A few years ago, I wrote a piece for the Guardian exploring the ways in which German academia, where I worked, was causing me to feel intellectually incapacitated and disempowered. In the piece, I explained how I was pushed to shift my research away from my actual interests, and towards the sorts of ‘dark’ or ‘exotic’ topics that affluent white people tend to associate with the place I come from. I wrote it because I wanted to set out precisely why I did not wish to participate in a game in which I was only allowed to play using my nationality as a card. But when the piece was published, I was appalled. Despite the content of what I had written, the editor had— without any sense of irony, and without asking for my consent—chosen a headline that focused entirely on… my nationality.
I decided not to demand that they remove my piece. Instead, I chose to allow my work to be validated by their brand, at the expense of compromising on how it was framed for their audience’s consumption. I allowed them to use my identity as clickbait, and, in return, I published my first article in the Guardian. It’s a transaction that still haunts me.
I began to feel that I could be heard only by signalling that I “belong” to the global south, the oppressed majority. This was something that I never wished for. But how else can we criticise the status quo when the hegemonic media is strictly gatekept, and deeply invested in victim narratives? I am often advised to write first-person testimonies about my personal experiences, rather than structural analysis of the systems that produce those experiences. And when I follow that advice, I don’t get paid—because (and here I quote directly from an email) they don’t have budget to pay “for pieces written by professionals about their profession.” In short, if I want to make a living as a writer, I have to play their game. If I refuse to participate in my own commodification, my work remains unpaid and under-appreciated. It’s a clever trick that keeps marginalised people invested (and invest-ing) in the systems that actively oppress them.
Narrating Trauma
Yasmin Nair, in a critical essay on Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, has argued that trauma “guarantees authenticity” for women and queers; authenticity which, she claims, is “a passport” that admits marginalised people into public life. For Nair, Gadsby’s staged enactment of trauma reinforces a paradigm that authenticates women and queers only if they are willing to narrate their trauma. “Trauma has always been a precondition for queers and women to enter into public discourse,” she writes; a precondition that is more strictly enforced the more ‘othered’ you are: “If you are a queer and/or a woman of colour, trauma is an absolute requirement for any degree of success.”
This narration or performance of trauma—the public display of suffering—has thus become the main route through which marginalised people can be acknowledged and accepted within the public sphere. Perhaps it is not all that shocking: it is much less difficult to humanise and empathise with othered bodies when they are portrayed as one-dimensional victims. It’s also more satisfying and manageable to point a blaming finger at abusers, instead of listening to the voices that are challenging the status quo and demanding radical change.
Parallel to this, corporations and states have, predictably, found ways to profit from hegemonic discourses that control and regulate power-critical narratives. Driven by the dual motives of extending power and enforcing interests, capitalism, patriarchy, and other oppressive structures work hand in hand to nurture the continuation of an individualised guilt-suffering nexus, rather than eliminating the roots of injustice. It makes sense. Why would the ruling class want to dismantle the systems of injustice when they are benefiting from them? But if they can look like they’re trying, there’s money to be made. The status quo is both comfortable and lucrative for those with institutionalised power. These people also happen to be the ones who write the rules of the visibility game. And the first rule is: come forward and be recognised for your trauma—after all, what else could you possibly have to say that is of interest?
Trauma as a tool for visibility
The colonial urge to view othered bodies as inferior and pitiful subjects, and to consume their perceived ‘abjection’ as fashionable entertainment, is not particularly new. In the early 20th century, the Portobello Marine Gardens in Edinburgh featured a so-called ‘human zoo’, where “Somali families were brought over to live in a mud-hut compound and ‘perform’ their daily lives for visitors.” According to the Portobello Heritage Trust, these “performances were seen more as salaried work rather than coerced labour”—a point which rather misses the fact that, in order to participate in this “salaried work”, these families were required to collude in the portrayal of themselves as abject victims, dependent entirely on the benevolent gaze of the Edinburgh bourgeoisie.
