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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Articles Available Online


There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Last autumn I listened to an episode from the 1999 ‘Lock Up’ series of This American Life, which explored the way prisoners represent their identities visually once they have been released During the podcast, an ex-detainee explained that during incarceration he and his fellow convicts ‘had very little to see or look at, in terms of variety, in terms of what one had become used to Seeing people come and go, different distances, different colours, different lives, all just one vague big grey soup’ What struck me most about his comments was how starkly prison-industrial complexes violate the agency of those they detain, limiting prisoners’ ability to connect with each other and the outside world, and most of all, denying any assertion of individual identity I began to wonder how writing and visual art could help represent prisoners deemed invisible by wider society Interviews, such as the one in the podcast, contribute to building a biographical narrative of a subject – but what about photographs, portraits and paintings? What might an ethical portrait of a prisoner look like? Could art be used as a tool to give agency back to those on the inside? Or rather, who do prisoners rely on to construct images of them from the outside, in the face of a system which seeks to siphon off all humanity?   *   The dehumanisation of transgender prisoners is by no means unfamiliar, but the trial, prosecution and release of Chelsea Manning has shifted the rhetoric of both media and personal representation into a different realm During her incarceration I knew of Manning as someone both famous and infamous, whose identity as a trans woman and committer of treason has been widely sensationalised A United States Army soldier, Manning was convicted under the Espionage Act and for a number of other offences in 2013 after she ‘leaked’ over 700,000 sensitive diplomatic documents to the secret sharing site Wikileaks The files contained war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, diplomatic cables from the state department and documents on Guantanamo Bay After pleading guilty to ten of the twenty-two charges of which she was accused, Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Several years before her sentencing, she had also spent three years in detention centres such as Camp

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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poetry

December 2011

Sonic Peace

Minashita Kiriu

TR. Jeffrey Angles

poetry

December 2011

Beneath the sun My interchangeable routines Are formed from superfluous things Managing this place is A metal will, swelling...

fiction

September 2012

Sarah Palin Night

Agustín Fernández Mallo

TR. Michael McDevitt

fiction

September 2012

It was a Sunday afternoon, siesta time: my phone buzzed in my pocket. ‘Is this Agustín Fernández Mallo?’ ‘Yes,...

poetry

May 2016

Two Poems

Sam Buchan-Watts

poetry

May 2016

The Dentist’s Chair       I dreamt of the dentist’s chair, that it wore a smart pair of...

 

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