Reviewer Patrice Petro calls Tatar’s book “a study of German avant-garde and modernist art and a sustained reflection on the relationships between gender, crime, violence and representation. . .”[2] Leslie Kitchen called the book “…a profound and provocative contribution to our understanding of sexual combat and the aestheticization of violence in modern culture.”[2]

Lilie Chouliaraki’s article The aestheticization of suffering on television (2006) analyzes “an example of war footage in order to trace the ways in which the tension between presenting airwar as an ‘objective’ piece of news and as an instance of intense human suffering is resolved in television’s strategies of mediation.” For example, Chouliaraki argues that the “bombardment of Baghdad in 2003 during the Iraq war was filmed in long-shot and presented in a quasiliterary narrative that capitalized on an aesthetics of horror, on sublime spectacle (Boltanski). The aestheticization of suffering on television is thus produced by a visual and linguistic complex that eliminates the human pain aspect of suffering, whilst retaining the phantasmagoric effects of a tableau vivant”, producing an “aestheticization of suffering [that] manages simultaneously to preserve an aura of objectivity and impartiality, and to take a pro-war side in the war footage.”[