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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Good evening everyone and welcome to this hybrid event organized by the Department of Media and Communications here at the lse. It's wonderful to see a full room and I know we have an audience joining us online. Unfortunately, we have some technical problems and the audience online can hear us but not see us. But please stay with us and we will make sure that you participate also at the Q and A session. My name is Miria Giorgio. I'm the head of Department in Media and Communications and I am delighted and honored to chair this event tonight. And this event celebrates and discusses progress Professor Lili Hulleraki's new book, the Weaponization of Victimhood. I would like to start by briefly introducing our panel to you. Lili Hulleraki, the main speaker for today's event is professor of Media and Communications here at the lse. She will be joined by a wonderful panel and to introduce them alphabetically. Next to Lily, we can see Professor Rosalind Gill, who is a professor of of Inequalities in Creative and Cultural Industries at Goldsmiths. We have online Professor Rada Hedge who we will hear. Unfortunately, we won't be able to see who is professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. We also have Professor Karin Jorgensen who is professor of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. I want to warmly welcome them and I want to welcome also our audience both in the room and online. And this is how we're planning the event for tonight. Professor Huyaraki will speak for about 20 minutes and then we will invite Professors Gill, Hedge and Val Jorgensen to speak for about five to seven minutes each. @ the end, we will return for a short exchange before we open to the audience for the Q and A. And audiences again, both online and in the room, can ask their questions. We will finish the event with a reception here in the room and also book signing by Professor Hularagi. For those of you who would like to share your impressions online for this evening's event, please use lsevents. The event is recorded and subject to technical difficulties. We are planning to make it available as podcast.
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Now.
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I was thinking of how to briefly introduce the book and the event to you. I then realized that this is the easiest job in the world and not only because this is a brilliant book, but also because there is so much praise on the book out there already. So instead of my words here, here are some of the responses that the book has attracted already out there in the world and in different settings. So on the LSE Review of Books, Rodrigo Muniz Gonzalez and Ignacio Siles wrote, Cullaraghi crafts a rigorous and compelling argument that helps us understand how victimhood is articulated through mediated discourses, historical conditions and personal experiences, an Amazon reader wrote on the Amazon webpage. More topical and necessary than ever, this book is a real eye opener when it comes to understanding how being a victim has become such a powerful identity in contemporary politics. A must read and we also read in the Atlantic in her book Wronged, the scholar Lili Hulairaghi argues that the practice of claiming harm has has become the rhetorical province of the powerful. She asks readers to turn to a basic, yet hard to solve question, who is vulnerable? And this is what I would like now to invite Professor Juliaragi to do to share with us her response to this question. Please join me to warmly welcome her on the podium.
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In Vaatin's rhetoric, this man is a victim who paid the price by defending a just cause. In reality, he was a perpetrator who victimized women. He was someone who breached the law. He engaged in what the law calls practices of harassment, practices like praying, distributing leaflets and showing images of aborted fetuses to women, some of who to women already were in distress trying to access health care in a country that is predominantly pro abortion, pro choice, in other words. Now these recent examples, and there are many others speak to my argument. Today I will be talking about a key feature of far right political communication, its consistent and effective weaponization of the vocabulary of victimhood at the service of a politics of cruelty and violence that harms particularly the most vulnerable amongst us. My main example in today's talk comes from the debate on reproductive rights in the US and the struggle between precisely the pro abortion and anti abortion stances, or pro choice and pro life ones. So let me start with a quote. The quote is there can be nothing higher or more critical than the defense of innocent unborn life. This is what US State Representative from Oklahoma Jim Olson, a Republican, said on May 19, 2022, speaking of the impending then impending bill to ban abortions in the U.S. this was a mere five weeks before the Supreme Court overturned the landmark ruling of Roe vs Wade, which back in 1973 had legalized abortion, protecting women's right to choose what they want to do with their bodies. As a result of the 2022 overturning, 17 states have today gone back to 1960s legislation which where nearly all abortions are outlawed, while eight states allow some conditional access to procedures just in special cases, a fact that is already impacting approximately 25 million of women, or 29% of all American women of reproductive age, roughly 1 in every 3.4 women. Now, this idea of of the fetus as quotation marks innocent unborn life, in Jim Olson's words, lies at the heart of the far right rhetoric. For this overturning and the idea of protecting this life is framed in that rhetoric. In the legal language of human rights, it's a right to life or to potential life, as the Supreme Court claimed. And there are two things that I want to point out here. Firstly, the idea of the fetus as a person with human rights, whose life is under threat and needs legal protection, casts the fetus as a potential sufferer. Secondly, this same rhetoric turns those who decide to have an abortion into perpetrators. By depriving the fetus of its right to exist, those people are seen to commit violence, in fact, nothing less than murder. These two points, the casting of the fetus as a sufferer entitled to a right to life and the portrayal of those having an abortion as perpetrators, are the two key constituents of the vocabulary of victimhood I discuss. Specifically, what I'm going to be doing today is first of all, I provide a definition of victimhood and break down the concept of victimhood in what I call two languages of pain, trauma and rights. Then I use the anti abortion or pro life argument to understand or help us all understand what it is about victimhood that makes it such a powerful linguistic weapon in our culture and in our politics. To this end, I I introduce three propositions that victimhood is about social struggle for recognition and domination. Secondly, victimhood is a form of politics that creates communities of us and them. And finally, that in order to reach some clarity about how victimhood works as a politics and in politics, we need to separate victimhood from vulnerability. And in conclusion, I ask how we can challenge and reclaim victimhood that is currently weaponized by the far right, and how we can place it at the service of those who are most exposed to violence, those who are most vulnerable in society. So in my book Wronged, I define victimhood quite simply as the communication of suffering that places the victim, the perpetrator and the benefactor at the heart of the conversation. To be more specific, victimhood is about claims to suffering that confirm moral status to the claimant and attribute responsibility for the infliction of or the relief of suffering to other actors. In other words, there is always a Benefactor. When we talk about suffering and victims, and there is also always a perpetrator. And we have just seen in my example, how rights, the right to life, has been used as a claim to suffering that does precisely that. It evokes a victim, the fetus, as potential life in need of protection, a perpetrator, women who have abortions and states that allow them, and a benefactor, pro life activists, Republican politicians, and perhaps above all the Supreme Court that voted for the right to life of sheeters. But it is not only rights that is used as a vocabulary of victimhood, it is also traumatized. Another Republican argument is indeed that women having abortions can suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. Unlike rights, which is a claim to social suffering, or what we might call injury, a lack of rights, or a lack of protection from harm, trauma is about psychological or emotional suffering inflicted upon us by violent or tragic events, relationships or people. Now, the interesting thing is that in the language of. Right. Oh, sorry, in the language of trauma, now the actors of victimhood move around. Women are now victims rather than murderers, with the perpetrators being abortion clinics that are criminalized in certain states. And the feminist activists and political actors that defend abortions, as before, the benefactors are again pro life activists, republican politicians, I mean, in short, those who care for women and they don't want them to suffer emotionally. So in the book, I approach those two languages, trauma and rights, as the two paradigmatic or exemplary languages of pain in our public spheres today. And, and I kind of do a historical kind of overview where I trace their emergence back to the legacy of the Enlightenment, even though these languages really took their current form in late 19th and early 20th century Western thought, in Freud and psychoanalysis, trauma and in liberal Marxian and post Marxian political thought. Sorry, liberal ant Marxian or post Marxian political thought, human rights. So even though I can hardly go through the complex genealogy of these legacies here, but chapters one and two of the book actually engage quite intensely with those questions. In the course of the 20th century, these two languages came to dominate our public discourse and have now become indispensable in institutional communication, in the workplace, in education, in the media, in politics, deeply entrenching our ways of speaking, thinking and feeling about ourselves and about our political and social relations. With those claims, that's my right, or I feel traumatized. These are of course, phenomena that have already been theorized by a number of. Of social theorists, sociologists, et cetera, et cetera. For instance, Eva Illus, who I draw heavily on in my own work, calls this culture of the 20th century emotional capitalism. Frank Reddy calls it a culture of therapy. Did Jefferson and Rechtman call it an empire of trauma, et cetera, et cetera. Now, while I have personally greatly benefited from engaging with all these accounts, my own contribution to the definition of victimhood is to move beyond that idea that victimhood is just one single word that signifies the suffering self. I am a victim. And to think of victimhood as, in fact, a whole vocabulary of pain that bifurcates, as I just pointed out through the example, into emotional suffering and into social suffering. These are two quite distinct domains into both trauma and rights. And as I show below, this capacity of victimhood to shape, shift and bifurcate in different languages of pain matters enormously in political communication. If trauma is grounded on the therapeutic encounter, on empathetic dialogue and the emotional healing of the psyche. Rights has historically been the language of mass social movements of collective protest against the injuries of, for instance, the working class in the French Revolution, basically in classical Marxism, of women, black people, colonial against colonial subjugation, et cetera, et cetera. So rights has historically emerged as the language of the oppressed and the language of the marginalized, but also more recently, and when I say more recently, I mean mid 20th century, post World War II, human rights has also become institutionalized as the language of global governance of the UN, the International Court of Justice, etc. Etc. Or where human rights works as sometimes successfully, sometimes not. So it works as legal protection from various forms of violence for the most vulnerable individuals and groups in the world. So these are really my definitions. What is victimhood, which are the languages of pain and how they have developed historically. So on the basis of these definitions, let me now move to the next part of my talk, which kind of moves from defining to understanding victimhood, from what victimhood means to how exactly victimhood works, and specifically how it manages to work as an efficacious form of political communication in our public discourse. And to do this, we now need to turn to those three properties I mentioned earlier. These three properties or concepts around victimhood that I also introduce as part of my own contribution to the discussion on what victimhood is and how it works. And all three propositions are actually already implicit in the argument that I made earlier. So the first thing to say here is that we need to approach victimhood not as an appeal to empathy and altruism, but or not only as an appeal to empathy and altruism, but to also begin seeing it as part of social contestation and social struggle. As my brief Historical excursion into the histories of trauma and rights suggests our culture and our institutions are have today come to attach extraordinary moral and political value to the victim. And this value, this normative premium on victimhood, renders pain and suffering a desirable form of capital to be accumulated and protected by those who claim it. Another way of saying this is that after as our societies are full of conflicting positions, groups and their interests, the languages of pain have now become key strategic resources available for co optation by any group to be used for their own aims and their own purposes, for attention, visibility, recognition. It is in this sense that, as I said, claiming to be a victim is not only about asking for empathy or or seeking consensus. It's about claiming to be. It's about primarily about seeking domination in a terrain of rival social forces and interests. Victimhood, in other words, is a space of struggle where claims to psychological suffering I'm traumatized or I'm triggered, et cetera, et cetera, and claims to social suffering I have been injured, I've been wronged, coexist, compete, clash and mix with one another. And just like we saw in the anti abortion example, struggles over victimhood are struggles over the kinds of value that those who own the capital of suffering invest upon the other actors in the languages of pain. Who is the victim to be empathized with? Who needs to be castigated and punished as perpetrator, and who is to be applauded or rewarded as a benefactor? Think back to the work that victimhood does in the anti abortion rhetoric. By placing suffering and pain at the heart of its argument and by attaching the language of rights to the category of unborn life, this rhetoric manages to conjure up a worthy victim. The features and in this way to re narrate a deeply misogynistic narrative of the evangelical far right that women's bodies are not theirs to control into a rights based activism, a moral cause. Innocent unborn babies have a right to life and we are the good ones. Because we fight for them, we have a responsibility to protect them. Simultaneously, this same rhetoric places women in an ambivalent position of both the perpetrator castigating them on their decisions on abortion, and of the victim warning them of the risks of PTSD and wanting to protect them from the trauma of abortion. So women in this rhetoric are there to police and control, but also to patronize and save from themselves. We could say that the overturning of Roe vs. Wade relied precisely on this reversal of victimhood that attaches blame and guilt on women and praise to Those backrolling one of the most important legal victories for women in the 20th century. And this reversal, this capacity of victimhood to twist and turn, to shape, shift, as I said, attachments to pain, takes me to the second contribution that I'm making to debates on the role of the victim in contemporary politics and culture, namely, that when we speak of victimhood, we do not refer to a fixed identity within a person. That is an identity essential to the self. Rather, victimhood