By Matilde Da Luz
What do we see when we see suffering?
In human rights campaigns, especially those addressing gender-based violence, the image of the suffering woman, often Muslim, veiled, and silent, has become almost inescapable. From post-9/11 “liberation” narratives about Afghanistan to humanitarian appeals that foreground school closures and barred windows, visual tropes have flattened incredibly multifaceted political scenarios into sentimental and victimizing stories.
These images stir emotions. They drive donations. But at what cost?
Feminist and decolonial thinkers have long argued that emotional appeals, despite their intuitive strength, obscure the structural and historical conditions of injustice surrounding victims of abuse. They do so by effectively depoliticizing harm, casting women as passive victims, and reinscribing colonial logics of moral superiority. Representation, in this view, is never neutral. And visibility, far from guaranteeing justice, may distort, contain, or even erase.
The Sentimental Economy of Rights
Human rights campaigns rely on what Professor Wendy Hesford calls “spectacular rhetorics”, which are visual and narrative forms that turn trauma into moral theater. Think of the iconic images: crying girls, veiled silhouettes, hands gripping wire fences. These images are successful in constructing a moral economy where worthiness is measured by how effectively a body can elicit pity.
This is the sentimental economy: one in which emotions like compassion and outrage are mobilized to generate engagement, but also to reinforce the viewer’s innocence and distance. As American critic Susan Sontag warned in Regarding the Pain of Others, sentimental responses risk becoming a substitute for action. They allow us to feel without asking what produced the suffering, or what our relationship to it might be.
Visual frames are political: What is seen, how it is seen, and who is allowed to feel are shaped by conventional Western systems of power, as argued by philosopher Judith Butler. Spectacle doesn’t just show suffering, it assigns meaning to it – and often, that meaning is tailored to Western audiences who are invited to save, donate, or “give voice.”
Sara Ahmed, a feminist scholar, helps us see how repeated associations (between veils and victimhood, for example) make certain bodies stick to certain emotions. Over time, these affective links accumulate power, turning representations into scripts: the veiled victim, the barbaric father, the white savior. These scripts shape what kinds of suffering are legible and what kinds are left out.
The “Savage–Victim–Savior” (SVS) metaphor captures this logic. In human rights storytelling, the West often appears as the rescuer, while Muslim and Global South cultures are cast as threats to be disciplined. Structural violence, like poverty or occupation, rarely fits this frame, because it doesn’t photograph as well as bruises or barred doors. The victim must look the part.
What’s rarely acknowledged is that this SVS metaphor informs aesthetics as well as narratives. The visual grammar of human rights borrows heavily from humanitarianism’s history of sentimentality: iconic suffering, anonymous faces, urgency without context. In this context, feelings become a stand-in for justice.
The Problem with “Lived Experience”
Today, many campaigns gesture toward progress by centering “lived experience.” First-person testimonies, face-to-camera videos, and direct quotes are now common. But the shift is not always as radical as it seems.
People are turned into vessels of authenticity, where survivors are expected not just to share their pain, but to carry its political meaning. They must be vulnerable, articulate, and redemptive – all at once.
Education activist Malala Yousafzai’s portrayal reflects this tension. Even as she speaks at the UN and leads global campaigns, media representations often return to her image as a teenage shooting victim. Even in cases where individual agency has clearly emerged, the iconography of injury lingers.
Beyond Recognition: Toward Opacity
If visibility can be violent, what alternatives exist?
Opacity can be a powerful answer. To demand that every subject be legible is a colonial impulse, rooted in a lack of appreciation of the nuances of political power. True ethical relation respects difference without requiring translation. Acknowledging that our political narratives are skewed to reflect Western values implies that human rights work should protect the right not to be seen or fully known.
Human rights work doesn’t always need to expose. Sometimes it needs to protect. In other words, the most ethical way to witness might be to withhold. Not every image has to go viral. Not every voice needs to be subtitled and smoothed out for donor appeal. Opacity is about honoring complexity, contradiction, and the fact that some stories resist resolution.
This resonates with Professor Mahmood’s critique of liberal feminist expectations. In Politics of Piety, she shows how acts like modesty or devotion, often seen as passive, may be deeply agentive. But they require a different grammar of understanding, one not built on visibility, resistance, or choice.
What Could Advocacy Look Like?
These critiques raise a hard question: how can human rights advocacy be effective while avoiding spectacularization of suffering?
Some recent campaigns point the way. Education Cannot Wait’s #AfghanGirlsVoices centers on anonymized first-person testimony, translated from Dari or Pashto, letting girls describe their school closures without using their faces or trauma as props. Sahra Mani’s documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me documents the resistance of Khatera, an Afghan woman pursuing justice after incest, without reducing her to just another symbol.
The Afghan Witness project takes another approach to escape the Western sentimental aesthetics. By offering evidence (in the form of geolocated images, metadata, and verified reports) instead of emotions, it treats witnessing not as performance, but as documentation. Here, ethics lie in restraint, not in provocation.
These are not perfect models. As long as NGOs depend on visibility for funding, sentimental aesthetics will be hard to escape. But these examples suggest that alternatives to spectacularization do exist, and form matters – that it is possible to represent harm without reproducing harm.
Rethinking Solidarity
To move toward a decolonial aesthetic, we need to rethink our perception of what solidarity means. What if solidarity didn’t rely on seeing, knowing, or even feeling with? What if it began with uncertainty? Instead of asking others to “tell their story,” perhaps we should ask: whose gaze does this serve? Who gets to feel innocent, outraged, or moved? And who is turned into a symbol?
Images of suffering will always circulate. The question is not whether to represent, but how to represent, and what are the implications of such representation? Do we demand moral clarity, or stay with complexity? Do we dominate with vision, or stand beside in unknowing?
Opacity is not apathy and refusal is not silence. Solidarity, if it is to mean anything at all, must begin by letting go of the urge to save.