Media necropower: Australian media reception and the somatechnics of Mamdouh Habib

This paper discusses the manner in which Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, who was arrested in Pakistan just after September 11, tortured in Egypt, and subsequently spent three years imprisoned and tortured in Guantanamo Bay was discursively positioned within Australian media reception. Specifically, I argue that Habib's body was made culturally intelligible within what I call media necropower or contemporary media practices which reconfigure the politics of race and assimilability within the somatechnics of racialised bodies. Reading at least two televisual interviews on Sixty Minutes (2005), and Dateline (2005), as well as newspaper articles and a number of public responses to Mamdouh Habib's interviews, this paper will explore how the materiality of Habib's body was produced within a speculative, judgmental regime, media necropower.