Images of terrorism: negotiating with the media as victim and icon

In a 2006 special issue of the journal Health, Risk and Society, Iain Wilkinson (2006, p. 4) writes about the importance of focusing on both personal risk emotions and broader cultural representations in analyzing major traumatic events. Wilkinson's preference is for an emphasis on how suffering is culturally expressed in contrast to policy-led needs of “expert” discourse, and I want to extend this preference in the first half of my chapter to subjective negotiation with professional and political discourse through the mass media.

The special issue of the journal on “Suffering, health and risk,” included a piece by Andy Alaszewski that caught my eye during my long period of recuperation after being caught in the July 7, 2005 terrorist attack by a suicide bomb exploded by Mohammad Sidique Khan three feet from my body. Here Alaszewski (2006) explores alternative methodologies for the examination of stroke survivors' diaries, and considers reflexively the power of medical and social science discourse to “airbrush … from the record patients' feelings of fear and distress”(p. 56).

In contrast to expert discourse, he emphasizes stroke patients' anxious feelings, taking into account:

• the emotional consequences stemming from the frightening lack of warning of a catastrophic invasion of one's personal health;

• the anxiety about recurrence of the attack;

• the breakdown of everyday confidence and one's sense of ontological security;

• and then, in reaction to all this anxiety, the conscious, painstaking and minutely detailed planning of everyday activities which always used to be taken for granted and once were performed without conscious effort, such as crossing a road or even making a cup of tea.