Clothing Without Bodies: Watching care and connection in images from Gaza

From Firenze University Press Journal: Fashion Highlight

Cherine Fahd, Todd Robinson, University of Technology Sydney

The editorial team of Firenze University Press poses the question: “In a visual stream that normalizes catastrophe, how does our way of looking change when the image shows only what remains — the clothes — and not the bodies?”

“Perhaps we can say that grief contains the possibility of apprehending a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I am. This possibility does not dispute the fact of my autonomy, but it does qualify that claim through recourse to the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are, from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (Butler, 2004, p. 28).

This essay addresses how images of atrocity reach us within a contemporary visual culture shaped by the constant stream of social media posts on Instagram. A large proportion of images in our feeds — photographs, screenshots and video reels depict apocalyptic scenes of death and destruction from occupied Gaza. Images arrive as a steady stream of human suffering. They are confronting in their immediacy, often marked by timestamps such as “posted 1 hour ago”.

These temporal details are important in grounding genocide in the present. In some of these images, the absence of human bodies in relation to everyday objects, especially clothing, emphasizes a rupture between life and death.

This essay proposes that fashion studies, particularly as it attends to the relationship between clothing and bodies, offers a mode of interpretation — one that responds to these images not merely as representations of violence, but as affective and ethical provocations that demand witnessing, care, and political consciousness.

This reflection invites readers to consider how images of violence operate within contemporary regimes of visibility. By attending to the temporal immediacy of social media and to clothing as a material trace of absent bodies, the essay argues that fashion studies offers a critical framework for rethinking ethical spectatorship and political witnessing within contemporary visual culture.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/fh-3604
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