is a whole politics of communication, a politics of communicating pain. In this politics of pain, claims to trauma and injury, emotional and social suffering, engage in tactical relationships of blame and praise, and in so doing, bring together particular communities of recognition and belonging. It's us who have suffered and exclude others from these communities. It's a them. Are you with us, the victims, or with them the perpetrator? So how exactly does this politics of pain work? I'm coming back to the bifurcation of the two languages of pain. And if you like, the semantic slipperiness or mutability of victimhood, its shape shifting capacity to choreograph itself into various narratives of blame and praise. We saw, for instance, that victimhood has the capacity to produce, first of all, simultaneous but contradictory claims. Women can be perpetrators and they can be victims. Or to put it another way, we have competing but simultaneous attachments within the same category of identity. Women can be both, at the same time, murderers and traumatized by this token. Victimhood can thus be claimed by everyone and anyone. It can be claimed by perpetrators, who can also be victims. It can even be claimed in the name of those who do not exist as persons. For instance, the fetus. The fetus did not acquire legal personhood. There was no person attached to to the fetus until the June 2022 Supreme Court decision. And finally, just as it can be attached to known persons, victimhood can also be denied to real persons. Women, for instance, are not recognized as victims of the law and its misogyny. And here comes my third and final contribution to our understanding of victimhood as a political vocabulary. With victimhood, it does not really matter whether the claimant is vulnerable. It does not matter which position of structural vulnerability one objectively occupies in social space. And by objectively here I refer to the historical and contemporary scientific indicators, qualitative and quantitative, that show us exactly which social groups are more exposed to structures of violence more than others. So I am talking about sociological work that has established who suffers by what. And when I talk about structures of violence, I'm talking about poverty, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of deprivation, discrimination, abuse, death, and hence they are also more likely to be systematically victimized. Instead, what matters in victimhood is power. What forms of power do those who claim victimhood hold? Where do they stand in pre existing social hierarchies? What kinds of capital do they own? Economic, symbolic, cultural? And what kinds of access, credibility and authority do these forms of capital grant them? What do these forms of capital protect claimants from? But also what kinds of violence? Those without certain forms of capital are those without certain forms of capital exposed to? While such questions cannot really adjudicate individual claims to pain, so we can't go to any individual who claims to be suffering and tell them whether they are a real victim or not. And that is absolutely not what I'm trying to do in this work. Primarily because everybody, of course, feels pain. A lot of forms of pain are invisible. A lot of forms of pain are intersectional. So this is not an exercise in finding real from fake victims or differentiating real from fake victims. These questions nonetheless help us navigate our public conversations by keeping a crucial distinction in mind. The distinction between victimhood as a specific speech act and vulnerability as a condition of the self. What is this distinction about? As I have already shown through the example we have been using, victimhood is a claim about me, an act by which I announce myself, a performance of my identity. I am traumatized. Vulnerability, on the other hand, is not about speech and it is not about identity. Vulnerability is about social space and social positions. And the question here is not what identity are you communicating? But what is your place in society? And it is here that, as I just mentioned, socioeconomic markers and stratifications of class, gender, race, sexuality, ability, age, etc. Etc. Are crucial. These markers are not identities in themselves. They are indicators that tell us quite a lot about the kinds of violence that some people are likely to experience because of their position in society. So different people may be exposed to different intersections or configurations of violence and may be sheltered from others, depending on where they stand on this, if you like, imaginary continuum between abject vulnerability, someone who has nothing, and full privilege, the super rich, for instance. So back to our pro life anti abortion example. Claims to women as perpetrators and not as victims occur despite the bulk of medical and social scientific research. Socioeconomic evidence, in other words, showing the multiple systemic harms and inflicted upon women being denied the option of abortion. Recent research, for instance, in the American Journal of Public Health, entered the British Medical Journal, and here I have a screenshot of the first of the American Journal for Public Health. You don't have to read because I'm going to very quickly go through the findings have documented that abortion bans in the US have already led to substantial health harms for women, severe health complications and deaths, as well as economic hardship and struggling financially and moreover mental health issues, trauma, anxiety, stress, low self esteem, et cetera. So not only physical suffering, but also emotional and psychological suffering, trauma and rights, sorry and injury. The BMJ in particular mentions that among all categories, black women were already three times more likely to die from pregnancy related causes than white women. And following the abortion ban, this group has been projected to experience a 33% increase in pregnancy related deaths. Here are the intersections of structural vulnerability and how they reflect themselves in kind of objective or scientific data. So in conclusion, where can we go from here? In a world where we witness the rise and rise of the far right, with real existential risks looming over women and other minoritized groups and the planet itself, but where much structural pain remains invisible, what vocabulary is there to use to reflect on and politicize this pain? There is more in the book, but I just want to end with two proposals here. Firstly, I argue that we need to seek to replace the hate driven uses of victimhood that divide us into communities of us and our enemies with uses of pain that highlight continuities and intersections of vulnerability across social and political communities. Just a minute ago I spoke about social space and how the social sciences categorize human experiences neatly in boxes, socioeconomic boxes, which of course do a good job because they enable us to speak about the social conditions of vulnerability in a clear and credible way. Yet human experience is complex and diverse, and no individual fits neatly into those. Each one of us experiences a cross section of vulnerabilities and privileges, and there are always pathways to meeting others, connecting and and getting together in communities, creating alliances and producing narratives of collective vision and desire together. And so these stories, of course they can be and should be about pain and grief, but at the same time they can also be about empathy and gratitude and joy and humor. There is a range of emotions that can bring people together. And if victimhood is about relating, about establishing relations across the actors of suffering, then what kinds of relations we choose to narrate in our communication of pain is, in my view, a key political question that has not been addressed adequately yet. Now, sorry. So here we are. That was my first kind of thought about how we can rethink victimhood from a perspective of connection rather than division. And the second one the second proposal is just simply to be a bit more suspicious of claims to victimhood. One of the reasons why victimhood works so efficiently is because we tend to think of the victim as a core identity, one that, as I said, carries its traumas and injuries and deep emotions throughout life. And of course, I'm not denying that we feel that way very often, and this is part of our lived experience. But the distinction I drew between being vulnerable and claiming to be a victim is equally important. We need to start asking questions about victimhood that break down that concept into its communicative constituents. And so here is a methodological framework, what in the book I call the heuristics of victimhood that I think can begin to help us keep the two vulnerability and victimhood intention in some form of dialogue every time we are confronted with emotional, often angry claims to having been victimized. Who claims pain, for whom? In which capacity and from which social position of relative power? Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator in this claim? Let's start separating these out and trying to kind of think reflexively about them. Which truth claims does this claim to pain articulate? Where is the evidence? What exactly is used as the evidence for that kind of claim to pain? Which historical context is it made? And as we all know, context is one of the most political questions. What we define as context every time changes and becomes a kind of a point of heated contestation. What kinds of emotions and actions does the claim to victimhood mobilize? What kinds of community does it bring together? And what kinds of exclusion does it presuppose and perpetuate? What are the implications of these exclusions for those who are already structurally vulnerable in our societies? And finally, a question that I don't know. I think it's probably too ambitious to ask, but I think it's important to put ourselves, you know, vis a vis that responsibility as well. What tangible protection can we give the structurally vulnerable? How can we keep others like them safe? Addressing these questions can help us make our judgment on where we stand when we are confronted with claims to victimhood based on the conditions of the suffering, rather than prior habitual attachments or attachments of tradition, the force of authority, or simply virality, simply what is popular online? Now more than ever, it is important to employ this heuristic framework to help us navigate public discourse with more clarity about what victimhood is and how it works. For without such clarity, the tactical uses of victimhood, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt here, can and will continue to change the world. But the most probable change will be to a world with more, not less, suffering. Thank you very much.
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So we'll go to Professor Gill and then to Karen and then to Rada Hedge online.
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C
Okay. Hi, everybody. Thank you.
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A
Thank you so much for inviting me to speak. It's been absolutely great reading this book and thinking with it over the last couple of weeks, and I'm really delighted to be here. So, first and foremost, I think this is a celebration. So huge congratulations, Lily, on the book. This should be a celebration as well as an engaged conversation. And it's lovely to be in this warm surroundings of the Shaw Library and also to be so aware of so many friends and colleagues of yours who are online and family members who are celebrating you. So very warm congratulations. And I think Wronged is an important book and a book that identifies a very important shift, drawing together the ways that claims about victimhood are at the heart of contemporary politics, and particularly how discourses about victimization have become central to the rise of the far right. So I'm just going to pick out a few highlights, a few questions, and some brief observations. And I'll start with history, because that's where you start. And I think the work that you do in the book of situating the rise and the weaponization of victimhood is really impressive and fascinating. I found it particularly interesting how you trace the soldier's body as central to the transformation that you describe. And particularly you show that this privileging of this white male heroic pain has given men the legacy of what you call testimonial entitlement to talk about their pain and their suffering and be believed, even when this was highly complicated. But by the Vietnam War and wars since then, particularly you mentioned in the Gulf and in Afghanistan and the rise of ptsd, which of course leaves no visible scars from which to authorize a position of suffering. And your analysis here really resonated for me with Sanda Gilman's extraordinary historical work of documenting shifts in relation to the the history of cosmetic medicine, again once seen as heroic when it was performed on the bodies of soldiers returning from war to repair their injured bodies, but then latterly associated predominantly with women and disparaged by the values of what's seen as a feminized consumer culture. And also, as you said, you trace pain in relation to psychoanalytic and human rights discourses and to the Holocaust, facilitating almost a template for the representation of almost all subsequent trauma. But I wanted to pick up on really an alternative history or a potential alternative history that I felt wasn't explored here. And that is the turn against discourses of victimhood and victimization from within anti oppression and liberation struggles themselves. So I'm thinking in particular of feminism, of course, and the revolt against victim identities that was seen from the 1990s onwards, but also post colonial struggles, LGBTQ struggles, which have all foregrounded agency, resistance, pride, joy. And secondly, on this point about tracing the history of this formation, I wondered if there was kind of a missing section for me, which was around the 1980s and the early 1990s when scholars started tracing different constructions of complaints. So you do mention Robert Hughes book Culture of Complaint and Lauren Berlant's work and so on. And I wondered if you see a connection between the attacks on what was said, seen back then as political correctness and the so called culture wars of today, and particularly the role that victimhood plays within those culture wars. And I wanted to note alongside and entangled with the appropriation of victim discourses by the right is the continued difficulty, and indeed sometimes near impossibility, of speaking out for those subjects who truly have been victimized. And as Gilly Kay and Sarah Bonet Wiser put it, in relation to sexual violence, even if women do everything right, their voices and their stories still often don't break through beyond mere visibility. And this is because the rules of the game are stacked against them, and particularly of course, against, against women who are not white, who are not cis, who are not middle class, who are not femme presenting, who are not able bodied, slim, heterosexual and so on. And Sarah Bonet Weiser and Kat Higgins work on the Economy of Believability, I think is also really vital reading here. And so too is Amir Srinivasan's notion of affective injustice. I think this is really important to note that alongside all the other forms of injustice that characterize our society, economic injustice, social injustice, cultural injustice, there's also affective injustice which structurally disadvantages marginalized groups, making it both harder to speak out, less likely that they'll be believed, and more likely that they'll receive further victimization. And I think your work really contributes to, to thinking about the mechanisms of that affective injustice, including building on ideas such as himpathy as discussed by Kate Mann, or the false equivalences set up by hashtags like all lives matter or men too, which obfuscate and seek to erase the particularities of race and gender based oppressions. So I think you can tell that I'm largely in agreement with your argument, even while I'm adding the more examples different histories, different concepts to think with. But I do want to raise a final set of critical comments about really kind of what action, what intellectual work, what next steps, what kind of politics is needed to engage with the weaponization of victimhood? And as you've just told us in your final chapter, you raise some heuristic questions that we might ask to help to determine who might rightfully be called or lay claim to being a victim, as