Kisses at the memorial: affective objects, US militarism and feminist resistance at sites of wartime memory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2005, American artist Seward Johnson first exhibited The Unconditional Surrender, a sculpture modelled after Life Magazine’s iconic photograph of a sailor kissing a white-clad woman on 14 August 1945, day of the Allied victory against Japan that ended World War II. This article interrogates the presence of Johnson’s sculpture, now an iconic object, at prominent sites of tourism and commemoration in San Diego, California, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and Caen, Northern France, amongst other places in the United States and Europe. It asks, how do affective encounters between the sculpture, memorial visitors, and feminist activists shape understandings of US militarism? Controversies around the sculpture illuminate the importance of affective encounters with iconic objects for sustaining militarism, as well as for contesting it. On the one hand, visitors’ often playful interactions with the sculpture reproduce benevolent accounts of US militarism. On the other hand, the addition of a plaque reminding visitors of the sexual violence perpetrated by American servicemen abroad shows that objects matter in the contestation of the violent dimension of any militarism. I suggest that while verbal interventions shape the meaning of iconic objects, the latter’s aesthetic qualities, and those of their material environment, allow it to ‘speak’ for or against militarism. These findings draw on participant observation at the memorial sites and an analysis of statements by the artist, curators, feminist critics, and visitors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".