Dead woman glowing: Karla Faye Tucker and the aesthetics of death row photography.

On 3 February 1998, the state of Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker by lethal injection for her role in the murders of Deborah Thornton and Jerry Lynn Dean. She was thirty-eight years old, white, and a devout Christian convert who had, in the course of her prison sentence, married a minister. Her execution attracted an unprecedented degree of media attention. In the last few days of her life, she was interviewed on Larry King Live, The 700 Club, and numerous other network shows. The Indigo Girls wrote a song about her, and her unlikely but highly vocal allies included capital punishment supporter Pat Robertson, a relative of one of the victims, Pope John Paul II, and supermodel-turned-Amnesty International advocate Bianca Jagger. Most death row executions never make a headline in the national press, but Karla Faye Tucker featured prominently in the mainstream press for several months before and after her actual execution date (figure 1). Though we might easily attribute the media's fascination with Tucker to the gruesome and sexual nature of her crime--she pickaxed her victims to death, claiming that she had an orgasm every time the pickax entered her victims' bodies--the newspapers declared that it was Tucker's gender in particular that captivated the public imagination and caused entrenched death penalty supporters like Robertson to rethink their position, if only momentarily.

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Tucker was the first woman to be executed in Texas since 1863, when Chipita Rodriguez was hanged for killing a horse trader. (Rodriguez was pardoned 122 years after her death by the state of Texas in 1985.) Tucker was also only the second woman in the United States to be executed since the resumption of the death penalty in 1976. (1) Journalists drew loud attention to their own problematic relation to the question of gender in this case, repeatedly questioning their "chivalrous" desire to defend a woman about to die and sensing that there might be an inappropriate gender bias in their attitude. Yet this concern about an overly generous attitude toward women, I will argue, ultimately works to distract us from what Lauren Berlant calls "the violence of sentimentality." (2) "National sentimentality," she writes, "is too often a defensive response by a people who identify with privilege yet fear they will be exposed as immoral by their tacit sanction of a particular structural violence that benefits them" (153). The journalists' self-proclaimed excess of chivalry and feeling for Tucker simultaneously mobilized and cloaked insidious fantasies about femininity and, as I will argue later in the essay, about feminism too, which invited the nation to pay attention to the "beautiful" female body for the ultimate purpose of its eradication. As I analyze the stylized and purportedly sympathetic photographs of Tucker in the context of the antifeminist rhetoric that emerged in discussions of her execution, I will ask how femininity, whiteness, photography, and death intertwine with mainstream fantasies about what feminists really want. (3) But on what aesthetic traditions do these images of a "beautiful" woman about to die draw, and to what ends? Can photography serve progressive politics more effectively, and if so, what are the alternatives? Such questions presume that photography plays an active role in shaping, as well as reflecting, the political landscapes we inhabit, and I pursue them in the belief that by analyzing how individual images are constructed and circulated, we begin to intervene in the often imperceptible work they do to support states in their right to brutally eradicate the bodies they no longer want.

White Beauty, Black Death

The privileged media attention afforded Tucker came under muted attack from various places, including, somewhat surprisingly, from some death penalty abolitionists for whom the question of Tucker's gender was inextricably linked to questions of race and religion. Ajamu Baraka, regional director of Amnesty International, declared: "Her death will not be in vain for the abolitionist movement," but added that he and other Amnesty leaders were "troubled that the execution of a white woman had drawn so much notice while so many black men go to their deaths professing as strong a devotion to their saviour as she did." (4) Similarly, the Economist asked: "Would a black man who had pickaxed a white couple to death but had seen the light in prison and become a devout and erudite Muslim have found such support? Probably not. It was her sex and her prettiness, as much as her religious conversion, that made Ms. Tucker a poster girl of the anti-capital-punishment groups." (5) What is striking here is the asymmetry between the examples offered. Even as the article tries to stress the implicit racism underlying the media's exceptional support of Tucker, race itself drops out of the picture as the black male Muslim is compared with a woman only identifiable by her "sex," her "prettiness," and her "religious conversion." As race becomes sex, whiteness disappears as a category for examination, becoming an unreadable norm all-too-easily elided with "prettiness." If feminist critics choose to allow the racial dimension of "feminine aesthetics" to go unnoticed, we not only run the risk of inadvertently assuming a stance of indifference toward the racial dimension of the death penalty" politics through an exclusive focus on our "proper objects" of sex and gender but we also fundamentally limit our ability to understand how ideals of femininity are always racially coded. Uncovering how the media racially marks Tucker's femininity constitutes an important step in thinking through how high-profile, "poster-girl" cases like Tucker's might be recuperated so that her images work for, rather than against, the fight to stop the death penalty.

Black men on death row rarely appear in the national press. If they do, it is most frequently as unidentified thumbnail mug shots, part of a photographic archive, or statistical reflections of larger political issues. (6) As individuals about to die, they disappear, as they do in the image that opens Rolling Stone magazine's article from 3 August 2000, "Bush and the Texas Death Machine" (figure 2). In this series of images, the dead not only remain nameless but, in many instances, faceless too. (7) While some identities appear as generic silhouettes of black male heads, others are represented by photographs so dark that the images erase rather than reveal the details of individual faces. Needless to say, the invisible faces in question also happen to be black. (8)

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As Allan Sekula has argued in "The Body and the Archive," photography played a crucial role in developing effective systems of criminal identification. (9) Mug shots not only offered evidence for those trying to determine criminal types through the "sciences" of phrenology and physiognomy but they also provided the police with supposedly perfect reproductions of the distinctive features of each criminal face. (10) However, even the briefest glance at the photographic archive published in Rolling Stone reveals that while the images do effectively distinguish one white face from another, the face of one black man could, in many cases, easily be exchanged for that of another without anyone noticing the (in) difference. The indistinguishable nature of these photographs might seem innocent enough--after all, the implicit responsibility for the eradication of black individuality apparently lies not with any collective lack of interest in the specificity of black male death but rather with a mere technical infelicity, the impotence of the camera in the face of dark skin. Rather than accepting this logic, however, we need to remember, as Richard Dyer insists in White, that all technologies are at once technical but always also social (economic, cultural, ideological). (11) The medium of photography has always privileged white people--has taken the white subject as the norm--and these photographic developments have important ideological consequences. Dyer argues: "The photographic media are centerpieces in a whole culture of light that is founded on two particular notions, namely that reality can be represented as being on a ground of white, and that light comes from above; these notions have the effect not only of advantaging white people in representation and of discriminating between and within them, but also of suggesting a special affinity between them and the light" (84).

As we will see, the moral purity associated with whiteness and lightness plays a crucial role in the photographic production and reception of Karla Faye Tucker, who seems to embody the glow that Dyer links to the idealized white woman. Dyer traces the development of the image of the glowing human being from Renaissance art, with its use of halos radiating from the head, through the Romantic ballet, cinema, and fashion/cosmetic photography, historically linking the rise of the glowing, idealized woman to specific racial anxieties: "The angelically glowing white woman is an extreme representation, precisely because it is an idealisation. It reached its apogee towards the end of the nineteenth century and especially in three situations of heightened perceived threat to the hegemony of whiteness. British ideological investment in race categories increased in response to spectacular resistance to its Empire, notably the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the Jamaican revolt of 1865" (127). Yet this glow, this ultrawhiteness that seems so essential to the media's ability to establish Tucker as a poster child of the anti-capital punishment movement, is far from unproblematic and may even ultimately work against abolitionist goals in that it cultivates an aesthetically based ethics founded on a presumed love of whiteness, as if whiteness itself were a moral category worth fighting for. But before turning my attention to the complicated question of how the media employed conventions of white female luminosity in its representations of Tucker, I want first to acknowledge (and resist) the indifference to the nonwhite subjects this culture of light produces by offering three brief examples of prisoners on death row who lacked some or all of the qualities that made Tucker so "photogenic," and who consequently failed to attain her celebrity status.

The death of Gary Graham, or Shaka Sankofa, in Huntsville, Texas, might initially strike us as an exception to the media's general disinterest in the execution of black men. Graham, age thirty-six, was killed on 22 June 2000 after being convicted for the 1981 murder of Bobby Lambert in a Houston supermarket parking lot. His controversial trial attracted a degree of media attention partly because compelling evidence cast strong doubt on Graham's conviction. No physical evidence linked Graham to the scene, ballistics tests found that the .22 revolver found on him did not match the murder weapon, and tour of the nine Supreme Court justices voted to postpone the execution. Although the media did represent the controversy surrounding this particular case, it showed little interest in staging or printing the kind of elaborate photographs of Graham that …