opposed to merely experiencing pain, which is part of the human condition. And in a way, the questions that you suggest are very familiar, socio theological questions asking for, as you said, contextual information, such as which social positions do people occupy in relation to gender, race, class, who speaks, in what capacity, what truth claims do they mobilise, who's included, who's excluded? And these are all, in my view, really good and even vital questions, but I do worry that they may be seen as even despite your position about not wanting to make individual adjudications, as presupposing that we always know already and in advance whose claims are legitimate and whose claims are not, so might this risk kind of determining the validity of claims based on social position, effectively just flipping the current social order with its sympathy or its systematic favoring of whiteness? I think that wouldn't be radical enough, and it would be problematic. And it's not what you're arguing, I think. But how might we address situations in which there are multiple and different claims to victimhood? How might we distinguish between competing claims among marginalized groups, between the white woman who claims she's been raped, the black woman who claims that her son's been framed by a racist criminal justice system? And in my view, much of the really interesting and difficult issues and work actually fall into this gray zone because, as Patricia Hill Collins put it, we live in a matrix of domination in which there are few pure oppressors and few pure victims. And these complexities make it complicated to just believe allwomen. So finally, I just wonder whether it's worth distinguishing between those really relatively few in number and highly powerful people who mobilize claims of victimhood deliberately and cynically, the Brett Kavanaughs, the Donald Trumps of this world and the media machines that support them, and counterpose that to the many, in my view, far greater in number, for whom the claims might resonate because they feel in some way that they have been wronged, or because they've lost out in the social or economic or cultural order. And these latter people are not powerful, they're not necessarily in some way natural supporters of the right. And this, I think, is actually the challenge for the left and the failure of the current left for not taking seriously and connecting with these sentiments and taking the opportunity to channel and relocate them through different inclusive and progressive discourses. So for me, I think we have an ethical obligation as sociologists to listen and try to understand widespread expressions of grievance. And we also have a political obligation as people who want a more just world. It's vital because as Stuart hall said, these articulations that have caused victimhood to be so central to the rise of the right are not necessary. They're not determined, they're not absolute, they're not essential. They're contingent. They can be changed. Things could be otherwise, another world is possible. Thank you.
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B
Professor Raul Jorgensen, please.
- [47:01]
A
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [47:31]
D
Good evening, and it's such a delight to. To see so many people here in this beautiful space to celebrate this wonderful book, this great intellectual achievement. And so I'm very, very honored to be here tonight to pay tribute to what I see as a great new masterpiece by one of the scholars that I admire the most in the world. Not only that, but I think it's also fair to say which one of the reviews read out by Miria suggested that Wronged is a book that has arrived at just the right time, asking all the urgent questions that we need to ask ourselves right now. In its preoccupation with some of these most urgent political questions of our time, it shows us that scholarship can and does engage with the world around us, and in doing so, that it gives us the answers to how we can change the world for the better. Now, therefore, for me, if there is one book that you have to read to better understand this particular historical moment, it's this one. It's this book because it explains how we have come to inhabit a world in which the powerful and the dominant in society are actually able to perpetuate their privilege by making claims to victimhood. So Wrong presents us with this very profound, in a sense, moral paradox and this ironic reversal. It presents us with the fact that in contemporary societies, the school bully, along with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, let's throw in Andrew Tate and Elon Musk, to mention just a few examples, not accidentally, that all of these very powerful actors can successfully cast themselves as victims. Now, how does that happen? Well, the book is set against the backdrop of the rise of authoritarian populism and the growing weaponization of narratives of victimhood on social media platforms. And I think it's important to note that in that context where truth is a really tenuous resource that creates the conditions where suffering becomes a claim that's selectively adopted by individuals or groups for their gain, as Lilly puts it in the book. And in doing so they promote a broader victimhood culture. And I think what the book really powerfully demonstrates is that because the voices of the most powerful and wealthy in society are also the loudest, their claims are heard over and above the suffering of the marginalized, the poor, and those who are actually victimized by the cruelties of the powerful, even if those who are victimized may actually be cast as the perpetrators. Now, in the past, I found the historian William Reddy's concept of an emotional regime to be a very compelling way of understanding how forms of emotional discourse become embedded and dominant within a particular historical era. When he talks about the idea of an emotional regime, he means dominant constellations of emotions and ways of expressing them in public. He suggests that emotional expression can be understood as a kind of speech act. When we speak of our emotions, we make them come alive. So to ready, the expression of emotion, or what he calls emotives, constitutes a type of speech act which both describes and changes the world. Because emotional expression has an exploratory and self altering effect on the activated thought material of emotion. What Lilly's book shows us is that the act of claiming victimhood also frequently as a way of perpetuating cruelty, is the dominant emotional regime of our era. In a sense, I think everyone who will have read this book will find this quite upsetting in certain ways. But it's also useful to know that because it provides us with potential solutions and strategies of assistance. Lilly's talked about some of what these potential solutions and strategies of assistance involve. One thing that she picks up on is that resisting this emotional regime ultimately also relies on emotionally inflicted narratives, relies on narratives of victimhood based on the actual lived experience of pain, requiring, as she puts it, crafting new narratives of joy, justice, narratives that combine the languages of pain and their emotions, empathy and anger, with explicit argument and informed judgment underpinning that. Now, when I was reading this I found myself very much in agreement, also thinking it may sound easy, but it's not. It places the onus on the public storytellers among us to actually find and craft these narratives. What that means is that it requires an explicit ethical commitment to justice and commitment to resistance. And this is something that can sit in tension with, for example, professional self understandings of journalists. At the same time, this is I think, a really essential ethical commitment that we see embedded really in all of Lili's work over the years, this commitment to justice for those who suffer, those who are victimized, and those who do not have a voice in the public sphere. And it is one that's given renewed impetus by our current emotional regime. So, in summary, the bad news is that victimhood and pain are here to stay. But the good news is, if we can put it that way, that progressive social change is possible within this new emotional regime and that there are therefore grounds for optimism. Thank you very much.