Since then, colonialism has become more subtle. Today, the observation of historically and systematically oppressed bodies displaying their suffering forms part of the ritual of ‘acknowledgement’, where the act of bearing witness to historic violence in fact becomes a means of reinforcing the consequences of that violence. And while those with greater power can enjoy the display of suffering and their own professions of historical guilt, the notion of actually dismantling the oppressive structures from which they continue to benefit appears less popular.
One of the biggest scams of our time is the use of buzzwords—such as fair, intersectional, and diverse—by corporate culture to obscure its institutionalised exploitation of marginalised people. Sara Ahmed has written on how “diversity works as public relations,” as a form of “damage limitation” wherein the existence of diversity policies to which institutions can point works to pre-emptively undermine and minimise any complaints those institutions may receive. Institutions often respond, Ahmed notes, “with statements of commitment: we do not tolerate sexual harassment, or we are a diverse and inclusive organisation, as if saying it is so, makes it so.”
And this has effects on our social relations, too. As corporate culture appropriates the language of social justice movements, the historical disadvantages of marginalised people become profitable currency. When one’s identities and experiences become a consumer product, those who refuse to sell are effectively rendered invisible. If you choose not to capitalise on your experiences of oppression, you will need to speak much louder in order to be heard—if you are able to be heard at all. Your colleagues may listen and empathise when you tell them about a racist attack you just experienced, but they will react very differently when you point out their own internalised racism. And if you want to make any power-critical claims, you’d better be ready to validate them with a moving personal story of oppression. We are at our most visible when we are othered and victimised—in other words, when we are constructed as having the least possible agency.
Relatedly, brands, social media, and the journalism industry have recognised the need to tell stories through personal lenses, because these resonate better with audiences, and therefore generate more clicks, clout, and income from advertising. The personal story of a woman who is experiencing violence at the hands of her partner is far more “relatable”—and thus more likely to be shared and discussed online—than a critique of patriarchal institutions such as marriage, or an investigation of the cultural and social forms that make abuse possible. It is easier by far to demonise or canonise specific individuals than it is to call into question the structures from which so many benefit. But do we really need, for example, to hear more heartbreaking stories of families being torn apart in order to understand the horror of borders?
As a writer, to succeed in the trauma economy, you should be able to manoeuvre comfortably in your biggest, darkest, most exotic and enticing traumas. Even better, your story should unveil some shock aspect for the assumed audience, who is normally not exposed to that specific form of violence.
Agency and the normalisation of trauma
There is no doubt that the narration of trauma can be a healing process. The word trauma derives from the Greek for wound, and is understood as being something which disintegrates the sense of self. Narrating trauma is important for the reintegration of that self, helping us to reclaim a sense of agency, as well as to “come into conscious possession of our past”, as Ruth Leys puts it. Likewise, in a culture where vulnerability is frowned upon, and being on the receiving end of violence is seen as weakness, it is important to talk about pain and suffering.
As we have seen, the extent, to which such trauma narrations are heard and received often varies depending on whether or not the narrator is willing or able to perform a certain kind of victimhood. Kurt Borg observes that “trauma narratives are adjudicated with criteria of success or failure, as if they are a performance or an examination”. In fact, trauma narratives can be, and often are, commodified, depoliticised, and homogenised. We should, therefore, be aware of the limits of the liberating effects of narrating trauma. While it facilitates certain forms of self-narration, it also silences other forms of self-construction.
If narrating trauma is necessary for marginalised people to unlock access to public resources, they are obliged not only to be good at selling themselves as victims but also to be accomplished storytellers, so that their personal suffering is as relatable (and marketable) as possible. All of this happens without much regard to the further trauma caused by constantly exposing one’s wounds for public consumption.
