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Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood
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 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.
264 pages, Hardcover
Published May 21, 2024
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August 27, 2024https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...
ATLANTIC REVIEW: Wronged explores how the practice of claiming harm has become the rhetorical province of the powerful
ATLANTIC REVIEW: Wronged explores how the practice of claiming harm has become the rhetorical province of the powerful
April 22, 2025
The intro/framing of the project is well done. Case studies in the chapters feel weak and she could have pushed her race analysis further (I disagree with a few things in the soldier chapter). But overall, useful for a mass audience and for diagnosing our present. The citations are impressive.
"The success of emotional capitalism in aligning the 'losers' of neoliberal capitalism with the perpetrators of their victimhood, as in the discourse of far-right populist governments, I suggest, lies precisely in this capacity of pain to disavow any a priori political attachment and, by claiming the 'truth' of the human condition, to attach itself to different positions of privilege and vulnerability across the spectrum.
How did this configuration come to be? How did the emotionality of pain manage to speak the language of political universality?" (18)
"...cruelty is, in this account, not the opposite of empathy but a potentiality inherent in the politics of pain itself." (113)
"This coupling of liberal pain with cruelty is impossible to fully disentangle. The two are inherently coemergent. Humanism and violence, altruism and domination, benevolence and enslavement, the civilizing mission and colonial expansion are parts of the same history of Western modernity." (117)
"We cannot fully escape this legacy of emotional capitalism as a source of personal pain and societal suffering or of the language we use to talk about both. What we can do as we look ahead, however, is to break with the taboo of Western modernity and its obligatory deference to the vocabulary of victimhood and instead pose the unthinkable question: Why should we car about this claim to suffering?" (139)
"The success of emotional capitalism in aligning the 'losers' of neoliberal capitalism with the perpetrators of their victimhood, as in the discourse of far-right populist governments, I suggest, lies precisely in this capacity of pain to disavow any a priori political attachment and, by claiming the 'truth' of the human condition, to attach itself to different positions of privilege and vulnerability across the spectrum.
How did this configuration come to be? How did the emotionality of pain manage to speak the language of political universality?" (18)
"...cruelty is, in this account, not the opposite of empathy but a potentiality inherent in the politics of pain itself." (113)
"This coupling of liberal pain with cruelty is impossible to fully disentangle. The two are inherently coemergent. Humanism and violence, altruism and domination, benevolence and enslavement, the civilizing mission and colonial expansion are parts of the same history of Western modernity." (117)
"We cannot fully escape this legacy of emotional capitalism as a source of personal pain and societal suffering or of the language we use to talk about both. What we can do as we look ahead, however, is to break with the taboo of Western modernity and its obligatory deference to the vocabulary of victimhood and instead pose the unthinkable question: Why should we car about this claim to suffering?" (139)
September 5, 2024
Oh, yes: "we have turned victimhood into a weapon of the privileged."
"Unless we come to recognize the suffering of the vulnerable for what it is—a matter not of victimhood but of injustice—the culture of victimhood will continue to perpetuate old exclusions and enable further injuries."
"Unless we come to recognize the suffering of the vulnerable for what it is—a matter not of victimhood but of injustice—the culture of victimhood will continue to perpetuate old exclusions and enable further injuries."
April 30, 2025
Fantastic analysis of victimhood, making us consider who ‘victimhood’ belongs to. So powerful when considering the reversal of belonging from victims who experience suffering to instead considering ‘victims’ accused of inflicting the pain.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews