Rhetorically Representing Public Policy

National Geographic 's 2002 Afghan Girl and the Bush administration's biometric identification policies

Bibliographic Data

ID12690366
AuthorsRae Lynn Schwartz-Dupre (0009-0002-0638-9718, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume7
Issue4
Pages433-453
Publication date2007-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Media Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1468-0777 • E-ISSN: 1471-5902
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14680770701631620
OpenAlexW1847201582
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited27

This essay offers a critical reading of National Geographic's 2002 documentary The Search for the Afghan Girl as a means to suggest how, and in what ways, communication scholars can retheorize the relationship between media representations and policy. Reading critically National Geographic's strategic redeployment of the Afghan Girl, I argue that the text functions rhetorically to refigure the public understanding of, and attitudes towards, current biometric and identification-based policy. Put differently, I suggest that the 2002 representation of the Afghan Girl helped to render acceptable and intelligible what the American public had once vehemently opposed: biometric national identification technologies. In turn, the media spectacle of the 2002 Afghan Girl helped to rhetorically constitute a new kind of post-9/11 US citizen subject. Understanding the ways in which feminist postcolonial theory can lend credence to issues of cultural and public policy can help bridge the gap between the theoretical production of communication scholarship and the material realities of government action

Afghan · Critical reading · Media studies · Political science · Public policy · Reading (process · Scholarship · Sociology · Spectacle · Subject (documents · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub