Capturing the Void(ed): Muslim Detainees, Practices of Violence, and the Politics of Seeing in Guantánamo Bay

This dissertation explores how political and legal violence against "Muslim" subjects and bodies - specifically, male ones - are enacted, sustained, and justified. Through a conceptual argument that accounts for the ways in which "Muslimness" is constructed through and against the body, it argues that central to these processes are visual practices; more precisely, visual practices that operate in tandem with circuits of violence. As a particularly visceral instantiation of these relations, an analysis of images of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and its detainees encapsulates the central claim of this project: that the relationship between legal and political power, violence, and specific kinds of subjects and bodies both emerges from and is dependent upon particular practices of visuality that make and unmake subjects and bodies in distinct and meaningful ways. This has implications for not only how we understand these relationships, but also in regard to how we understand the subjectivities and materialities of those who are the targets of such violent practices.