Kisses at the memorial: affective objects, US militarism and feminist resistance at sites of wartime memory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it