CLANDESTINO FESTIVAL

Fredag 12 juni Kl 10-11

Carnegisesal, Novotel

Embittered Subjects: The New Politics of Blaming the Victim

(Föreläsningen hålls på engelska)

In recent decades, constitutive questions about power and in justice have been raised -and yet transformed- by being spoken Mikela Lundahl through a language of victimization, by victim-claiming and victim-blaming.What are the political effects of this discursive shift whereby issues of inequality are cast in an explicit language not of exploitation or oppression, but of victimization? And, as importantly, what does it mean when people disadvantaged by hierarchies of power feel compelled to insist that they are not victims? Analyzing a range of victim-blaming texts, I show the impact of anti-victim discourse on the way we think about and act in politics. Anti- victimism makes it extremely difficult to grapple with institutional privilege,systemic domination, pervasive forms of social injustice that advantage some by subordinating others; after all, no one need be a “victim” because each of us could be self- determining, if only we have the right character. Yet the same critics who decry the spread of victimism depict Alyson Cole a world in which they are victimized by the pathology of a dominating victim politics. I show how this story of victimization is, paradoxically, the key trope in an anti-victim discourse that has achieved hegemony over the shape of public policy, both domestic and international.

Alyson Cole är doktor i statsvetenskap från Berkeley. Hon är författare till The Cult of True Victimhood:From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2007). Cole utmärktes med President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2008.