Feminist flashpoints and the burning question of accountability

Abstract

The media coverage of the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss reveals the ongoing difficulties of holding powerful men accountable, despite decades of feminist mobilisation around sexual violence. This essay builds on Sarah Banet-Weiser’s concept of the ‘feminist flashpoint’ as spectacular media events which can help problematise cultural understandings of ‘accountability’ beyond ‘cancel culture’ and carceral feminist politics. Analysing the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss in relation to another feminist flashpoint, the contested interpretation of the photograph V-J Day in Times Square, initiates an epistemological shift that focuses on the spectators of the kiss instead of its protagonists. This critical shift locates a feminist practice of accountability in processes of historicization and thinks of responsibility in collective rather than invidividual terms. This piece is part of a special themed issue on the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss.

How may we develop a feminist politics of accountability that moves beyond the singular and the spectacular? Rubiales’ assault, its viral circulation, and its aftermath, reveal the cracks in a feminist politics of ‘speaking out’ which can be easily coopted by neoliberal discourses that cast responsibility in individual terms. ‘Speaking out’ has been the prevalent register for accountability claims in a #MeToo era, yet, as Tanya Serisier (2018) notes, acts of sharing personal narratives of sexual violence are limited when it comes to bringing about structural change. This investment in a feminist politics of ‘speaking out’ places a heavy burden on those who have experienced forms of violence to share their stories, as shown by Hermoso’s reluctance to become a spokesperson for victims of sexual violence (Fernández Romero and Núñez Puente, this issue). Elsewhere, I have argued, in relation to celebrity testimonies of sexual violence, that the imperative to share one’s story also comes with the injunction to overcome adversity, through dispositions such as confidence or resilience (Moro, 2021, 2022). Thus the onus of ending sexual violence is put on the victims themselves, who are overwhelmingly women, rather than on the perpetrators. When the focus is on the perpetrator, harm is framed as the consequence of individual actions and responsibility becomes synonymous with punishment, which is equally understood in singular terms. These can be for instance institutional sanctions or criminal proceedings, both of which Rubiales is facing. Significantly, such discourses occlude the power relations that produce sexual violence.

This is why feminist flashpoints, of which the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss is an example, are inherently limited in their capacity to address the question of responsibility. Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) defines feminist flashpoints as media events that shed light on important feminist issues, while constraining discussions to simple and rapid responses to complex problems. As Banet-Weiser (2018) argues, ‘the hot take depends on the same capitalist circuit of media visibility that provide the light for a flashpoint’ (para. 4). As quick responses that revolve around the passing of judgement on individual cases, feminist flashpoints evoke the question of responsibility, but cannot accommodate a politics of accountability because they offer a moralising diagnosis of violence instead of attending to the structural inequalities that enabled the perpertrators in the first place. Indeed, as Banet-Weiser observes: ‘it is easier to moralize than to historicize’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018: para. 4, emphasis original). This is also why cultural practices like ‘cancel culture’, which could be an interesting mode of collective accountability beyond the carceral system, are ineffectual as long as they are confined to media spectacles and/or forms of boycott that trade in reputation and in brand (Moro and Sedgwick, forthcoming).

To think through some of the tensions at play within a feminist politics of accountability, I offer another example of a spectacular non-consensual kiss, Eisenstaedt’s iconic 1945 V-J Day in Times Square photograph (hereafter ‘TSK’ for Times Square Kiss), as a ‘cold case’ against which to analyse the Rubiales affair. The metaphor of the ‘cold case’ is particularly befitting, as it offers the perfect counterpoint to the feminist flashpoint’s heat by contrasting the delay of 80 years of cultural change with the immediate viral circulation of ‘hot takes’. Because it will never be possible to know what truly happened in the moment leading up to and captured in the photograph, the TSK also shifts a conceptualisation of accountability away from an accumulation of data often at play in the narrative device ‘he said, she said’ and onto the analytical possibilities of ambiguity.

Cooling down: accountability as critical historicization

For a long time, the V-J Day in Times Square was celebrated as a depiction of passionate romance commemorating the end of the Second World War, until Greta Zimmer Friedman identified herself as the woman in the photograph and revealed that the kiss was not consensual (Library of Congress, 2005). The photograph, immortalised in 2005 in the sculpture Unconditional Surrender by Seward Johnson, has since been at the centre of multiple controversies stemming from concerns that it represents sexual assault. These controversies gained traction in 2005 with Friedman’s interview (Library of Congress, 2005), resurfaced on feminist blogs in 2012 (Breslaw, 2012; Mosbergen, 2012), re-emerged in 2014 when a feminist activist group launched a petition in protest of the installation of a copy of the statue at the Caen Memorial in France (Osez le Féminisme, 2014), and then again in 2019 after the statue in Sarasota (USA) was vandalised with ‘#MeToo’ painted in red on the leg of the nurse a few days after the passing of the presumed sailor, George Mendonsa (Ernst, 2019). The contestations of the TSK sheds light on the ways in which shifting understandings of consent play out in the popular imaginary leading up to and since #MeToo. This is not to suggest that the genealogy of #MeToo is linear, but rather that feminist flashpoints crystalise debates around sexual violence and are shaped by the circulation of local mobilisations in a globalised mediascape. ¹ In fact, the TSK’s 80-year-long cultural history is marked by moments of incandescence – for example, as a symbol of the war’s end when it was first published in a full-page display of Life magazine, or as a contested flashpoint leading up to #MeToo – but these are only snapshots compared to the iconic photograph’s long interpretive history as a romantic staging of national pride and liberal democracy.

