Textual Practice

ISSN: 0950-236X (Print) 1470-1308 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rtpr20

Framing human rights: comics form and the

politics of recognition in Joe Sacco's Footnotes in
Gaza

Rebecca Scherr

To cite this article: Rebecca Scherr (2015) Framing human rights: comics form and the
politics of recognition in Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza, Textual Practice, 29:1, 111-131, DOI:
10.1080/0950236X.2014.952771

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Textual Practice, 2015
Vol. 29, No. 1, 111 –131, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2014.952771

Rebecca Scherr
Framing human rights: comics form and the politics of
recognition in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza

This essay examines how frames function both aesthetically and politically
in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. Using the recent work of Judith Butler
(Frames of War and Precarious Life) to discuss comics framing, I argue
that a close examination of the panel frame allows for a focus on the
content of comics at the very same time as it allows one to examine the
larger discourses that delineate, or fail to delineate, that content. I
further argue that in Footnotes, the frame functions as a site in which
comics form and human rights discourses are entangled, an entanglement
that highlights Sacco’s highly ambivalent attitude towards the human
rights field that he both participates in and critiques. In addition to
Butler, I draw on the work of McCloud, Groensteen, Eisner, Azoulay
and Sontag (among others) to discuss the complex interweaving of
comics form and the ethical issues that arise in representing human
rights violations, formal and ethical issues that characterise all of Sacco’s
works.

Keywords
Joe Sacco; Footnotes in Gaza; comics and graphic novels; human rights;
ethics

# 2014 Taylor & Francis

Textual Practice

In the first three pages of Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco frames the graphic
narrative’s entire trajectory. Hanging out at a noisy Jerusalem bar with his
journalist friends, he depicts the hard-boiled reality of reporting on atrocity
on a daily basis, in particular indicating the compassion fatigue that results
from unending years of conflict: ‘It does get old . . . they could file last
month’s story today – or last year’s for that matter – and who’d know
the difference?’1 From here, he stretches his musings even further back
in time, ending the page by imagining a scene of Palestinian death and
mourning from ‘50 years ago’.2 This short sequence introduces the over-
arching theme of the work: in the text itself, we follow Sacco in his
attempt at finding testimony in order to reconstruct an incident over
fifty years old, a massacre in Rafah by Israeli soldiers in 1956 that left
scores of Palestinians dead and that has been erased from the historical
record (or, as the title suggests, relegated to a historical footnote). But Foot-
notes also documents the difficulty of ascertaining the line between past and
present suffering. By continually splicing images of newly demolished
Palestinian homes between panels that depict past atrocities, Sacco’s
work asks, just as this opening passage indicates, how might the truth
claims of past suffering be complicated by the fact that, for Palestinians,
atrocities are ongoing?
This notion of the slippage of time frames is reinforced by Sacco’s use
of more literal frames, that is, the panel designs. The hard, delineated panel
outlines of the first two pages give way on the third page to bleeds and
panels positioned at somewhat jarring angles. In breaking with right
angles, these more jarring panels communicate to the reader a kind of slip-
ping out of an easily conceptualised and contained framework. That faces
and hands bleed over from one frame to the next acts as a visual symbol of
the ongoing suffering, as representations of the dead from a week ago and
from fifty years ago overlap on the page plane and across the space of the
gutter, just as they constitute an unfolding of the same crisis in reality.
I begin with this example as a way to start framing my own claims in
this essay. I am interested in the way that frames function in Sacco’s work,
that is, the way that a close examination of the panel frame allows for a
focus on the content of comics at the very same time as it allows one to
examine the larger discourses that delineate, or fail to delineate, that
content. Thus, I am interested in framing as an aesthetic device and as a
device that can be deployed towards more critical and political ends. As
Judith Butler points out, framing is a performative and interventionist
act: ‘The frame . . . actively participates in a strategy of containment, selec-
tively producing and enforcing what will count as reality.’3 Put another
way, the frame ‘is itself interpreting, actively, even forcibly’.4 In this vein,

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 Rebecca Scherr Framing human rights

a close look at the function of the frame allows for a political reading of its
function; this takes on particular weight when what is framed are texts and
images concerned with the suffering of others and, related to this, human
rights violations.
I argue that in Footnotes, the frame functions as a site in which comics
form and human rights discourses are entangled; in particular, Sacco uses
the aesthetic and political aspects of framing to interrogate the assumptions
and limits of human rights discourse itself. On the one hand the commu-
nicative power of Sacco’s images depends on invoking such human rights
discourse in order to legitimate his subjects, to highlight their humanness
against a background that denies this very humanness (what I will refer to
as the politics of recognition). On the other hand and very much in line
with contemporary critiques of human rights discourses, Sacco’s work
also reveals the mechanisms by which this very discourse maintains hege-
monic power structures by reifying categories of personhood and nation-
hood, based on the historical continuum of the colonialist project. Sacco
is, of course, particularly attuned to the ways that this manifests in the
visual culture of human rights. As such, his work indicates that we need
to see human rights frames in order to examine them, rethink them and
engage in the act of critique. In other words, Sacco’s work shows that he
is fully aware of the possibilities the comics form possesses as a tool for
interrogating the ideological assumptions of human rights.
Joe Sacco is one of the most recognisable comics artists working today.
His particular form of non-fiction comics – what he calls ‘comics journal-
ism’ – has appeared in various venues: Palestine, originally serialised in
nine comic books but later collected as a single volume, won the American
Book Award in 1996; his first major book-length work, Safe Area Goražde
(2000) about war in eastern Bosnia, secured his reputation as one of the
most original artists working in the realm of representing conflict; and
Footnotes in Gaza (2009) has also been a critical and commercial success.
Shorter pieces have appeared in The Guardian, Time and Harper’s,
among other periodicals, which have given a high profile ‘face’ to
Sacco’s brand of comics.5 One of the most distinguishing features of all
of Sacco’s work is the way in which he transforms himself into a major
character. In the context of journalism, such self-portraiture aligns his
work with the ‘new journalism’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s,
while in the context of graphic narrative6 such self-exposure links his
work to graphic memoir, for example, works like Art Speigelman’s
Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Yet
his work does not fit neatly into either category, and the often uneasy
co-existence between the autobiographical and the investigative is part of
what gives Sacco’s work its particular edginess. His specific interventions
into the lives of his informants are part of the narrative display, and

