The daily injuries of authority structures and social discipline under global capitalism proliferate continuously. Yet while the deprivations of poverty are being dismissed as violence in their own right, the deployment of state violence has been elevated to new heights of romantic heroism. Racial, sexual and class violence in the multi-billion-dollar entertainment and music industries normalizes coercive violence by the state apparatus. Between the Pentagon and Hollywood, producing themeans and promotional images of violence have become US export industries par excellence. Globalization arrives inseparable from guns or stories of men and weapons in service to the nation-state.

Representations of violence against 'bad subjects' are being marketed as ideological legitimization for its use, and agents of social domination generate demands for an aestheticized violence that fits political specifications. But 'bad subjects' can't leave their reality cinema or turn off the TV once bullets start flying: we are both the audience and the subjects.

Violence -- even where a defensive or liberational necessity -- is quintessentially ugly. Its representation involves expressive choices that collectively constitute an aesthetic that turns such ugliness to political purposes. This issue of Bad Subjects examines how the aesthetics of violence manifest themselves under the terms of contemporary transnational capitalism. To whose benefit are bodies being mutilated on screens and on streets? How do dominant cultures perpetuate their power through representations of physical domination in action? What happens when violence becomes a consumer item? How did we come to enjoy the sight of violence so, how do we love it so?

Bad Subjects invites violent prose fits on these topics. Contact Arturo Aldama [aaldama@asu.edu] or Joe Lockard [lockard@socrates.berkeley.edu]. March 15, 2002 submission deadline.