The temporality of these controversies exemplifies the ways in which feminist flashpoints capture new iterations of the question of accountability. These questions peaked in the summer of 2020 around the removal of statues of historical figures associated with the slave trade, colonialism, or the Confederacy (New York Times, 2020). Debates around statues and the memorialisation of controversial historical events or figures are not new, nor are the tactics of public removal, vandalism, or petition. The controversies surrounding the TSK are nonetheless interesting for the ways in which they put the question of collective responsibility, collective remembrance, and gender politics at the forefront. For instance, the Osez le Féminisme (2014) petition contests the ‘erection of sexual assault as a symbol of peace’ (para. 8, my translation) and places conflict-related sexual violence on the same continuum of violence as rape, workplace sexual harassment and street harassment. By drawing links between a duty to remember the ‘14,000 women who were raped by GIs in France, England, and Germany during the Second World War’ and the ‘75,000 women raped every year in France’ (Osez le Féminisme, 2014: para. 6–7, my translation), the petition also challenges false historicization. False historicization is a common defence strategy that justifies the perpetrator’s actions as emblematic of their time and different gender socialisation (Hemmings, 2011; Stone, 2022) which has been prevalent in the media coverage of the TSK and its presumed protagonists, George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer Friedman. As Stone (2022) argues, ‘looking back at the past also illuminates patterns of misunderstanding, silencing, and trivialisation that go some way toward explaining the explosion of storytelling under the hashtag #MeToo’ (p. 198). To reprise the heat metaphor, looking at the cold embers of past flashpoints reveals the conditions under which the patriarchy remains incombustible and also helps us imagine how we might extinguish it.

As feminist flashpoints, the controversies around the TSK offer early examples of a collective reckoning of the pervasiveness of sexual violence and, most importantly, an effort to think through our own complicity in enabling sexual violence through an investment in cultural narrative that romanticise non-consensual kisses (see also Zecchi, this issue). While the focus on collective accountability was central to the Osez le Féminisme petition (2014), the tagging of the Sarasota statue in the wake of #MeToo reframed accountability in individual terms: Mendonsa was added to an ever-growing list of infamous men accused of sexual violence. This difference could be explained by the national specificities (France vs USA) of the controversies. A comparative analysis is beyond the scope of this essay and instead, I want to interrogate what these nuances reveal of the elusiveness of the concept of ‘accountability’ in relation to sexual violence, an ambiguity which I suspect has less to do with the etymology of the word and the prevalence of its related synonyms (responsibility, liability, representation) in translation, and more to do with how we conceptualise the root cause of sexual violence, as well as responsibility and justice.

Unsolvable cold case: thinking accountability through ambiguity

It is the impossibility of knowing with certainty what happened in the case of the TSK and the temporality of its contestations that I find most productive when thinking about what a feminist politics of accountability might look like. Because of the angle of the kiss and the camera which obscures the face of both protagonists, it is impossible to assert the identity of the two people kissing. In fact, this mystery is part of the TSK aura because the idiosyncracies of the kissers is eclipsed in favour of ‘who and what they can represent’ (Hariman and Lucaites, 2011: 81), including heterosexual romance, meritrocatic values, liberty, peace, nationalism. This semiotic transcription gives the photograph its ideological value. More than a historical document, the photograph is a cultural reference or ‘model of imitation’ that lends itself to multiple forms of commodification. ² Yet the TSK can also be a resource for communicative action, as demonstrated by the Osez le Féminisme petition and the #MeToo tag on the Sarasota statue. The TSK’s ideological function is thus to reinscribe dominant social relations and gesture to alternative interpretations, while ‘[aiding] continued revisiting and revisions of the ‘original’ event to negotiate basic questions of legitimacy as they complicate a sense of past, present, and future’. (Hariman and Lucaites, 2011: 37). In other words, iconic photographs are similar to flashpoints in that they ‘at once, open up and constrain thinking about feminist futures’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018, para. 3). The key difference is that the mystery surrounding the protagonists of the TSK is central to its cultural and economic value, but this semiotic ambiguity also requires feminist critics to look beyond the central characters for answers to the thorny question of accountability.