When othered bodies are so often portrayed as victims, their violation is normalised. In their book Frames of War, Judith Butler explains this in terms of ‘grievability’:
when we might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.1
In the same way, when non-Europeans are subject to war and violence, this is shrugged off as an everyday occurrence: what more would you expect from ‘those people’? But when people who share “Western values” or lifestyles come under attack, however, it’s a different story. Where are the Yemeni flag emojis? The calls for Western homes to open to Congolese refugees? We witness white supremacy all around the media when journalists and public figures call for immediate action and solidarity with the people of Ukraine, not simply because this should not happen to any human being, but because they are more deserving of our sympathy, being “relatively civilised”, possessing “blue eyes”, and looking “like a European family next door”. In other words, the closer to a European cultural norm a person is, the more human—the more grievable—they are.
In Why We Matter,2 Emilia Roig talks about this question of proximity to certain cultural norms, a proximity which defines who is seen as deserving our sympathy. This regime of grievability extends across society. In their book Revolting Prostitutes, Molly Smith and Juno Mac discuss the ways in which trans women are “constantly targeted for public harassment”3 and “sex workers are associated with sex, and to be associated with sex is to be dismissible.”4 When sex workers are dismissed, so too are their demands—such as the demand for the decriminalisation of sex work. The liberation of sex workers is primarily understood as “rescuing” them from the industry, as opposed to acknowledging their agency and providing actual protection, such as healthcare, improved working conditions and safety. Smith and Mac argue that these women, in their perceived proximity to sex, are thought to stand against the cultural norms of ‘womanhood’; and, as such, they are treated as threatening victimisers, or at best, as helpless victims incapable of understanding their own lives or exercising any agency. And, of course, this “rescuing” of sex workers usually takes the form of more calls for state intervention—usually police—which reinforces and upholds the present regimes of power and control.
The competition of suffering
We’ve seen how the display of suffering has become a sort of currency in public life. But in all realms of life, be they interpersonal or political, the display of suffering and victimhood seems to have become a precondition for receiving compassion, as well as for offering ‘legitimate’ critique. As Sarah Schulman explains in Conflict Is Not Abuse, if a person is feeling anxious or uncomfortable, it does not necessarily mean that they have been a victim of abuse. For Schulman, abuse can only happen if someone “has power over another… if not, it’s a conflict.”5 Her sense is that misidentifying conflict as abuse risks minimising actual abuse when it happens. But to recognise the potential harm in what Schulman calls the “underreaction to abuse and overreaction to conflict”6 is not to discount the reality of real abuse and actual violence. In fact, being able to differentiate between conflict and abuse enables us to move from being complicit bystanders to active resistors in the face of violence (not least because counter-accusations of abuse—known as DARVO—are a favoured tactic of outed abusers, and frequently rely on precisely this conflation of conflict and abuse).
People can often mistake the genuine hurt they experience in a conflict with the violence of abuse. And because the only way for that hurt to be recognised—to be considered eligible for compassion—is to inhabit a position of victimhood, people would much rather see themselves as a victim than recognise their own role in escalating the conflict. Perhaps this is because we tend to perceive suffering as an ordeal which cleanses and purifies. As Kurt Borg explains, “ascribing to the victim a state of innocence or purity implies a moral economy that equates goodness with suffering.” What this can mean is that if, as often happens in conflicts, you did not behave ‘perfectly’, in a way befitting of victimhood, then any hurt you might feel can be downplayed, devalued, and dismissed. This would seem to incentivise the conflation of conflict with abuse. And as long as trauma is utilised as both a cleansing force and a badge of authentication, it will inevitably be commodified and flattened for the easy digestion of the wider culture. There is no surprise that, in such a moral economy, competitions between political identities will take up much of the space that could have been otherwise used to discuss the abolition of punishment and control.