- [54:36]
C
Thank you.
- [54:37]
B
Hopefully fall goes well and I hope we have some IT support. We will now hear from Professor Radha Hedge online. Radha, can you hear us?
- [54:51]
C
Yes, yes.
- [54:52]
E
I guess the camera doesn't work, right?
- [54:56]
B
No, the camera doesn't work, but we hear you perfectly.
- [54:58]
C
Oh, okay.
- [55:00]
E
Thanks Miriya. First of all, congratulations. Lily, can you all hear me?
- [55:07]
C
Yes, yes, thank you so much.
- [55:09]
E
Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity to engage with your rich book. And it's a pleasure to be in conversation with you and I guess a sonic exchange with the others and to be with Ross, Karen and Mirya. When a president of a war torn country is blamed for starting the war by the President of the United States States and accused of gambling with World War 3, all understandings of victim and aggressor are thrown on the wayside and also civility. This dramatic change has caused political ripples and as Lily writes in her editorial just yesterday, every shift in who we recognize as the victim is simultaneously a shift in who we believe deserves justice. Claiming victimhood, as this important and timely book notes, is about claiming power with political insight. The book argues that the injured self emerges at the intersections of embodied experiences and the available language of pain. The book situates victimhood as a communicative act where the value of the victim attaches itself selectively to certain bodies. Building on this premise that the book explores a vast moral, political and cultural terrain. This tightly organized and eminently readable book invites the reader on an intellectual journey to run with the ideas and engage the heuristic proposed to other contexts, other conjunctures. It is with this spirit that I frame my comments. The book argues that it is in the coming together of the economy, emotion, and in technology that has created a marketplace of victims competing for dominance. The discussion evokes various types of violence patriarchal, genocidal, colonial state, symbolic, digital in order to highlight how claims to victimhood have evolved. While the book's focus is on the communication of victimhood, the capacity to speak, and the platformization of pain, it makes one think about the cultures of violence that create these spaces of victimization. Acts of violence are almost often depicted in linear chronology, and this too reserved for violence that can be captured in numbers and figures. What did we think about violence itself? As my colleague Alan Feldman writes, as an unfolding continuum of meaning within which victimhood is constituted, then we begin to see contradictions and failures of the system. Since the book is so highly attentive to questions of context specificity, it would be of interest to think further about how this economy of representation that valorizes the linear and the chronological poses a challenge to unraveling the disjunctures inherent in victimhood. I'm prompted to think about these contradictions by the book's own call to see systemic vulnerability and tactical victimhood not in opposition but as hybrid configurations. The book excels in weaving context and critique together with the goal of capturing claims to pain as situated acts of power. Illustrative of this is the identification of symbolic tropes of cruelty, one being affective centering and the position of the white privileged male self, AKA Karen, and the other being idealization, which projects the innocent white female victim. This was another moment when I was reading this book which took me to other instances in history and literature of white women and their fear of sexuality, of men of color. Donald Trump has cashed in on these isolated cases of white women victims who were allegedly raped by undocumented immigrants and has given them front row seats as props to further his masculinist and militaristic agenda. This idealized vision of white female innocence seems to do the trick each time to consolidate white masculinity and, as the book shows vividly, the mission of populist politics. Turning to the figure of the white male soldier who I see that Ross mentioned also, this book highlights the testimonial entitlement sometimes denied to others. The suffering of the white soldier, the book states, projects the conception of the Western male self as fundamentally good and only accidentally bad and deserving always of compassion. Some fine writing, Lily. This paradoxical figuration of the compassionate warrior, the book argues, has historically been linked to history of exclusion and forgetting. While the racism is well documented in the book, I would also add that these regimes of exclusion have been held up by the violence of misrecognition meted out to non white and non Western males who are marked by their propensity to violence and therefore ineligible for claiming victimhood on the notion of ineligibility. Embedded along with these other selves is of course the figure of the unfailing figure of the woman from the global south, the woman in a burqa in a village in Afghanistan, the migrant woman with a child crossing the Rio Grande. These women are seen as bodies which have absorbed their victimage and hence not worthy of compassion. Both these already injured bodies and the idealized bodies of white female innocence are figures that seem to be made for iterative circulation. Both have the capacity to regenerate across context and in order to sustain the myth of the fundamentally flawed black male body and consolidate compassionate white masculinity. What makes these belabored tropes arise in new avatars and service new masters and assume positions in the continuum of victimage? The answer perhaps is stark, but one needs to continually ask how this resuscitation happens, distinct and separate. On one level, these narratives and images of victimhood sustain one another, one who is contaminated by violence and the other who is an extension. Why and how do we need to think about layering and interconnections between these figurations of vulnerability? Just a few more thoughts. The book offers a set of questions to take the project and the moral drive of Lilly's argument further. I see this addition of heuristics as an important exercise, a