The power of vulnerability

Mobilising affect in feminist, queer and anti-racist media cultures

Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä, Ingrid Ryberg, Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä, Ingrid Ryberg

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526133090
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526133120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism

This book investigates the new language of vulnerability that has emerged in feminist, queer and antiracist debates on media, taking a particular interest in the historical legacies and contemporary forms and effects of this language. Contributors such as Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed examine how vulnerability has become a battleground, how affect and vulnerability have turned into a politicised currency both for addressing and obscuring asymmetries of power, and how media activism and state policies address so-called vulnerable groups. Taking on such heated topics as trigger warnings and diversity policies, the book will be of interest to scholars and students in media and cultural studies, affect theory, gender studies, queer theory and critical race studies.

1

Vulnerability as a political language

Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä and Ingrid Ryberg

In present-day public discussions, questions of power, agency, and the media are debated more intensely than ever as issues of injury or empowerment. Vulnerability has emerged as a key concept circulating in these discussions and their academic analyses. The #MeToo campaign, as well as its extensions like #TimesUp and versions in various languages across the globe, has been taken up as a key example of these tendencies, showing how the public articulation of experiences of injury, trauma, and hurt is now turning into a powerful worldwide movement. A collective of voices testifying to a persistent, repetitive vulnerability and injury caused by sexual harassment, assault, and abuse has, perhaps paradoxically, become praised as a feminist movement for empowerment, justice, and change, and a societal force to be reckoned with.

At the same time, the campaign has raised several questions: what are the limits of feminist politics that draws first and foremost on a shared public victimhood, or survivorship? How much of this vulnerability is shared, and by whom? Why is #MeToo having an impact only now, with wealthy and often white cis-women in Hollywood at the forefront of the movement, when the issue of sexual abuse and assault has been a key struggle in feminist, women of colour, and trans activisms for such a long time? What part does social media play in the successes and failures of activist efforts such as #MeToo, and how does it relate to broader media histories of addressing and representing painful issues and marginalised people?

One of the keys to the success of the #MeToo movement might be that potentially anyone might be the ‘me’ who has experienced sexual abuse – although, in practice, the people who have become the faces of the campaign primarily identify as cis-women. At the same time, the universalising understanding of ‘woman’ and its equation to being a victim or vulnerable are some of the movement’s most critiqued features. In that sense, the movement can be seen to differ from another recent highly publicised and ongoing social media and activist movement, #BlackLivesMatter, which centres black lives and steers clear of the confessional mode.¹ As George Yancy states in an interview with Judith Butler (Yancy and Butler, 2015), in #BlackLivesMatter there is a specific racial vulnerability at stake which must centralise blackness instead of any subject. While it is true that ‘all’ lives matter, black lives do not seem to be included in the category of lives that matter, since black men and women are killed without consequence by police officers in the United States. Black lives are concretely under threat and treated as disposable, and therefore it is urgent to call for them to matter.

What #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have in common is drawing public attention to serious, pervasive, life-destroying issues that have long been ignored by white patriarchal institutional and state power. What they both have also been accused of is that by claiming injury to a specific group, they dismiss the possibility of anyone’s or everyone’s vulnerability to that injury: that white people can also be killed by the police, that men can also be sexually abused. Here, vulnerability is paradoxically equated with power: a voice, an experience, or a life that matters, that is worthy of attention and compassion. But what happens to structures of privilege and marginalisation if vulnerability is understood as a universal condition of all (human) life? Such an ontological understanding of vulnerability, while true in the sense that all life is perishable, is often mobilised to discredit and undermine the validity of movements focusing on the culturally and politically produced vulnerability of specific groups.

Within feminist, queer, and anti-racist discussions, a key critique of the #MeToo campaign has addressed its whitewashing, exclusion of trans-identified and gender non-conforming people, and focus on wealthy cis-women in Hollywood, like Alyssa Milano, Salma Hayek, Uma Thurman, and Oprah Winfrey. The black American social activist Tarana Burke first launched the slogan ‘Me too’ in 2006 in her efforts to offer consolation, empathy, and relief from a sense of isolation to women of colour who experienced sexual abuse in underprivileged communities. These origins of the slogan and the movement were first left out entirely, as the campaign started spreading on social media through white actress Alyssa Milano’s post on Twitter. The focus on white cis-women’s experiences of sexual abuse could also be seen to overshadow the magnitude and severity of sexual assault on Native women, trans people and trans women of colour (Adetiba and Burke, 2017). These debates over whose injury and vulnerability matter more, or the most, raise important issues about structural inequalities between women and what can count as ‘shared experience’, but also about how to measure levels of vulnerability, or if such measurement or ‘competition’ is desirable or possible at all. If a more severe injury or vulnerability should lead to more visibility and being more in the centre of campaigning, what is to be done about the vulnerability that visibility can bring, for example, to trans women of colour who may survive by passing as cis?