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such a self-critical mode also underpins much of the comics’ ethical impli-
cations. While Sacco’s face functions as an anchor, as a site of familiarity
among the dozens and dozens of drawings of the people he meets and
talks to, the works are only ‘about’ Sacco in relation to these others. The
relationship between comics artist/journalist and source stands in for
larger discourses that speak to the connections and disconnections
between those who look at (and ‘hear’) others’ pain, and those who are
the objects of such vision.
Nearly all of Sacco’s comics works centre on individuals and groups
enmeshed in geo-political crises, and because of this Sacco often draws
his cartoon avatar engaging with the human rights apparatus: he hitches
rides with UN convoys in Bosnia, supplements his own interviews with
official documents and reports from the UN and Amnesty International
and depicts his many connections with other people also working within
this apparatus. Sacco, though, is not the only comics artist who focuses
on human rights issues. Spiegelman, Satrapi and Keiji Nakamura (Barefoot
Gen) certainly align their work with human rights issues that arise in the
context of war and atrocity, though unlike Sacco all three of these
artists’ works negotiate the participant-witness perspective from a first-
hand and/or familial link to the atrocities. The UN and especially
UNICEF commission ‘human rights’ comic books targeted specific
readers in Africa and Asia, thus these works fulfil a didactic purpose.7
The comics of Dan Archer are the closest in spirit to Sacco’s, but take
an uncritical approach to the discourses of human rights.8 In my view,
what distinguishes Sacco’s comics from these others positioned at the cross-
roads of comics and human rights is his ability to use the comics form to
invoke a human rights perspective and, at the very same time, to critique
that perspective. As I discuss in this essay, Sacco carefully constructs and
deconstructs frames in order to perform this double function.
To invoke human rights both pictorially and emotionally, Sacco
engages with the politics of recognition. The politics of recognition
refers to the modes in which certain groups and individuals claim human-
ness up against counter-discourses that attempt to establish the limits of
human intelligibility within a specific context: the context could be war,
battles over civil rights, legal representation and so on.9 Thus, this term
points to the field of human rights per se and to the various discourses
about humanisation, that is to say, the various modes by which the rep-
resentational field frames who counts as ‘human’ and who does not. In
Footnotes as well as in other Sacco texts, the politics of recognition func-
tions on two levels. Most obviously, Sacco’s work gives voice to those
who suffer; one can read these comics as a kind of human rights report,
a series of personal and collective accounts by those outlining the human
rights abuses they have experienced. For Palestinians in the Gaza strip

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 Rebecca Scherr Framing human rights

such accounting is crucial because of their uncertain status as those ‘deser-

ving’ of recognition within Western human rights discourse. In terms of
their status as refugees – one of the main categories of person within
human rights discourse – Palestinians are ‘the exception within the excep-
tion’,10 meaning they are in fact refugees while being denied the official
status of refugees as a result of international political intervention; they
are, in short, caught in a deadly legal loophole in which their very ‘human-
ness’ is put under question. In addition, their lack of recognition within the
larger refugee apparatus means that they do not have access to such avenues
of recourse as international courts of justice and other juridical frameworks,
yet ironically their situation is thought of as political, in other words, Pales-
tinians are perceived as political subjects.11 As Ursula Biemann points out in
her poignant video essay X-Mission, this situation has concrete effects in the
lives of Palestinians: within the human rights apparatus, money and atten-
tion flow to those perceived as victims, not to political subjects.12 Sacco’s
images attempt to work within this paradigm by reframing Palestinians as
on the receiving end of human rights violations, and it is crucial to
acknowledge that this reframing is intended for a mostly Western reader-
ship, where the perception of Palestinians is most in dispute. Part of this
representational practice entails ‘[featuring] the daily humiliations and
struggles for people living under occupation’ as a way to ‘refute the
image of inexplicable terrorism that dominates mainstream news reporting’
on Palestine.13 Thus, Sacco’s motive is to humanise his subjects within a
specific representational context, and he does so by evoking the rhetoric
of human rights: by drawing images of pain, suffering and injustice.
The second level in which Sacco works the politics of recognition into
his comics is by highlighting aspects of the comics form which allow
readers to experience the narrative in a powerfully visceral manner. One
example of this is the mode of ‘listening’ Sacco maps into the text.
While comics is primarily a visual medium, Sacco constantly represents
himself listening to his informants’ stories of torture, imprisonment,
home invasion and so forth, thereby framing many of the sequences as tes-
timonial narratives. Since testimony is one of the most accepted ‘styles’ of
human rights narratives, this aspect of the work reinforces the politics of
recognition I mention above; by framing Palestinians’ words as testimo-
nies, Sacco inserts their stories into a recognisable, legitimising form of
human rights discourse. Because Sacco’s cartoon avatar is positioned as
the reader’s filter as we navigate this landscape of crisis, we too are posi-
tioned as listeners as much as we are positioned as spectators. In reading
Sacco’s work, then, we must draw on a broad range of senses. We are
addressed not as passive viewers, but as active participants in the gathering
and hearing of testimony; our engagement with the material is corporeal,
physical, intimate. Elsewhere I have written about the ways in which

