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3.3.1 Researchers Evading ‘Victimhood’

In this section, I will discuss the contrast drawn by some researchers, between young women being agentic or victims. For example, in the introduction to their study, Currie et al. (2006) took issue with earlier research treating girls as “victims” of girlhood (p. 419). In their own words, they therefore wanted to focus on girls’ agency and “how girls are active creators of girlhood” (p. 420).

Rebecca Stringer (2014) argues that even among feminists there appears to be a consensus that ‘victim’ “calls forth a reviled subject: woman as powerless victim of domination” (p. 5). She points out that this view of women is incompatible with a postfeminist idea of women as empowered and self-determiningly agentic, and that postmodern feminists likewise reject the notion that “women are powerless as such” (Allen, 1998, cited in Stringer).

There does appear to be a trend in research on young women, first, to show them as agentic, assuming agency equals empowerment and, second, to avoid positioning any

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woman as a victim (see e.g. Duits and van Zoonen, 2006, Lamb and Peterson, 2011). Baker (2010) found young women employing a variety of discursive strategies to evade ‘victimhood’. In the same way, much research focusses on agency, arguably as a move away from earlier research framing women as always already powerless and inagentic victims. While this development towards a focus on women and girls as agentic actors in their own lives is positive, it is important not to lose sight of constraints and

difficulties experienced by women. It is also important not to discuss agency, choice or victimhood only on an individual basis, as if these concepts were personal

characteristics rather than social positions.

3.3.2 Victimhood as personality deficit

In her book ‘Framing the rape victim: Gender and agency reconsidered’, Carine M Mardorossian, (2014) analyses how the term ‘victim’ has played a role in ennobling

notions of agency that valorise autonomy and support masculine notions of (American) selfhood. Through analyses of language used by the media and politicians in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York, she found the term ‘victim’ denounced in favour of the word ‘heroes’ to describe both the US as a nation and people, such as firefighters, who were personally affected by these events. Through this and analyses of rape trials widely reported at the time, she found that

“agency and victimization are conceptualized in opposition to one another, and the presence of one automatically implies the absence of the other. Agency is valorized as a mark of self-reliance, resistance, and moral worth, a valorization that is increasingly enabled today through the devaluation of victimhood’s association with passivity” (p. 32)

An impression of victims as inagentic, non-choosing, vulnerable and dependent is emerging. The term is presented as self-evidently undesirable. In another example, this is very clearly illustrated in this sub-heading from SlutWalk London!’s home page: “We

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are not victims. We were victims, for a moment in time. Now, we are survivors.” Similarly, the women interviewed by Baker (2010), classified by her as disadvantaged due to socio-economic constraints, repudiated victimhood as associated with “self-pity, insufficient personal drive and a lack of personal responsibility for one’s own life” (p. 190). In these uses, victimhood appears to be associated with an enduring “personality” which will be consistent and persist across contexts, rather than being a status

applicable to specific situations or a consequence of the operation of external forces.

Different associations with the category of victim are possible. Baker cites Gill’s (2007) argument that young women today are misleadingly endowed liberally with choice and agency by a “post-feminist sensibility” that represent them as “above influence and beholden to no-one” (p.188), and links victimhood with difficult circumstances, exploitation, constraint and disadvantage.

3.3.3 Dilemmas and Situated Talk

The previous section discussed a contrast between inagentic, passive and weak victims, and active, choosing, strong and empowered women, but the distinction is not as clear- cut as it can seem. Looking at how agency, strength and victimhood can be variously enacted and interpreted across various contexts, can complicate understandings of these concepts. On the other hand, discursive constructions of certain practices as

‘empowering’ and ‘chosen’ may foreclose possibilities for construing certain situations

as dilemmatic or undesirable. This section will review research which addresses these

points.

The significance of situational context for what people can say and do is highlighted in a study by the psychologist Alison Mackiewicz (2011). She found in interviews with young working class women in the UK that they said they felt they had to “dress like a slut” if they wanted to go out, and they also said they needed to drink alcohol to get the confidence to do so. This may be an indication that these young women were aware of

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the social desirability of distancing oneself from a certain image through their style of dressing (i.e. not to dress like 'a slut'), but simultaneously felt under pressure to dress that way. It is possible, that the activity of “going out”, involves particular sets of social rules, or scripts, which may not be easily reconciled with critiques of media

representations of young women. It is also possible that what young women do in the context of going out is different to what they say they will (e.g. in Malson et al.’s study). Language must always be considered in its context of use. These are not

questions that are easily illuminated through individual or group interviews outside the social context of “going out”. They highlight the difficulty in defining any instances of talk or actions as unambiguously and undilemmatically ‘agentic’, ‘empowering’ or ‘chosen’.

3.2.4 Critiques of antivictimism

This section has shown that ‘victimhood’ can be conceptualised in various ways, from Mardorossian’s specific focus on victims of rape to the women interviewed by Baker who discursively avoid victimhood by emphasising ‘choice’ in their talk. How the terms ‘victim’ and ‘victimhood’ are employed or even avoided in talk matters beyond individual stories of potentially ‘victimising’ experiences. Some more recent work challenges views of ‘victimhood’ and ‘victims’ as undesirable opposites of ‘agency’ and people capable of acting agentically. For example, The American political theorist Alyson M. Cole analyses the politics of “the cult of true victimhood ” (2007), where victimhood is construed as individual purity whereby some victims become construed as ‘not true victims’, and argues that making victimhood a question of individual

character dismisses possibilities for marginalised or oppressed groups to fight collectively.

Taking a different critical position, Stringer (2014) suggests that the notion of ‘woman as victim’ has been critiqued since the 1980s, coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism.

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She introduces the term ‘neoliberal victim theory’ to describe “the rhetoric and motifs of conservative anti-victimism”, thus “foregrounding the role of neoliberal values in contemporary anti-victim discourse” (p. 6). In other words, Stringer construes anti- victim feminism as a neoliberal version of feminism that focusses problematically on individual responsibilities rather than collective politics and structural change. Stringer also cites Rosemary Hennessey’s (2000) claim that it is as important to analyse the growing neoliberal ‘ways of knowing’ as to analyse the impact of neoliberal

programmes of structural adjustment and the resultant growing inequality and upwards distribution of wealth. Citing David Harvey’s view that ‘neoliberalism has become hegemonic as a mode of discourse’ (2005, cited in Stringer 2014, p.8), she argues that the category ‘victim’ is a significant example of a neoliberal way of knowing.