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Abstract
This article discusses the widespread use of victim tropes in contemporary Anglo-American 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; victim narratives are rhetorical, they are designed to elicit pity and shame the perpetrator. They are deployed to stimulate political debate and activism, often to appeal to an all-purpose 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. In formulating an ethical response to the lived experience of victims, we need to consider the different kinds of critical intimacies elicited by such media.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the “Politics of Shame” conference, University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, South Africa, November 30, 2015, and in that, I am also very grateful to Ronelle Carolissen, Tamara Shefer, and Vivienne Bozalek for their inspiration and support. I am grateful to Malcolm James, and the four anonymous reviewers, for kindly reading and commenting upon the manuscript. An earlier version of this paper appeared in Portuguese in Paragraph Journal (Revista Parágrafo), http://revistaseletronicas.fiamfaam.br/index.php/recicofi/issue/current in their Special Issue “Media and Inequalities” February 2017.
Notes
1. Even Internet shaming itself has itself been parodied, with the meme of dog shaming that first appeared in 2012.
2. See Chapter 10 of Animal Farm (George Orwell Citation1945).
3. The related vogue for “trigger warnings” in higher education seems to endorse this view of students’ intrinsic vulnerability, although “triggerists” strategy of avoidance ironically flies in the face of psychotherapeutic approaches to trauma (that the patient should not avoid traumatic stimuli, but confront and naturalise them). See http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/treatment/therapy-med/prolonged-exposure-therapy.asp for a user-friendly summary of why “avoidance” prolongs the condition; see Ehlers and Clark (Citation2000) for a more clinically informed analysis, available at http://test.academyofct.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Ehlers_Clark_2000.pdf. The concept of triggering in relation to victimhood deserves a thorough analysis which unfortunately I cannot develop here.
4. Typically like those that challenged men’s rights to women’s bodies through the anti-rape and domestic violence protests of the 1970s.
5. “‘Not even my wife knows’: secret Donald Trump voters speak out.” Emails compiled by Amber Jamieson, The Guardian Newspaper, March 3, 2016. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/03/secret-donald-trump-voters-speak-out
6. When the victim is a straight, white, young male, such as in the case of Lee Rigby, the British soldier who was beheaded by Islamic extremists in a London street on May 22, 2013, the injury is iconic. The neofascist organisation Britain First controversially deploys the phrase “remember Lee Rigby” (against the wishes of Rigby’s mother) to mobilise Islamophobic activism. The cultural logic is that such a victim (the dead soldier/Christ) encapsulates the threat and horror of a “religious war,” and therefore seizing righteous and violent retribution is a sacred duty (against Jews, against Muslims …). It is all the more ironic of course since Jesus Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew.
7. Wikipedia is still reporting this as fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany. See also similar media reports (one of many) such as http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/cologne-is-every-day-europes-rape-epidemic/news-story/e2e618e17ad4400b5ed65045e65e141d, accessed July 27, 2016. The 2015/6 moral panic about “Muslim rapists” was a social media phenomenon, despite later police reports that only three of the fifty-eight men arrested came from Syria or Iraq. Reviewer 3 raised the spectre of the hyper-masculine non-white male refugee in the context of the “rape of Europe” (in nationalisms, the “land” or territory is usually gendered as female). They kindly drew my attention to the cover of a Polish magazine wSieci depicting such a theme: see, http://www.wsieci.pl/wsieci-islamski-gwalt-na-europie-pnews-2681.html, accessed October 30, 2016.
8. UNICEF provides a useful summary of research on media representations of children, with further references here: elearning-events.ditie/unicef/htmil/unit1/1_5_2.htm.
9. For a precise analysis of the visual motifs of victimhood, see “Save the Child” by Martha Zarzycka (Citation2016). Thank you to Reviewer 3 for this connection.
10. Quoted in Simon Watney (Citation1987, 37).
11. See Sally R. Munt (Citation2001).
12. Whereas white lesbians have in the past experimented with victim/shame tropes—such as in Catherine Opie’s photography (Citation1993)—such images seem to relate more viscerally to abuse (indeed, the motif of sexual victimhood seems to have shifted discursively away from homosexuality toward child sexual abuse). Black lesbian photographers, such as South African Zanele Muholi, appear to prefer a counter-discourse of heroic modes, facial portraits, and the aesthetics of presence, that in her own words constitute “visual activism … so that future generations will know that we were here” (Citation2010, 6).
13. The idea of the model victim is enshrined within the British legal system: for example the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority reduces compensation to any victim if they hold any unrelated criminal conviction—you are deemed to be “worth less” if you have breached the law already.
14. Bildungsroman is the novel of formation, or “coming of age” story.
15. The “one drop rule” comes from the history of slavery and racial classification in the USA, in which having any kind of non-white inheritance would mean a racial designation as black, or negro, in historical parlance.
16. We might also pause to wonder for a moment at the motivation of parents who tried to extinguish their daughter’s self-identity in this way.
17. https://www.amazon.com/dp/194464816X/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_awdo_t2_CxefybGSTD93C, accessed October 10, 2016.
18. See for example Elaine Showalter (Citation1987) and Jane M. Ussher (Citation1991, Citation2011).
19. Indeed, I’m of the generation that used to watch the vaudeville classic The Black and White Minstrel Show (Citation1958–1978) with my Dad every Sunday as a child in the 1960s and 1970s. Attitudes to minstrelsy have predominantly drawn attention to the programme’s racist stereotyping, although in a limited way it did bring black cultural forms to wider audiences.
20. Cornwall’s Darkie Days seem to stem from traditions of Mummery, however the singing of songs about “niggers” seemingly draws from the appropriation of minstrelsy traditions of the Music Hall from the nineteenth century. There are rumours that Cornwall people used blackface to confuse landowners after a slave ship was wrecked off the Cornish coast. Certainly Cornwall has a strong history of radicalism in part due to its ethnic differentiation from the English; during the nineteenth century (similar to the Irish) they could be known colloquially as “white niggers.” There are conflicting explanations and it is worth reading M. R. Davey (Citation2006) to get further insight.
21. There is currently a Facebook photographic meme circulating which shows a photo of Caitlyn Jenner juxtaposed with a photo of Rachel Dolezal. Overlaying Jenner is the caption “Pretending to be a woman/Must accept and aprove [sic] of”; overlaying the image of Dolezal is the caption “Pretending to be Black/Unacceptable!! We Disapprove.” Presumably this is anti-trans propaganda, however I think it does point out the inconsistencies in essentialising race or gender.
22. Jive Filter is a computer programme that converts plain English to a dialect “jive,” a parody of African American Vernacular English; see http://funtranslations.com/jive
23. Thank you to Malcolm James for this point.
24. Samira Kawash (Citation1997).
25. Emily Davison was a suffragist who died at the Epsom Derby on June 4, 1913 when she was run over by the King’s horse.
26. Gospel of Matthew 20:16, King James Bible.
27. Thank you to Matt Brim for this observation.
28. Male migrants and refugees are often hyper-masculinised and seen as a physical threat, or feminised for their despised dependency; whereas female migrants and refugees are overtly feminised as cunning, crazy, or completely passive victims, depending on the context.
29. https://www.facebook.com/unitedrescueaid/photos/a.220171104993036.1073741830.206321536377993/358086281201517/?type=3&theatre, accessed October 31, 2016.
30. Online petitions have been very successful in this respect, so much so that it is part of British law that a petition on https://yougov.co.uk/ that gains over 100,000 signatories has a right to be debated in Parliament.