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Sacco’s graphics invoke haptic responses, in this way communicating the

experience of the suffering depicted and not just documenting its exist-
ence.14 This is in line with Hilary Chute’s claim that comics demands ‘a
physical intimacy with the reader in the acts of cognition and visual scru-
tiny’.15 In short, Sacco’s synaesthetic methods highlight the corporeal
dimension of comics, the specific ways that comics address readers’
bodies. Sacco’s comics get the reader to feel the pain of others, though of
course at a remove; we are framed as witnesses so as to answer the
other’s ‘call of pain’.16 Since the subject of Footnotes is the pain of others
that is the result of what are being framed as human rights violations,
such bodily forms of address require the reader to confront the politics
of feeling and recognition. His work envelops us into a world where we
cannot remain neutral; our visceral reactions to the human rights abuses
lead us into acts of identification and/or disavowal.
As I stated earlier, Sacco’s particular innovation is to embed critiques of
the discourse that structures how human rights signify for a Western reader-
ship into these evocations of human rights. Sacco’s critiques are very much in
alignment with several contemporary cultural critics who argue that a criti-
cal, evaluative eye is necessary when it comes to assessing the discourses of
human rights and the frames of this discourse. Joseph Slaughter writes
that we live in ‘the Age of Human Rights’, meaning Western culture is suf-
fused with images, slogans and ideas pertaining to human rights. At the same
time, he claims, we also live in ‘the Age of Human Rights Abuse’, pointing to
the fact that Western culture’s ‘banalization of human rights’ leads to ‘viola-
tions . . . committed in the Orwellian name of human rights themselves,
cloaked in the palliative rhetoric of humanitarian intervention’.17 In other
words, the very ubiquity of this discourse has led to co-optation and very sig-
nificant erasures. One of the most troubling erasures is that in the discourse’s
most accepted form, ‘the West [is] the benefactor of a world that it itself
manages to symbolically annihilate’,18 although in both Palestine and Foot-
notes Sacco clearly shows that for Palestinians such annihilation is not only
symbolic. Wendy Hesford points out that despite the fact that human
rights discourse, in its ubiquity, has its uses – it can mobilise large
publics, solicit awareness and intervene in public culture in instructive
ways – critics have also ‘exposed the risks of constructing a sentiment-
based ethics and compassionate ethos that sutures human rights to the suf-
fering body’,19 that such ‘calls to empathy all too frequently serve as proleptic
shields, as ethically uncontestable legitimating devices for sustaining the
hegemonic field’.20 In much the same critical spirit, Sacco utilises various
framing strategies to call attention to such modes of ‘sympathetic’ looking
which do nothing to question spectatorial habits that construct an ‘us’
who sees, and a ‘them’ who are seen.

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 Rebecca Scherr Framing human rights

This simultaneity, that is, the fusion of images of human rights and an
embedded critique of the implications of such imagery, is possible, in part,
because of what Marianne Hirsch refers to as comics’ ‘biocularity’. ‘Biocu-
larity’ does not simply refer to the form’s dual modality of visual-verbal
signs, but points beyond this to the ability for such a mode to encompass
and communicate contradictions, contradictions that become especially
significant in representations of traumatic events: ‘Words, images, and
word-images work together to enact the impossibility of seeing and the
impossibility of not looking.’21 I would add that a close examination of
the frame – the delineated space in which these word-image combinations
take shape, the space that structures the range of interpretations these
word-image combinations give rise to – reveals that it plays the essential
part in producing this paradoxical impossibility.
In its most recognised form, comics consists of an interplay of texts
and images, and this interplay is mapped out visually and spatially in the
idiom of frames and gutters. The gutter is the space between frames, the
space which, according to Scott McCloud, calls attention to the ways
that the reader participates in creating the narrative. McCloud points
out that in moving from frame to gutter to frame again we essentially acti-
vate the story, we become ‘a silent accomplice’ in carrying out the artist’s
vision; he calls this act ‘closure’.22 Closure is when readers fill in the gaps
between frames, when we use our imaginations in assuming what happens
from one frame to the next. Comics requires us to perform closure again
and again, and in this repetition we ‘foster an intimacy . . . a silent, secret
contract between creator and audience’.23 This is also part of what pro-
duces the physical intimacy to which Chute refers, as much of what
happens in apprehending the gutter happens on an experiential level of
cognition. This process of moving from frame to gutter to frame also high-
lights the relationship between the visible (what is inside the frame, includ-
ing the shape of the frame itself) and the invisible (what happens in the
gutter) that is quite specific to the comics form.
Compared to the gutter, the frame has received scant attention as a
formal device, which is strange considering the fact that frames and
gutters constitute each other; they are unthinkable without the other in
comics. Perhaps this lack of attention is due to the frame’s very visibility,
making it seem more of a given, and as such it has been discussed as the
space of composition. Will Eisner thinks of the frame as the way that a
comics artist communicates an ‘emotional climate’ and ‘the atmosphere
of the page as a whole’,24 while Thierry Groensteen says about the frame
that it ‘is always an invitation to stop and to scrutinize’.25 Yet frames do
not only do this, I argue, but also hold the potential to participate in pol-
itical discourse. When an artist is able to point the reader’s attention to the
act of framing, such as the example I began this essay with, a whole host of

