American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal

Introduction: Race, Death, and the Maternal in American Visual Culture

· 1 ·· INTRODUCTION · Race, Death, and the Maternal in American Visual Culture On September 11, 2001, Roman Catholic priest and New York Fire Department chaplain Mychal Judge emerged from the World Trade Center’s Ground Zero as the first recorded victim of the terror attacks. Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton was on site to capture the vision that began immediately circulating the world as an “American Pietà.”1 Startling for its simultaneous denotations of action and stillness, muscled response and grief, the picture asked for an interpretation, a reconciling frame stable enough to carry an assuaging meaning into a groundshattered national context. The pietà was that frame. True to its longstanding historical role of archetypal inspiration, the shadow-shape of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ fluidly enveloped the five cradling men and their fallen, saintly hero. Thus recognized, the “American Pietà” birthed the terror attacks as the crucifixion of the nation, at the same time rendering concrete and prophesized a maternally sanctioned, masculine response. The apparent ease with which the pietà frame fit the postmortem photograph of Judge had much to do with Father Mychal’s own saintly reputation as a longtime servant to the Catholic church and tireless comforter to the sick and needy. Two book-length biographies, one documentary film, a children’s book, and hundreds of online testimonies published since 9/11 render both the impact of Judge’s spiritual and material gifts to others during his life and the extremity of personal and national loss represented by his death.2 After decades of service as a spiritual leader to fellow New Yorkers, Judge died from a blow to his head that occurred while he was in World Trade Center Tower 1 tending to the injured and performing last rites. Having lived and died in a very public role of religious leadership, Judge’s bodily self-sacrifice was perhaps bound to be figured in the shape of Christ. Indeed, very little of the pietà’s traditional religious contours 2 INTRODUCTION needed to shift in order to accommodate the symbolic material of Judge’s prone and lifeless body. What did need to shift and stretch, however, was that component of the pietà mold that originally, timelessly contained the Virgin Mother. In a photographic terror-instant, several male, uniformed first responders were put in her place.3 Circumstances of national emergency floated these five men into a photo-sculpture of compassion: together, they formed one maternal Mary, remarkable for its recasting of the pietà’s conventional gendered symbolics.4 More than anything else, it was Mychal Judge’s visual double identity as Christ and terror “Victim 0001” that made distinctly American and apparently gender-transgressive this holy scene of maternal sacrifice, grief, and ordained resurrection/ retaliation. A nationalism bearing the force of religion lent the American-modified pietà its transposing power to put five men in the symbolic image-space Rescue workers carry fatally injured New York City Fire Department chaplain Father Mychal Judge from one of the World Trade Center towers, September 11, 2001. Philadelphia Weekly reported the image being referred to as “an American Pietà.” REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton. INTRODUCTION 3 of a holy, grieving maternal body. If it was touched and comforted by the pietà’s impressively flexible frame, however, the public at large initially had no knowledge of the degree to which this framing was potentially queer. A fact known to relatively few at the time of his death, Mychal Judge was gay and had for many years served and supported the queer community with his spiritual leadership.5 That his gay identity was largely closeted meant that homophobia had no opportunity to rear its head before Judge was lovingly cast in the Christ position of the pietà or before the pope accepted Judge’s fire helmet on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church.6 Once news of Judge’s gay identity began circulating after his death, however, antigay voices immediately weighed the possibility of Judge’s sainthood against his gayness. In an editorial for Catholic Online, Dennis Lynch, a self-identified longtime friend of Judge, called the gay community’s claiming of Judge as a gay hero a “September 11th hijacking.” Citing only the fact that Judge had never told him he was gay during the ten years in which they’d known each other, Lynch declared that Judge was a “heroic, celibate , faithful Catholic priest” who had been sinisterly misappropriated as a...