methodology to rethink a media theory of victimhood that could take into account structural inequalities and injustices. Representing the victim as the one acted upon and as incompatible with any sense of agency was a dominant concern of feminist scholars, and much theoretical ink has been poured on this piece space in general and by post colonial feminists. The mutation of this figure of the victim minus agency, who now mutates into a potent identity in the neoliberal landscape. Mediascape, as described in Lilly's book, marks an interesting turning point in media studies which raises a disciplinary question about the need for inserting conceptual and theoretical genealogies and into pedagogy in communication and media studies. Wrong certainly makes a contribution towards this end. Towards the conclusion, the book argues that the need of the moment is to balance individualistic explanations with collectivist narratives of justice, but warns that this might be a dated enterprise in the current media environment and its vitality driven economies of attention. In this moment of global chaos and political reversals. How do we balance ideas of obsolescence? And I did see one of the chat messages because I'm sitting in front of my computer without a camera. Generational accounts as well. And the need for political intervention. How do you balance this? The virality, I mean, the obsolescence and the need for political intervention. The need for generationally apt discourse and political intervention and social transformation wronged with its attention to political realities and a deep commitment to a democratic vision, succeeds admirably by opening up the limits of political discourse. Thank you very much, Lily, for the opportunity and thank you all.
- [64:20]
B
Thank you so much.
- [64:21]
A
Radha.
- [64:22]
C
Thank you so much.
- [64:25]
B
I will now invite Lily to give just very brief a couple of minutes perhaps, responses to our three discussions and then we'll go straight to Q and A. So please start collecting your thoughts and your questions. Type your questions in the Q and A box if you're joining us from home. And we will have a roaming mic going around the room in a minute.
- [64:51]
C
Yes, I will try to be brief because I can see that we only have maybe a little bit more than 15 minutes left. So I will try to bring together at least two to three points that have been made by different speakers. And I want to concentrate on the point about leaving out of, of the book different historical accounts and genealogies. They have not been explored. For instance, genealogies around the struggles of victimhood of, by anti, you know, by oppressed groups, post colonial struggles, feminist struggles, et cetera, et cetera. I did leave those histories out, and that is not because I'm not interested in that, but because this particular book was trying to focus on the question who is today the ideal victim? What is the dominant imaginary of pain through which everything else is refracted? And in my view, if the focus is on what dominates our public culture today, then we need to go back to the 20th century and look at two key moments. One is what shaped the culture of pain and the imaginary of pain at that time. And in my view, that was a kind of intellectual judgment I made. It was the two world wars. And that is what the second chapter of the book focuses on. We are talking about mass suffering around the world, and particularly in the European continent. And there is a particular memory of those wars and a particular way of commemorating the victims of those wars that systematically leave out women, leave out the home front and leave out colonial armies, all those brown and black populations that fought for their empires but were not even registered in cemeteries or in death lists of those wars. And so starting from the age of catastrophe, so to speak. I think I was able to create a story that basically tells how the suffering of the white men in particular came to be the focus both of scientific research, cosmetic surgery, therapeutic culture as a whole. And as Radha said, one of the reflections of that culture today is precisely the kind of toxic masculinity that is embodied and enacted through figures like Trump. But not only so there is this primacy of the wounded white masculinity, but there are also the tropes of language that are ready to find justification for male abuse, but castigate and blame women even when they are abused and attacked, or who are ready to believe men and take their word for a trace value, but. But who do not believe women even when the evidence is there. I think there is a connection between the history of the dominant imaginary of pain and the centering of white men throughout the 20th century and some of the phenomena around toxic masculinity that we are and the kind of deficit of female believability that we are experiencing in our culture today. I think I don't have time to address.
- [68:42]
B
I'm sure more issues will come back in the Q and A.
- [68:45]
D
So perhaps.
- [68:46]
B
Shall we open the floor?
- [68:47]
C
Yeah, I think so. To get some questions?
- [68:50]
A
Yes.
- [68:51]
B
Okay, so we have roaming mics. Please identify yourselves.
- [68:56]
C
I see a hand there on the back.
- [68:58]
B
Two hands. Let me three. We'll take those three questions. The person on the back with the blue checkered shirt. Then we have one here and then one there. I'll stand there just to be able to see, please.
- [69:15]
C
Thank you for the great talks, Lily, and also the great books. I'm Antonius, a student from the ucl. So my question is, what do you think about the role of the social media in this issue that make society more divided and like a lack of mutual respect and understanding to find the common ground and just to make a polarization in our society. Thank you.
- [69:42]
A
Thank you.
- [69:44]
B
Person here with the black, please.
- [69:48]
E
Thank you, professor, for such a wonderful contribution.
- [69:50]
C
I'm doing a PhD in sociology at Cambridge, and I was wondering, what do.
- [69:54]
D
You make of the role, the epistemic position of ignorance.
- [69:59]
C
Of ignorance in positioning victimhood amongst, you know, different identities and the person with.
- [70:07]
B
The white top there.
- [70:08]
D
Yes.