Indeed, the mystery around the kiss’ protagonists, further intensified by the passing of time, means that we need to look beyond the criminal justice system for accountability. Conflicting testimonies, statutes of limitation, and the death of most claimants forever precludes the prosecution of this assault. This opens up interesting theoretical possibilities for conceptualising ‘accountability’ in line with a feminist analysis of sexual violence that is critical of carceral solutions. Carceral feminism frames sexual violence as an issue that can be rationalised and managed through punitive state-sponsored institutions, such as the police and the prison industrial complex. It understands the root causes of violence in essentialist terms, attributing it to aggressive genes and/or poor life choices, and promotes privatised solutions to systemic issues. The impossibility of administering individual punishment in the cold case of the TSK forces us to look elsewhere for justice: from individual responsibility to collective accountability.

To move beyond the logics of personification of sexual violence revolving around the celebrification of perpetrators (the unindentified sailor; Rubiales) and victims (the unidentified health worker; ³ Hermoso) in a highly public mise en scène of ‘he said, she said’ (Cefai, this issue), I suggest that we focus instead on the spectactors of the kiss. These include the passers-by (TSK), the crowd of officials and fellow teammates (FIFA), as well as ourselves. Doing so allows us to examine our vested interest in these media spectacles. It triggers a reflection on the ways in which the responsibility for sexual violence lies beyond individual actions and requires us to interrogate our own complicity with intersecting systems of power that fuel the capitalist machine of media visibility. For those of us who call media and cultural studies our intellectual home, thinking of accountability in relation to the material conditions of power that make some of us spectactors and others subject of violence highlights the limitations of thinking of violence solely in symbolic terms. ⁴ Indeed, what happens once the statue is removed? What happens once Rubiales is fired? Grappling with these difficult questions opens up the possibility for a practice of accountability that is rooted in a structural analysis of power.

Ironically, or perhaps tellingly, the idea of shifting perspectives comes from numerous forensic-like explorations of Life magazine’s archive which have sought to prove that the kiss was consensual. These include an edited gallery put together by Life editors in an attempt to retrieve the TSK from ‘#metoo infamy’ (Berman and Ronk, n.d.: para. 1). The gallery shows pictures taken from another photojournalist on the same day depicting several other couples kissing, including one of Eisenstaedt himself kissing a colleague. If ‘kisses abounded that day’ so much so that the photographer was seen ‘kiss[ing] a reporter, his camera slung over his shoulder, in a pose not unlike that of the famous kiss he photographs that day’ and then later walking down the street with the same woman, ‘bright smiles on their faces’ (Berman and Ronk, n.d.: para. 3), the caption suggests, then Eisenstaedt, and by extension the subjects of his famous photograph, must have consented. The editors conclude that ‘even if a photojournalist is meant to be an impartial witness to history, he is also part of the history he is witnessing’ (Berman and Ronk, n.d.: para. 4). This article is another reminder of the importance of analysing the conditions of production of feminist flashpoints: false historicization is a convenient communicative resource that Life magazine utilises to solve a crisis of legitimacy stemming from its association with one of its most famous and lucrative photographs.

Concluding thoughts

The TSK controversies offer an interesting counterpoint to the Rubiales affair, in that both are centred around non-consensual kisses that have been read as spontaneous acts arising from moments of affective effervescence. These celebrations revolve around the exhilaration of victory on a global scale (the end of the Second War, the World Cup) and a shared national pride embodied by the embrace and the surrounding crowd. In both cases, these heightened collective affects are deployed as relativist discursive strategies to excuse the assault (different time, different culture). They also trigger feminist analysis atuned to the continuities between sexual harassment at work (sailor and health worker identified by their uniform, professional football) and in public spaces (street, stadium). Locating such non-consensual kisses at the intersection of these two continuums of misogyny reveals the complexity of accountability as a practice. This may include changes in policies or organisational restructuring, legal reforms, and shifts in cultural discourses. They are all interconnected yet distinct responses to sexual violence, and further research to explore the implications of each for an anti-carceral feminist practice of accountability is needed.

There are also stark differences, namely that we will never know with certainty the identity of the sailor and the health worker, whereas Hermoso and Rubiales are sporting celebrities in their own right and have both shared their version of the events (Cefai, this issue). While debates around the nature of the TSK have been sporadic and occurred decades after the fact, contestations of the FIFA non-consensual kiss were immediate and are widely documented. Analysing these two cases in tandem shows the perspective that is possible when images enter a different temporality, when the spotlight is no longer burning and the embers of patriarchy and feminism can be revealed among the ashes. In addition, new theoretical horizons emerge from the impossibility of solving cold cases. Here, a shift of perspective can be a methodological one in the form of a semiotic analysis of the iconic photograph to understrand the cultural work it undertakes. It can also entail a shift in focus which points to the complicity of spectactors, including ourselves, in enabling perpetrators. Iconic photographs and feminist flashpoints open up as much as they constrain discussions of sexual violence but an important tension remains: the shift in perspective required by cold cases such as the TSK may be a gateway to thinking accountability in collective and structural terms, but a feminist practice of accountability is itself imbricated within the same power dynamics that produced the violence it seeks to respond to.