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questions rise to the surface: what is framed and how? In what circum-
stances does such framing come to matter? What kind of impact can a
frame have on a reader? What is the frame’s potential for political com-
munication? Groensteen’s point that the frame can ‘supply a reading pro-
tocol, or even an interpretation of the panel . . . and also connote a certain
form of irony or denial’ opens up for this possibility of the frame’s political
function, but this is only indirectly implied in his discussion.26
It is through Butler’s recent work that I understand the frame as on
the one hand literal and on the other hand as pointing to even larger,
highly charged and political frameworks. Butler points out that while
frames are a part of picture-making, an aesthetic necessity, they also act
like a caption by forcing a kind of interpretation through their role of con-
tainment.27 This notion of the frame becomes particularly important when
examining official frames of war, Butler writes, because those who con-
struct these frames are intent on erasing the fact that these images are
indeed framed, meaning the images are passed off as indisputable facts,
not as the interpretations they in fact are. This erasure is how a norm is pro-
duced: ‘This not seeing in the midst of seeing reiterates the visual norm that
is itself a national norm’, she argues, and explains that this disavowal of the
existence of a frame builds a specific interpretation of reality. Furthermore,
denying the frame in fact reveals the identitarian political battles fought
over meaning within the realm of visual culture.28 These battles can
become visible, according to Butler, because the frame itself always holds
the potential for its own ‘breakage’, and in this way it is possible to
‘frame the frame’, that is, it is possible to use the act of framing to point
to the frame’s role as revealer and concealer and thereby ‘show that the
frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn, that something
was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible,
recognizable’.29 Thus, Butler’s frame theory calls attention to the signifi-
cance of what has been excluded from the frame: the excluded, or what
she calls the ‘discarded negatives of the official version’ function as ‘the
potential resources for resistance’ to official narratives.30 In a context
more specific to the relationship between frames and the politics of recog-
nition, Butler speaks to the potential of this recognition and resistance:

When those frames that govern the relative and differential recogniz-
ability of lives come apart—as part of the very mechanism of their
circulation—it becomes possible to apprehend something about
what or who is living but has not been generally ‘recognized’ as life.31

In my view the comics form, because it deals so explicitly and repetitively

with the visible frame, also holds great potential for facilitating and making
visible these more abstract, elusive aspects of framing and breakage.

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 Rebecca Scherr Framing human rights

In a chapter titled ‘Collusion’, Sacco details the global, imperial

network of powers that set the stage for the later 1956 massacre: ‘Dear
Reader’, he addresses us directly, ‘while we have been focusing on deadly
raids and destitute refugees . . . overly clever people in London and Paris
were hatching a plot that would turn the region upside-down’.32 Cueing
us to this more official, Western story through text, Sacco also encloses
the official history within straightforward, right-angled visual frames that
stress the national-corporate interests at stake for these powers: the first
panel indicates the weapons trade, the second shows an oil field, the
third points to shipping interests and so forth. Then, on the final page
of the chapter, Sacco shifts his frames (Figure 1). Imagining a potential
invasion, Sacco tilts all of the panels on this page – except the last one
– by a few degrees to the right. The tilting is meant to underscore the
action; in putting us off of right angles, it emphasises movement, the possi-
bility of things going off-kilter. In addition, the text component is boxed
into separate frames from the drawings, and they run across the gutters
so that the text boxes appear to be like tape, sticking images together by
overlapping them; on the page level, the whole thing resembles a
patchwork.
Except, as I have mentioned, for the final image. This image, no
longer at an angle but drawn face-to-face with the reader, shows a poor
Palestinian refugee family wearing tattered clothing and without shoes.
The image is unframed, or rather, one could say that it is framed by
the other panels and by the frame of the page itself; in other words, the
image does not have its own, autonomous frame. Most obviously, the
lack of autonomous frame reflects the lack of autonomy this family has
been forced into by the circumstances the previous panels outline. This
particular image is also an example of a page bleed, whereby an image
runs off the edge of the page. The effect of such page bleeds, McCloud
reminds us, is that the image ‘hemorrhages and escapes into timeless
space’.33 Thus this effect communicates, in this moment, the timelessness
of the refugees’ pain; as the book shows again and again, such suffering
continues to this day and is in fact rooted in the effects stemming from
this period of history. In a sense, then, the lack of a proper or normative
frame points to these larger issues and comments on the family’s lack of
representation within official discourse; as Sacco reminds us, these
people are considered by such official powers to be ‘human debris and
social outcasts’, all the while these powers refuse to acknowledge their
role in creating said ‘human debris’.34 This final, ‘timeless’ image also
appears to be emerging from beneath the patchwork made by the frames
of official history, as if the patchwork is attempting to cover over this
image but that the image slips out from the gutters. Put another way,
the family appears to be emerging from the page gutter itself, the space

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Figure 1. Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (New York: Metropolitan, 2009), p. 80.
Copyright # 2009 by Joe Sacco. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

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 Rebecca Scherr Framing human rights

that signifies invisibility. In the context of the ideas I am setting forth here,
then, Sacco’s framing insists on showing how official frames discard specific
people, framing them as invisible; that this invisibility has been systemati-
cally produced by official frames of war; and crucially, that the act of
framing itself in large part contributes to and produces very real suffering.
Thus, framing, while seemingly an aesthetic and/or abstract act, has real
effects in the world, it is transitive; as Butler asks us to consider, ‘How
do we understand the frame as itself part of the materiality of war and
the efficacy of its violence?’35 ‘Collusion’ demonstrates that while
framing can produce suffering, or in the terms Sacco uses to title the
chapter, framing colludes in producing suffering, calling attention to the
act of framing can also initiate the process of recognition and critique:
framing the frame.
It is important to point out that Sacco’s acts of framing, such as the
example above, do not provide answers as to what is the ‘correct’ way to
represent human rights violations; instead, Sacco is using the comics
form, in the words of Wendy Kozol, ‘to engage with the challenges of
viewing human rights crises’.36 When framing is exposed as framing,
that is, when Sacco simultaneously frames an image and a larger idea
and offers a glimpse as to what or who has been excluded from the
frame, his work contributes to social and political discourse and partici-
pates directly in the politics of recognition. In ‘Collusion’ as well as in
other sequences within the larger work, the gutter functions as the space
in which ‘the discarded negatives of the official version’ haunt what is on
display. Such framing of the frame suggests ways to re-think and expand
the notion of the gutter: the gutter is of course (and crucially so) the
space of reader participation, but it is simultaneously a space in which
one can, if directed carefully, imagine what has been excluded from the
version of reality presented within the frame.
Butler’s thoughts on framing stem, in part, from her critical response
to Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others37 and are therefore rooted in
a meditation on photography. For Sacco, photography is the visual
medium his work is most in dialogue with, and many of his framing
choices clearly demonstrate that this dialogue structures his aesthetic and
critical sensibilities. While it was in the earlier Palestine that Sacco often
depicted his character engaging in the act of photographing, and where
he often employed irony as a mode for critiquing his zeal for photographs,
in Footnotes such zeal is muffled, but he nevertheless continues the practice
of depicting himself with his camera bag at his side. In their attention to
realistic details, many (if not most) of Footnotes’ panels are reminiscent
of photographs. And some of these, Sacco indicates, are in fact hand-
drawn copies of actual photographs, for example in the chapter ‘The
Only Option’, where a Palestinian woman implores Sacco over and over

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again to take pictures of the squalor in which she and her family live, and it
is clear that he complies.38 This photographic mode reinforces both the
documentary dimension of the work and its link to human rights dis-
course. As Sontag argues in her final book, because photography is a
‘quick’, richly condensed unit of information in a vast sea of information,
it has become postmodernity’s preferred method through which to display
the pain of others.39 Thus, ‘the ultra-familiar, ultra-celebrated image – of
an agony, of ruin – is an unavoidable feature of our camera-mediated
knowledge of war’.40 It is clear from any cursory look at the human
rights field how central a role photographic images play in its efforts to
alert and ‘arrest’ the public, to use such imagery to quickly call attention
to situations in which human rights violations occur. At first glance,
Sacco seems to employ such a photographic mode uncritically in Footnotes
as a way to underscore the ‘realness’ of the scenarios he depicts; at the same
time, such an aesthetic draws upon this simultaneous sense of immediacy
and depth. A second glance, however, reveals that Sacco’s framing tech-
niques overlay this photographic mode in a way that allows questions
regarding the ethics of spectatorship to rise to the surface.
Butler and Sontag are particularly interested in the ‘transitive func-
tion’ of photographs: in order ‘to communicate effectively . . . they must
act on viewers in ways that bear directly on the judgments that viewers for-
mulate about the world . . . They do not merely portray or represent – they
relay affect’.41 Applying this argument to framing, then, implies that the
frame works as a containment device that orients viewers, ‘[endowing]
them with perspective, and [establishing] the trajectory of their action’.42
In other words, framing is all about the exchange between the image and
the spectator; framing does not only encompass the image itself and the
aesthetic choices of an artist or photographer, but shapes spectators’
points-of-views and potential actions. This again emphasises the performa-
tive function of the frame, and begins pointing towards the ethical dimen-
sions of framing and spectatorship.
Coming from a slightly different angle but very much in alignment
with Butler’s and Sontag’s ideas on the transitive function of photography,
Ariella Azoulay understands this particular exchange as the site in which to
formulate an ethics of spectatorship; this is especially the case, according to
Azoulay, when the images focus on war, human rights violations and ques-
tions of citizenship and belonging. With these kinds of images, the social,
mediating power of photography, she argues, ‘shifts the focus away from an
ethics of viewing . . . to an ethics of the spectator, an ethics that begins to
sketch the contours of the spectator’s responsibility towards what is
visible’.43 By this she means an ethics in which a spectator is solicited so
as to become active and engaged in the act of looking, an ethics in
which one comes to understand oneself as an embodied spectator, one

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who, through such looking, also understands the political implications of

positioning oneself not as an individual viewer but as a member of a
viewing public.44 Like Butler’s insistence that critical work can begin
once we learn to see official frames (which she reminds us is no easy
task), the ethics of looking at human rights images requires that one
adopt a vibrant, critical eye as well: the responsibility Azoulay refers to
includes the responsibility to carefully examine the frames of the discourse
as well as the visible content, because the image’s transitive effects register
in the public realm. Such effects and affects create a public, and in the
hands of official power, can be used to create consensus; this is why an
ethical stance is crucial, for it becomes a possible form of resistance to
such trajectories of consensus. Like Sacco, Azoulay’s specific focus on the
circulation of photographs of Palestinians indicates that what is at stake
here is no less than the dehumanisation of entire populations. Yet with
the comics form, in contradistinction to photography, the artist’s hand
can manipulate the frame to ‘supply a reading protocol’, allowing for
visual play, contradiction and critique on the visual plane itself. Thus,
the highly subjective element of Sacco’s drawing – the sense of non-indexi-
cality implied in cartoon drawing, as opposed to photography – allows for
ethical implications to be built directly into such a ‘photographic’ aesthetic.
In my view, Sacco’s most ‘photographic’ habit in Footnotes is his use of
portraiture: the close, detailed attention he pays to both drawing and framing
his informants’ faces. The face plays an absolutely central role in the framing
of human rights for a general, Western public. Hesford points to two famous
images of young Afghan girls whose faces – in particular, their eyes, their
‘direct gazes’45 – have come to stand in for a war-torn Afghanistan, and
whose youth, beauty and otherness (marked by head scarves) are meant to
solicit viewers; they are framed as ‘[objects] of our feeling and sight’.46 The
use of the possessive ‘our’ points to how these faces – as they are represented
and as they circulate as human rights images – reveal little about the plight of
the Afghan people, but much about ‘the West as an “imagined commu-
nity”’.47 It is precisely this tendency that speaks to the maintenance of
power differentiation based on colonial structures of hegemony; put in the
terms of visual culture, ‘the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded
only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees’.48 And
here lies the crux of a set of problems that Sacco’s comics navigate: how to
represent the faces of his informants without transforming them into
objects that become repositories and reflections of the privileged spectators’
own feelings and vision? Or, how can he evoke a spectator’s affect but
direct it in a way that moves against the trajectory of the viewer eclipsing
the object of vision? These ethical questions inform much of the framing
techniques found throughout Footnotes, and are particularly apparent in
Sacco’s handling of faces.