- [70:11]
C
Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, everyone for your contributions. I wanted to ask a question around kind of the wounded white masculinity, Lily. And kind of, what do you think of the idea of kind of the response to when people kind of. Or groups claim victimhood of. Oh, the narrative is quite tired now. Or you know, say, for example, slavery happened how many hundreds of years ago? Kind of not the get over it. But how can you be a victim of that today when that happened so long ago? And yeah, and the idea of the rhetoric, I guess, which mainly comes from the right of people want to be victims now, people want to be oppressed. It's almost fashionable, or there's the power in it. They see the power in being able to claim victimhood because they see visibility of it. And yeah, that kind of neurosis. Thank you very much. Yeah, I can just up to you and just do that. Just to start on that last question, I think there are like two dimensions to it. I think the first one is that we have a kind of a conservative, reactionary, far right argument about claims to victimhood that are being put forward in the public sphere by groups that are marginalized, oppressed, but are structurally vulnerable and that engage in those historical practices of protest and of claiming justice for their cause. And of course, the whole vocabulary of woke culture or of everyone is a victim now is part of, if you like, that kind of attempt to neutralize, radicalize or to trivialize those, you know, those voices and those struggles. So we need to be aware of that. You know, especially for me, the term woke is really a weaponization of claims to justice by people who are, as I said, structurally vulnerable. And it is being used to prior primarily by those in power to kind of trivialize or undermine those particular struggles. So I think as a term, even though you didn't ask me, ask, I'm just going to volunteer that I think as a term it conceals more than it reveals. And I personally use it only to exemplify precisely that point, rather than use it analytically or use it descriptively in order to label, label any of the social phenomena, especially of discontent and of struggle that we see in society. On the other hand, I have to say, and this is part of my argument and my talk earlier, I think we do live in emotional capitalism. I do believe that victimhood is a form of capital and therefore there is a kind of increased social civic reflexivity around the, you know, the efficacy of victimhood in the public sphere. So of course it is used strategically and it is used strategically very successfully by the far right. But I would say that any group that tries to make a public intervention, any group, wherever they stand in the political spectrum, including the left, can actually use victimhood strategically in order to position itself within that field of struggle, gain dominance, gain visibility, gain, you know, recognition. As I said, now the extent to which that struggle is fair and just and whether it actually does serves the kind of interests and the voices of. Of structurally vulnerable groups and individuals is a matter of situated judgment for me. So there are no blanket judgments we can make about that voice or that movement or that group. I think these questions are very particular. They have a context. They have a kind of historical specificity, and I would kind of locate them there. So then I'm going to take the question on the platformization of pain. So one of the things that I'm saying, I'm arguing in wrong is that the circulation and the amplification of claims to pain, once they enter the logic of social media platforms follow and obey the economic calculus of the platform. So it is not about the value of the claimant. It is not about the structural vulnerability of the claimer or the kind of just and true nature of the claim. It has to do with whether that claim helps amplify and monetize, you know, create value for the platform. So that that is really the main. The main argument about the platformization of pain, that the calculus of circulation and amplification is the economic interest of that platform. And there are two things to say about that. The one is that ultimately those who are, are already famous, those who are already prominent, those who are already well known and established, and therefore those who are already profitable for platforms are going to have their voices heard and are going to have their voices go viral and be amplified more than others. Sometimes it does feel like speaking into the void when certain voices come into, you know, social media platforms, even though platforms are invested in narratives of democratization and equality of voice, etc. Etc. I think by now all of these narratives and myths have been kind of shot down. But still, there was a time when that's what we used to believe. The other thing I wanted to say about platformization, beyond the kind of hierarchy of voices and hierarchies of suffering that being reproduced, is that all claims to suffering are individualized, because that's the nature of the platform. It is me. It is each one of us who tweets or, you know, kind of upload something in their feed, whether it is Instagram or a video on TikTok or whatever. There is, of course, the function of the hashtag that tries to create a kind of virtual community. But essentially all claims are about my truth. Truth, my suffering, my experience. And the fundamental problem with that is that what we really need are collectivist kind of narratives of suffering and justice, not individualized claims. These individualized claims, then also invite individualized solutions. And we have that as well. Self care, take care of yourself or I download that app or, or do a bit of therapy, which I'm not in any way looking down on, but I just don't think that this can be a kind of a problem to structural issues or vulnerability.
- [77:59]
B
I missed the third question, the ignorance.
- [78:03]
C
What was it?
- [78:04]
B
It was on ignorance. Of ignorance.
- [78:15]
C
Oh, of ignorance in relation to victimhood. Okay. Yeah, well, one answer I can give to that, and sorry, I didn't catch the, you know, the formulation from the start is that part of the kind of communicative structure of victimhood is in fact a kind of an inbuilt capacity for creating ignorance as well. And that has to do with which voices of suffering, which narratives of suffering are being prioritized, are being promoted, are being remembered and commemorated. And that's part of the narrative of that chapter that I mentioned about the kind of construction of the white soldier, European soldier, essentially as the quintessential figure of 20th century suffering. That particular construction is based on a kind and the communicative structure of pain and victimhood that has already built into it the possibility of forgetting, forgetting other soldiers, forgetting other kind of fighting subjectivities whose suffering, death and memory were simply kept out of the public narratives of remembering. So that is just one example in which ignorance, willful ignorance, is being built into the structure of suffering.
- [80:00]
A
Thank you.
- [80:02]
B
I'm afraid we run out of time, but the good news is that we have a reception to follow where you will have the chance both to discuss more of your questions with Lili, but also with our panelists, a part of course, from Professor Hedge, who I want to thank again. And unfortunately she's not here.
- [80:23]
C
Let me just also thank our panel. I want to thank Ross and Karen and Radha for being incredible discussants with really thought provoking and really moving contributions. In my book. I really couldn't have dreamt of a better panel for me. Thank you so much.
- [80:42]
A
Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.ukevents to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.