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Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 363 pp., $24.95 (paper).
Laura Wexler's argument in Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism rests on two concepts. First, Wexler defines a category of photographs-she calls them "domestic images"-that served the interest of US imperialism at the turn of the last century. Not limited to photographs of hearth and home, these images are any that "signify the domestic realm" (21) and deploy a discourse of domesticity to justify expansionist policies as part of an inherently virtuous, civilizing process-the "tender violence" of the book's title. Secondly, the author posits that such images were more ideologically potent because they were executed by women. Although not every one of Wexler's readings is equally compelling, the notion of ideologically charged photography bolstering, and indeed helping formulate, a culture of imperialism is convincing. However, the inextricability of the two claims weakens Wexler's work overall.
Tender Violence is organized around the oeuvres of four women: Frances Benjamin Johnston's series of sailors aboard Admiral George Dewey's Olympia during the SpanishAmerican War and her work at Virginia's Hampton Institute; Gertrude Kasebier's images of white, upper-class motherhood juxtaposed with her photographs of costumed Native Americans; amateur photographer Alice Austen's Street Types of New York; and Jesse Tarbox Seals' photojournalism at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. In each case, Wexler precedes readings of the photographs with biographical information culled from secondary sources. By and large, she finds that racial or ethnic others-the definition of whose subjectivity was fundamental to US expansion-are treated with condescension. Case studies get more interesting when whiteness and gender are the subjects, as in Wexler's juxtaposition of the gender trouble of Alice Austen's photographs of her own (white) friends and family with the conservatism of her take on race and class.
Despite an often vexing disorganization (the definition of central concepts, for example, arrives in Chapter 2) that suggests the not-so-seamless stitching...