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A vast number of panels throughout the whole of Footnotes frame

individual faces in great detail, and many of these are presented in a
sequence of frames that zoom closer to the face, or zoom in on different
aspects of the same face, mimicking film technique more than photo-
graphic convention.49 This kind of framing seems to position the face as
a kind of mask; the zooming functions as a form of questioning, as if
each frame in sequence, in shaping and probing the face from a different
angle, seeks a kind of truth behind the face: as Sacco writes regarding
one of his key, anonymous informants, whose face he continually
returns to and fragments, ‘swirling inside the skull of this old man, are
perhaps the last extant memories of a participant in that crucial episode
along our story’s bloody path’.50 The face, then, is both the key and the
question: it is the living remnant, the site of memory; but as the hesitation
lurking in the term ‘perhaps’ indicates, it also, potentially, blocks and/or
distorts such memories. The same man whose ‘skull’ Sacco is so interested
in refuses to answer the questions Sacco asks, instead telling Sacco what he
wants to tell; Sacco in turn continually questions the veracity of this man’s
memories. Tellingly, in one sequence featuring this man (Figure 2), the
frame itself enacts a silencing: the frames that constitute the second-row
sequence appear to cut the first image of the face off at the mouth. This
highlights the power of the frame to both reveal and conceal, and points
quite literally to a kind of blockage. In addition, the cutting off of the
mouth in such a bold and almost violent manner alerts us to its impor-
tance, so that what falls outside the frame takes on great weight. As
such, Sacco’s purposeful manipulation of comics framing leads the
reader to probe the informant’s mouth in the following panels, to see
what lies ‘behind’ it and what will issue forth from it, but such a visual
probing does not lead to the discovery of any definitive truth. Put
another way, no matter how closely the mouth is framed and no matter
from how many angles, it does not divulge the ‘ultimate truth’ Sacco
seems to be after, so that such framing speaks to a kind of frustration or
impossibility of knowing, underscored by the initial image of blockage.
Because this man’s face is put on view for us, mostly privileged
Western viewers, a stance of not knowing confronts the invisible power
dynamics that structure acts of looking, in particular the ways in which
Western viewers are primed to see ‘the other’, and even more particularly
and in the words of Sontag, how we are trained to regard the pain of others.
In the interface between the spectator and what is seen – one that is
marked by uneven power dynamics – not knowing can maintain a distance
in which the seen is not subsumed into or by the one who sees. Such uncer-
tainty can function as a kind of ethical stop-gap, blocking the usual trajec-
tory of seeing from completion so that ‘the other’ is not transformed into a
definable object. While ‘the other’ is still an object of vision in a strict sense,

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 Rebecca Scherr Framing human rights

Figure 2. Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (New York: Metropolitan, 2009), p. 63.
Copyright # 2009 by Joe Sacco. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

the gap of not knowing creates the conditions for the spectator to discover
in the other’s face what Butler calls ‘shared precariousness’, a concept I will
return to below.

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In ‘The Screening’ and other later chapters of Footnotes that deal head-
on with the massacre, faces are framed like passport photos, simply boxed,
passport-size, and with names attached. Since these images also ‘speak’,
such framing functions to render these faces ‘talking heads’ in documentary
fashion. This kind of passport-like, no-nonsense framing resonates with a
kind of official discourse, and in this way lends the stories – and the faces –
legitimacy. Such framing also functions ironically, in the sense that many
of these informants are in fact stateless, unable to obtain a passport. In
addition, the sheer number of framed faces demonstrates that Sacco’s
body of informants is wide: as readers, we encounter face after face in Foot-
notes, so that it is hard to keep track of who is who, and perhaps this is part
of the point. While the faces depicted are certainly poignant, we are not
being asked to identify or empathise with these faces as particular charac-
ters with particular trajectories, like in a novel; we are asked to look and
consider the face, but it is through ‘listening’ to the stories and ‘hearing’
how these stories both underscore and contradict each other that we are
solicited as witnesses. That these passport frames are monotonous in
their size and repetition suggests a sense of truthfulness through consensus:
the similarity of the frames reinforces the similarity of the stories, and
together they build a fuller picture of something that cannot be documen-
ted by any other means than testimony. Thus, this photographic method
functions ironically on another level, in that it supplies visual evidence
where no photographic evidence exists.
Kozol, in writing about Palestine, remarks that

individuals rarely appear on the page alone. Instead, Sacco conveys

the scale of Palestinian struggles and resistance through interviews
that almost always take place in collective settings . . . Groups listen-
ing to a storyteller provide a visual equivalent of testimonios whereby
speakers articulate collective experiences of trauma and resistance.51