Many have doubted whether the #MeToo campaign can actually produce the kinds of changes that would be needed on societal and institutional levels, or if it will remain too focused on confession and personal experience. While the campaign has, by breaking the silence around sexual and gender-based harassment, aimed to relieve victims from shame and stigma, it has also been critiqued for imposing a duty to confess, remember, and draw attention to experiences that some may be unable or unwilling to share for the sake of their own safety and wellbeing. The flood of accounts and confessions of abuse on social media channels has prompted many to turn away from the campaign and its main platforms, as continuously encountering accounts of abuse can also feel re-traumatising for victims of similar abuse (Lamotte, 2017). Thus, paradoxically, representations and accounts of injury do not necessarily succeed in producing empowerment but can also injure themselves and help produce an emphasised sense of vulnerability. In comparison, #BlackLivesMatter has not been focused on confession at all, even if it has also demanded acknowledgement of injury and consequences for perpetrators, yet a similar re-traumatisation critique can be applied to its imagery as well.

In the midst of the debates about the #MeToo campaign’s effectiveness, there is however no question about the campaign’s affectivity: how it has mobilised enormous and powerful waves of feeling, from compassion to guilt, from shame to rage. A similar affective mobilisation applies to #BlackLivesMatter, and this affective charge not only applies to those accounting for their experiences of sexual abuse or demanding an end to state-sanctioned violence against black bodies. It also applies to white, straight, male subjects, those in privileged positions who feel that these demands for change are a threat or take something away from them. Twenty years ago, Lauren Berlant (1997) analysed the emergence of the privileged as ‘injured’, calling these subject ‘citizen-victims’ – ordinary people ‘who now feel anxious about their value to themselves, their families, their publics, and their nation. They sense that they now have identities, when it used to be just other people who had them’ (1997: 2). The double edge of vulnerability concretises in these moments when the feeling of injury gathers affective charge around and for the privileged: vulnerability is no longer (if it ever was) only about weakness or immobilisation, but very concretely about agency. Claims of vulnerability can translate to claims to agency and voice, but these claims can have completely oppositional political consequences, depending on who is making them.

In this book we interrogate the tensions, complexities, and paradoxes of vulnerability in and through the media, particularly in feminist, queer, and anti-racist media cultures and debates about the production, use, and meanings of media. Our aim is, in particular, to make sense of the new language of vulnerability that has emerged through such tensions and paradoxes, investigating its historical legacies and contemporary effects. How do various understandings and claims to vulnerability mobilise affect? What are we expected to feel when seeing, reading, or telling narratives of injury – or empowerment? When can visibility and representations of difficult or hurtful experiences produce change, and when only more vulnerability? These questions are currently asked not only in the discussions around the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter campaigns but also, for example, in debates about ‘trigger warnings’ which are meant to alert viewers to potentially hurtful media content, and more broadly in discussions about reparative practices and the healing potential of activist media. These are also among the questions the writers of this book address. Through a broad range of original case studies addressing popular and activist media as well as public cultural and archival policies, they, and we, examine how asymmetries of power are addressed, contested, and felt as issues of being or becoming vulnerable. Furthermore, we map out and explore the consequences of different understandings of the concept of vulnerability for feminist, queer, and anti-racist efforts.

Vulnerability in feminist, queer, and anti-racist theorising

While the power, proliferation, and complexity of the language of vulnerability in feminist and anti-racist media cultures have grown all the more evident, in academic discussions the concept of vulnerability has simultaneously become increasingly popular across various disciplines. Drawing from diverse philosophical and methodological traditions and investigating a wealth of issues, both theoretical and policy-related, the rich scholarship on vulnerability is nevertheless far from constituting a sense of a shared field of ‘vulnerability studies’ or otherwise.²

Deriving from the Latin word vulnus [wound], vulnerability expresses the capacity to be wounded and suffer. As bodily, social, and affective beings, we all have the capacity to be vulnerable to one another and to conditions of inequality, discrimination, exploitation, or violence, as well to the natural environment. Mobilising the concept therefore entails challenging liberal notions of the individual subject as autonomous, independent, and self-sufficient, and somehow not touched by the capacity to be vulnerable. Mobilising vulnerability also means critiquing the ways in which this notion of the individual subject has implicitly been male, white, Eurocentric, cis-gendered, and able-bodied, allowing for ‘vulnerable groups’ to almost automatically signify those diverging from it. Such an understanding of vulnerability as ‘different from the norm’ easily allows the norm to remain invisible and uncontested. But if vulnerability is seen to characterise us all equally, again the uneven distribution of violence and injury between bodies can be left without adequate attention. What does it mean, to quote Judith Butler (2016: 25), if vulnerability is figured as ‘an existential condition’, a universal and shared human-animal ontology of us all, or ‘a socially induced condition’ that characterises some bodies more than others?

Within feminist and queer theory, as well as more broadly in the humanities and social sciences, the interest in vulnerability draws on ‘turns’ to embodiment, ethics, affect, and ontology (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001; Clough and Halley, 2007; Garber et al., 2000; Koivunen, 2001; 2010). Furthermore, it coincides with what Robyn Wiegman (2014) has termed the reparative ‘turn’ in queer feminist criticism. However, the history and routes of the concept’s travels are much longer and more complex. Invoked in the 1980s in the fields of moral and political philosophy (Goodin, 1985; 1988; Nussbaum, 1986), the concept subsequently travelled across disciplines: from sociology and social policy studies (McLaughlin, 2012; Misztal, 2011; Turner, 2006; Wilkinson, 2009) to legal theory (Fineman, 2008; 2010; Fineman and Fineman, 2017); from bioethics and other ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• 1 Vulnerability as a political language
• Part I Vulnerability as a battleground
• Part II Vulnerability and visibility
• Part III Vulnerability and cultural policy
• Index