I believe you… if you make a good victim
The dominant rhetoric renders systemic violence invisible, unless a specific ‘pure’ victim can be identified and located within a clear, individualised victim/perpetrator binary. This not only leads to the blurring of distinctions between conflict and abuse: it also places unreasonable demands on victims. If somebody talks about being the subject of violence with no evident display of grief, anger, or other trauma response, they are often perceived in a negative light, which may lead onlookers to disbelieve them. Moreover, victims are expected to appear before us in a state of purity, with no history of wrongdoing or misbehaviour, and to present themselves as harmless and blandly ‘likeable’. The discourse surrounding Amber Heard offers a good example of how the constructed figure of the ‘perfect’ victim works to dismiss and delegitimise actual victims. A ‘bad’ victim is, it would appear, a contradiction in terms. I have also learned the hard way that sometimes the only way to authenticate your experience of sexual violence in the eyes of others—the only way to be taken seriously—is to present yourself as a victim, and to take on the emotional injury that results from narrating and reenacting that trauma.
But if over-personalising conflict and structural violence is one error, over-theorising interpersonal violence and downplaying abuse is another. If we are to respond adequately and justly to intimate and relational violence, we need to take seriously forms of collective intervention and accountability—forms which, sadly, we don’t tend to encounter all that often. When we witness violence in any realm and we act as complicit bystanders, or try to dismiss it all as simply the inevitable consequences of certain structures, we are, in fact, enhancing the power of those structures, including the state and its monopoly on justice. If we shrug off all claims of abuse as overstated conflict, we are in grave danger of enabling abuse to continue unchallenged. In other words, when we mainly focus on “good intentions” rather than harmful actions, or on performing surface solidarity without acknowledging and repairing the harm, we become apologists for oppression and violence.
Having said that, collective intervention does not mean that we must surrender to the false dichotomies of good and evil. Rather, it refers to a social responsibility; one that facilitates communication and intervenes to end harm. Collective intervention opens the door to a transformative process, in which we demand that the abuser stops causing harm (and support them in that work), dismantle the conditions that allowed that harm to happen, and help build a culture where we prioritise resolution and transformation over punishment, while keeping the needs of the victim at the centre of it all.
Moving away from punishment as a tool of accountability is crucial. With the continual threat of punishment hanging over our communities, it comes as no surprise that people tend to lean to the side of denial, resistance and unhearing—a situation that makes addressing and repairing abuse and oppression so much more difficult. As a result, even in the most intimate settings, performances of trauma and victimhood have become a precondition to being taken seriously.
It’s not you, it’s the system
Let’s return to the institutional level, where we started out. The big push to label the experience of violence and oppression as personal conflict (or an inspiring personal story) is often a way to ignore the structural problems at play. Instead of challenging the structural practices of violence, we have learned to both scrutinise the individuals who were subjected to it, and accuse those who benefit from it. This further enables exploitative institutions to put the blame on the individuals, neatly heading off any calls for radical change.
We need to acknowledge that limiting the range of stories in which marginalised people can ‘star’ is itself a tool for maintaining and exerting power. It is not only condescending but unnecessary: as humans, we are perfectly capable of challenging the hegemonic and building solidarities without producing or consuming a performance of trauma.
Sharing our stories is important, and to think critically about how trauma narratives are socially received, interpreted, and circulated is not to reject this sharing. We just need to remember that trauma narratives are informed by hegemonic discourses and dominant cultures. They can be commodified and utilised to pull down the fingers that are pointing to the greater causes of harm.
Condemning the suffering competition implies the abandonment of the practice that reduces people to their sufferings and oppressions and strip them of agency. It is, therefore, not at all in contrast to an intersectional approach that wishes to reach those at the greatest structural disadvantages. In fact, it brings us closer to that goal. It teaches us that everyone who is subjected to violence deserves protection and solidarity, regardless of whether we think they make a ‘good’ victim or not. It also reminds us that being a victim of historical violence and active abuse does not disqualify you from being a complex human being—someone with the capacity to deeply understand and actively criticise power structures on your own terms.
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Judith Butler. 2010. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, p.38. ↩
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Emilia Roig. 2021. Why We Matter: Das Ende der Unterdrückung. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. ↩
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Juno Mac and Molly Smith. 2018. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights. London: Verso, p.24. ↩
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Mac and Smith (2018), p.28. ↩
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Sarah Schulman. 2016. Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, p.59. ↩
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Schulman (2016), p.21. ↩