Such representations of collectivity continue in Footnotes, and while the

passport-like portraits of ‘The Screening’ frame individual faces, the same-
ness of the frames and stories links them and creates a larger portrait, and
thus these individually framed portraits function as a group, as a collective
form of storytelling. Similar to the uncertainty that is the effect of Sacco’s
zooming technique, the identification at play here is not reliant on the
reader ‘seeing oneself’ in the face of the other, and as such also participates
in the ethical frames Sacco creates in this work. As readers, we encounter
not an individual face as a metonym for an entire people or nation (or
as a metonym for ourselves), as in the human rights portraits of Afghan
girls, but instead multiple faces, a whole community and collectivity focus-
ing on survival in the face of overwhelming oppression. This multiplicity

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 Rebecca Scherr Framing human rights

helps block the spectator’s habit of ‘consuming’ the face of the other: we
cannot rely on a one-to-one correlation or connection.52
Many of these passport frames are also positioned inside larger panels;
the passport frame clearly demarcates the face that is speaking ‘now’ (in the
present of the text) from the memory being spoken, memories which Sacco
actualises in drawing and which surround the face (Figure 3). This stylistic
choice frames the passport frames literally and conceptually: literally, in the
sense that the face is framed within two frames, a kind of literal framing of
the frame; conceptually, in that these doubly framed portraits speak to their
own circumscription in a more political sense. Because the memories
depicted in the surrounding panels are not based on actual photographs,
because they cannot be based on photographs but only reconstructed
through memory and imagination, Sacco’s framing choices here emphasise
that the more official image – indicated by the passport photographic-like
portrait – is not the full story itself. This speaks to the assumption, particu-
larly prevalent when it comes to the evidentiary function of human rights
photography, that the photographic image serves as direct evidence or the
source of truth for acts of atrocity; what can be ascertained without doubt is
what can be seen. In Footnotes, what falls outside of the official, framed
image is the real story of violation; and the violation itself continues up
to the present in Israel’s suppression of the evidence of the massacre, and
thus official power continues to frame the crisis through denial and exclu-
sion. While Sacco literalises this both in his framing techniques and in his

Figure 3. Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (New York: Metropolitan, 2009),

p. 317. Copyright # 2009 by Joe Sacco. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

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use of drawing to ‘fill in’ the missing evidence, the larger panels that sur-
round the face are also, of course, circumscribed, indicating a kind of
endless play of framing and its signification.
In striking contrast to the mostly expression-neutral faces that are
framed within these double-framed portraits, the surrounding panels
most often depict anguish, both physical and psychological, as well as
moments of intense fear and acts of mourning the dead. What I want to
suggest is that this double framing offers the face as the initial point of spec-
tator identification, a kind of ground for recognition. Yet in being directed
outward, that is, in moving from the tightly framed face into the larger
images of reconstructed pain and anguish, we are directed to transfer the
initial identification into an emotional, visceral engagement with the
pain of others, so that what we end up identifying with is not the face
per se but the moments in which that ‘face’ has experienced the reality
and depths of life’s precariousness.
To recognise the shared precariousness inherent in existence, in Butler’s
view, may be the key ethical insight in combating images and discourses that
seek to dehumanise others, and thus in her view should be a central issue in
re-framing human rights discourses and the politics of recognition. For
experiences of grief and rage, of pain and anguish, reveal that as humans
we are relational creatures: such powerful emotions ‘tear us from ourselves,
bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not our
own, irreversibly, if not fatally’.53 In a sense, Sacco’s method of placing the
reader into the gap of not knowing, of deep uncertainty, when confronted
with the face of the other also allows for this recognition that we are not
the other yet we are bound together; the stop-gap is necessary for creating
a space in which our presumed knowledge is ‘undone’, opening for the possi-
bility of seeing shared precariousness. In such a space, ‘We must attend to
[vulnerability], even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics
might be implied by staying with corporeal vulnerability itself.’54 One poss-
ible way of formulating a politics in this manner, at least in the context of the
ethics of spectatorship, is to think about the implications of paradoxical
identification, of a structure of seeing that encompasses identification and
dis-identification simultaneously, connection and dissonance, recognition
and not knowing, in other words, we remain vulnerable to the objects of
vision and do not attempt to subsume those objects into a kind of solid
self-portrait. Comics’ ‘biocularity’ allows for a visual display of this paradox-
ical movement of identification.
What I am claiming in this essay is that Sacco’s framing asks us, the
readers, to perform this difficult dance, to vacillate between connection
and distance: to sometimes identify with the objects of vision and disavow
that identification at the very same time, to sometimes identify not with
the figure of a ‘person’ but with pain itself, in this way pointing to the

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existence of shared precariousness in the realm of spectatorship.55 And the

frame is precisely the site where such acts of (dis)identification take place:
as Butler says about the frame, acts of identification occur ‘neither inside
nor outside the image, but through the very framing by which the image
is constrained’.56 Because of its structure which is dependent on the
frame–gutter relationship, and because frames speak to other frames
within comics sequencing, the comics genre can reveal how frames function
as containment devices and as sites of breakage, and thus as potential points
of resistance to specific frames of seeing. Sacco’s specific innovation is to con-
sistently use the frame in such a manner, in the context of human rights. Fur-
thermore, when the comics images that are framed are positioned within
human rights discourse and the politics of recognition, the ethical dimension
of framing is quite clear and pressing. Lilie Chouliaraki writes that the aes-
thetic products of human rights function as ‘subtle [proposals] as to how we
should feel and act towards suffering’.57 So, then, how are we as readers
directed to feel towards suffering when we are framed as uncertain and pre-
carious witnesses, as we are in Footnotes? The space of precariousness keeps
the conversation alive; it does not shut down all the possible ways of conceiv-
ing of the parameters of human rights discourses, of comics form, of ethics
and emotion and the ways that all these work in and against each other.

