Overview

Why is being a victim such a potent identity today? Who claims to be a victim, and why? How have such claims changed in the past century? Who benefits and who loses from the struggles over victimhood in public culture? In this timely and incisive book, Lilie Chouliaraki shows how claiming victimhood is about claiming power: who deserves to be protected as a victim and who should be punished as a perpetrator. She argues that even though victimhood has long been used to excuse violence and hierarchy, social media platforms and far-right populism have turned victimhood into a weapon of the privileged. Drawing on recent examples such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as historical ones from the major wars of the twentieth century and the Civil Rights Movement, Wronged reveals why claims of victimization are so effective at reinforcing instead of alleviating inequalities of class, gender, and race. Unless we come to recognize the suffering of the vulnerable for what it is-a matter not of victimhood but of injustice-Chouliaraki powerfully warns, the culture of victimhood will continue to perpetuate old exclusions and enable further injuries.

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In a moment when competing victim claims overwhelm public discourse, leading most to conclude that victim talk is distracting and destructive, Wronged gets so much right. Rather than join the chorus rejecting the victim idiom, Lilie Chouliaraki offers a way to recuperate it. By charting the growing pliability of victim status, how victimhood became unmoored from materiality and power, and how the politics of pity serves emotional capitalism, Chouliaraki disentangles systemic vulnerability from privileged grievance, and thus reclaims the language of victimization for the most vulnerable. Wronged is a rich and sophisticated study that makes a major contribution to overcoming our current political impasse. -- Alyson Cole, author of <i>The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror</i> This is an important book on a topic that has puzzled many, namely how powerful and privileged men manage to pass as the victims of their own victims. It will be essential reading for feminist scholarship, cultural and media studies as well as the study of intersectionality. -- Eva Illouz, author of <i>The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy</i> Where has the holy sorrow of silent saints gone? Lilie Chouliaraki has an answer. It’s vanished into the market of competitive suffering, one that, like all markets, advantages the usual suspects. She urgently and eloquently calls us, in the name of a just and beautiful polity, to attend to suffering undistorted by power. -- John Durham Peters, author of <i>The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media</i>

This is an important book on a topic that has puzzled many, namely how powerful and privileged men manage to pass as the victims of their own victims. It will be essential reading for feminist scholarship, cultural and media studies as well as the study of intersectionality. -- Eva Illouz, author of <i>The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy</i>

In a moment when competing victim claims overwhelm public discourse, leading many to shun victim talk, Wronged gets so much right. By disentangling systemic precarity from privileged grievance, Chouliaraki recuperates the language of victimization for the most vulnerable. Wronged is a rich and sophisticated study that makes a major contribution to overcoming our current political impasse. -- Alyson Cole, author of <i>The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror</i> How have powerful and privileged men managed to pass themselves off as the victims of their own victims? This important book offers a new and convincing answer. It is essential reading for feminist scholarship, cultural and media studies, and the study of intersectionality. -- Eva Illouz, author of <i>Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism</i> Where has the holy sorrow of silent saints gone? Lilie Chouliaraki has an answer. It’s vanished into the market of competitive suffering, one that, like all markets, advantages the usual suspects. She urgently and eloquently calls us, in the name of a just and beautiful polity, to attend to suffering undistorted by power. -- John Durham Peters, author of <i>The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media</i> Wronged is an instant classic for anyone seeking to make sense of the pervasive politics of victimhood in the era of digital platforms and profound polarization. In writing that is both strikingly original and deeply moving, Chouliaraki performs the magic trick of rendering visible what was previously unseen: even if suffering is universal, the politics of pain is deeply embedded within power relations and privileges the voices of the powerful over those of the powerless. -- Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, author of <i>Emotions, Media, and Politics</i>

Author Information

Lilie Chouliaraki is professor of media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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