This seminar series engages with feminist theory in media and communication studies to rediscover older and forgotten ways of knowing and thinking about these issues, and to imagine alternative ways of communicating in an era marked by global crises and armed conflicts. It is organized by the Department of Communication (IKO), Lund University, in cooperation with researchers from Goldsmiths, University of London.

 

Victimhood, victimcould, and the mediated politics of vulnerability

The figure of the victim—once reviled as weak, infantilizing, and intolerably feminine—has been recently imbued with new cultural currency and political force. In this talk, I develop a critical commentary on an emerging paradigm of representation that I call mediated “victimcould,” whereby regressive and far-Right political projects use media to a) conjure visions of hypothetical futures of suffering and injury, and b) weaponize those visions within present-day struggles over the predicament of vulnerability. Rather than seeking to deceive, I show how these acts of creative premeditation invite their viewers to feel futures of victimization as if they were already taking place, engineering a moral mandate for practices of violence and exclusion designed to prevent those futures from emerging. Thus, while vulnerability has arguably emerged as the lingua franca of both progressive political movements and the reactionary movements of the far-right, I argue that victimcould often serves reactionary ends by strategically collapsing probability and possibility within our symbolic politics of vulnerability and by failing to hold imaginations of the future accountable to the enduring political realities of the present.

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Kathryn Higgins is a Lecturer at the Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a critical interdisciplinary scholar of communication, culture, and the politics of vulnerability. Her work explores how media culture negotiates justification for different practices of violence, exclusion, and domination - particularly those enacted in the name of 'safety' or 'justice'. Her research is concerned with the contingencies of modern vulnerability politics within the representational terrain of media.