University of Oslo

Notes

1 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), p. 5.

2 Ibid., p. 5.
3 Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2010), p. xiii.
4 Judith Butler, ‘Photography, war, outrage’, PMLA, 120.3 (2005), p. 823. My
emphasis.
5 Joe Sacco, Palestine (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2001); Safe Area Goražde
(Seattle: Fantagraphic, 2000); see also Journalism (New York: Metropolitan,
2012) for a collection of Sacco’s shorter pieces.
6 I use the term graphic narrative here to refer to a variety of genres in comic
book format; the term covers comic strips, superhero comics, graphic repor-
tage, autobiographical comics, etc. For a discussion of this term, see Hilary
Chute and Marianne DeKoven, ‘Introduction: graphic narrative’, Modern
Fiction Studies, 52.4 (2006), pp. 767– 82.
7 Two series in particular include the Meena series for Southeast Asia, http://
www.unicef.org/rosa/media_2479.htm, accessed 10 April 2013; and the
Sara series targeting Eastern and Southern Africa, http://www.unicef.org/
lifeskills/index_8020.html, accessed 10 April 2013.

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8 Other graphic works that take on human rights issues include Mia Kirshner,
J.B. MacKinnan, Paul Shoebridge, and Michael Simons, I Live Here
(New York: Pantheon, 2008) and The Real Cost of Prison Comix (Oakland:
PM Press, 2008). Dan Archer’s work can be accessed via his website, http://
www.archcomix.com, accessed 10 April 2013.
9 See Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2006), p. 35.
10 X-Mission. 2008. Prod. and Dir.: Ursula Biemann.
11 As of the writing of this essay (December 2012), the UN has passed a resol-
ution giving Palestine the status of a non-member observer state, although
the implications of this remain uncertain.
12 X-Mission.
13 Wendy Kozol, ‘Complicities of witnessing in Joe Sacco’s Palestine’, in Eliza-
beth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, eds., Theoretical
Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012),
p. 174.
14 Rebecca Scherr, ‘Shaking hands with other people’s pain: Joe Sacco’s Palestine’,
Mosaic, 46.1 (2013), p. 25.
15 Hillary Chute, ‘Comics Form and Narrating Lives’, in Rosemary G. Feal, ed.,
Profession 2011 (New York: The Modern Language Association of America,
2011), p. 112.
16 See Sara Ahmed, ‘The contingency of pain’, Parallax, 8.1 (2002), pp. 31 –2.
17 Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2007), p. 2. The most commonly cited example of this kind of twisting
of human rights rhetoric is Bush’s remarks that the invasion of Afghanistan
would be good for Afghan women’s rights.
18 Lilie Chouliaraki, ‘Post-humanitarianism: humanitarian communication
beyond a politics of pity’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 13.2
(2010), p. 111.
19 Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011), pp. 189– 90.
20 Lauren Berlant, qtd. in Hesford, p. 190.
21 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Editor’s column: collateral damage’, PMLA, 119.5 (2004),
p.1213.
22 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: Harper, 1994), p. 68.
23 Ibid., p. 69.
24 Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 45.
25 Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 2007), p. 54.
26 Ibid., p. 50.
27 Butler, Frames, p. 8.
28 Butler, ‘Photography’, pp. 826– 7.
29 Butler, Frames, p. 9.
30 Ibid., p. xiii.
31 Ibid., p. 12.
32 Sacco, Footnotes, p. 78.
33 McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 103.

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34 Sacco, Footnotes, p. 80.

35 Butler, Frames, p. xiii.
36 Kozol, ‘Complicities of witnessing’, p. 167. My emphasis.
37 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2003).
38 Sacco, Footnotes, p. 32.
39 Sontag, Pain of Others, p. 22.
40 Ibid., p. 24.
41 Butler, ‘Photography’, p. 823.
42 Butler, Frames, p. xii.
43 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books,
2008), p. 130.
44 Ibid., p. 130.
45 Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, p. 2.
46 Ibid., p. 3. However, Judith Butler provides an alternative reading of these
faces, arguing in Precarious Life that the Afghan women’s faces are in effect
defaced, in the sense that they are used as an excuse for war, p. 143.
47 Ibid., p. 4.
48 Sontag, Pain of Others, p. 72.
49 Sacco, Footnotes, see p. 63, and pp. 340 –3 as prime examples of this.
50 Ibid., p. 63.
51 Kozol, p. 171.
52 Comics scholarship has often concerned itself with the icon of the face: many
scholars have examined the effects of the ‘funny animal’ faces of Maus, as well
as the deceptively simple use of facial iconography in Persepolis, and all of this
focus on the face centres on questions of reader identification. McCloud posits
that readers’ acts of identification occur along a spectrum: that the more rea-
listic or photographic a face is represented, the less we identify with it: ‘you see
it as the face of another’, p. 36. Less realistic faces, in contrast, become spaces in
which readers interpolate themselves, and therefore comics artists can elicit
various registers of identification based on how realistic, or how purely
iconic, they draw faces. Certainly Sacco’s detailed faces fall on the realistic
side of the spectrum and thus also in terms of comics identification, Sacco
rejects the notion that a reader should put him or herself ‘into’ the picture.
Framing the face as a potential ‘block’ and not as the end all and be all of
identification adds a nuance that is sorely needed to McCloud’s discussion
of the face.
53 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 25.
54 Ibid., p. 29.
55 See the very last chapter of Footnotes for the ways in which Sacco represents
pain itself, by placing the viewer into the frame, as if we are the ones being
herded to our death and experiencing the pain of battery.
56 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 148.
57 Chouliaraki, ‘Post-humanitarianism’, p. 110.

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