers than men.
Many of these pictures made the patronising attitude towards ‘factory girls’ no longer tenable, thus
profoundly affecting the conventions of working-class culture, during the war and in the long run. The paper
would argue that paintings like Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring was the final stage in a process which had
started during the First World War, with the ‘dilution of labour’ (a negative evolution, resented by males) and
the erection of (some) factory women as exemplars (theoretically a positive evolution, yet resented by some
females) an ‘affective turn’ which significantly contributed to bring about the fragmentation of the British
working class most clearly seen after 1951. The paintings cited would be shown on Powerpoint slides.