Argumentum ad misericordiam: the cultural politics of victim media

Abstract

This article discusses the widespread use of victim tropes in contemporary AngloAmerican culture by using cultural theory to analyse key social media memes circulating on Facebook in 2015. Since the growth of social media, victim stories have been proliferating, and each demands a response. Victim narratives are rhetorical, they are designed to elicit pity and shame the perpetrator. They are deployed to stimulate political debate and activism, as well as to appeal to an allpurpose humanitarianism. Victimology has its origins in Law and Criminology, but this paper opens up the field more broadly to think about the cultural politics of victimhood, to consider how the victim-figure can be appropriated by/for different purposes, particularly racial and gender politics, including in the case of Rachel Dolezal, and racial passing. In formulating an ethical response to the lived experience of victims, we need to think about the different kinds of critical intimacies elicited by such media.

HIV in MOTION: a community of practice on physical rehabilitation for and by people living with HIV and their allies

“…These are so because people living with HIV bring to bear a number of practical (social determinants of health) and philosophical aspects in their lives and how they uniquely weave them during treatment or simply living with a condition; they can also disagree with aspects of what is being discussed. In sum, we strived to be distinctive from stagnant, long, information-heavy, and victimhood narratives of scholarly presentations about HIV (and other medical conditions) firmly installed in the late 1980s (55).…”

Shame, Chronic Illness and Participatory Storytelling

“…Sharing stories of shame can produce political collectives through processes that de-individualise shame by revealing it as socially produced and, thus, as an object of collective protest and change more than a strictly personal state of being (Probyn, 2004; Shefer and Munt, 2019). Here, shame can be converted into collective ‘shame anger’ (Nathanson, 1987: 254) and, thus, become an affective driver of social mobilisation or new ‘shame formations’ (Munt, 2017: 869) fighting for social justice.…”

Gay shame in a geopolitical context

“…This fragile gay westerner is forged from the everyday threat of homophobia and its concomitant humiliation, opprobrium, bullying, and a history of injury, and he carries those wounds within. We have seen in the rise of white victimhood a kind of paranoia that is projected onto the body of the other (Munt 2017). White victimhood has arisen out of both the real and symbolic injuries of neoliberalism, as it has rapidly attenuated the gap between rich and poor, and whites and the rest.…”

“…Unacknowledged shame creates physical and symbolic violence. Unacknowledged shame also separates off the self from others, breaking social bonds and creating disidentifications, and an orientation of victimhood (Munt 2017). I also suspect that the extent to which white gay men perceive the 'Islamic threat' of homophobic annihilation is due to an over-estimation of that threat, in a compensatory practise of hyper-vigilance (coincidentally, a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, as are paranoid thoughts).…”