#Metoo: Thousands of women identify themselves as victims of sexual harassment or assault with ‘me too’ hashtag. (Associated Press, 2017)
This headline in the UK broadsheet newspaper The Telegraph refers to the public response to Actress Alyssa Milano’s #MeToo tweet that galvanised the 2017 digital campaign. That so many women self-identified as victims was both monumental and surprising because victimhood has been much maligned in popular discourse because of its connotations with powerlessness and passivity. In this chapter, I examine the notion of victimhood in sexual harassment discourse. Beginning with early feminist activism, I explore how particular cultural shifts and intensifications, particularly around neoliberalism and postfeminism, have shaped the notion of victimhood. In doing so, I discuss the implications that particular constructions of victim identity have for challenging sexual harassment in the #MeToo era.
Feminist Victim Politics
The coining of the term sexual harassment in the 1970s offered a challenge to its normalisation as, for example, harmless flirtation, office banter or as a dating blip. Activism around sexual harassment was firmly embedded within wider feminist politics that was encapsulated by the slogan “the personal is political”. This is exemplified in conscious raising group discussions which centred on how women’s everyday experiences, those that were considered “trivial” or “private”, could be linked to broader relations of unequal gendered power under patriarchy (Warner, 2001). The language of victimhood was crucial to the problematisation of these everyday personal experiences. This is because it offered a powerful way of drawing attention to the negative effects of gendered power inequalities. As Burt and Estep (1981) argued, “power dictates who victimises and who gets victimised and power dictates what will be viewed as victimisation. A person recognised, legitimised, as a victim is recognised as someone who has received a wrong, who has been treated unfairly and unjustly” (p. 25).
when I think about it I get really worked up…men thinking they have the right to touch me or proposition me because I’m a waitress…you aren’t in a position to say “keep your crummy hands off me” because you need the tip, that’s what a waitress job is all about. Women are the ones who are punished. They have to leave the job because of a man’s behaviour and the man is left there sitting pretty. It’s totally ridiculous. (Nemy, 1975, para. 15–16)
He propositioned me and I gave notice again. He finally understood but it was six months of pure hell. I was a wreck but I needed the money. (Nemy, 1975, para. 18)
I had poured myself into that job…it was just devastating to me that everything that could be pulled out from under me for no reason. For several years after that, I had no ambition. I had a frightening feeling that it could be all be taken away from me again. (Nemy, 1975, para. 32–33)
Women are the ones who are punished. They have to leave the job because of a man’s behaviour and the man is left there sitting pretty. It’s totally ridiculous. (Nemy, 1975, para. 42)
Today two things are clear: first that many women (and even more men) have never, despite all the policies, codes of code conduct and legislative apparatus accepted this feminist redefinition of women’s experience [of sexual harassment]; second, the definition of this behaviour as sexual harassment (as opposed to ‘just the way things are’) is now under major attack as part of the anti-feminist backlash. (p. 8)
Given that the politics of sexual harassment had contested the normalisation of everyday forms of gendered and sexualised inequality, it is unsurprising that sexual harassment became understood in backlash discourses as feminist man-hating and a threat to civil liberties. The disavowal of both feminism and victimhood was an overarching theme in predominant postfeminist discourses in the 1990s. Recurrent motifs of postfeminist arguments included, for example, that gender equality has been achieved; the identification of feminism as the root of women’s unhappiness; that women “‘can’t have it all – something has to give’; that ‘political correctness’ has become a new form of tranny; that (white) men are the real victims” (Gill & Scharff, 2011, p. 3). Within this context, there was a rise in popular critiques which broadly argued that feminist redefinitions of sexual harassment proliferate women victims and (falsely) inflate rates of women’s victimisation (Thomas & Kitzinger, 1997). A key concern with an expansion of feminist victim politics was that it would encourage a general view of women as passive objects of male victimisation. These popular critiques named feminist endeavours to problematise a wider range of behaviours using the language of sexual victimisation “victim feminism”. Critiques of victim feminism provided a fertile ground for moral panics in which second-wave feminism was held responsible for the spread of a political correctness that exceeded reasonableness and incited a culture of complaint.
Instead of learning that men have no right to do these terrible things to us, we should be learning to deal with individuals with strength and confidence. If someone bothers us, we should be able to put him in his place without crying into our pillow or screaming for help and counselling … we should at least be able to handle petty instances like ogling, leering and sexual innuendo at a personal level. (1993, pp. 101–102)
Roiphe’s work has been widely problematised for positing a highly individualistic solution that displaces any need to consider the social and structural bases of sexual harassment (e.g. Lazard, 2009; Stringer, 2014; Thomas & Kitzinger, 1997). As a reaction to radical feminist politics, postfeminist writers such as Roiphe, declined critical engagement with heterosexuality and how it demarcates and legitimises uneven freedoms, rights and desires for men and women in everyday life. It is important to note that Roiphe’s argument does acknowledge that “petty instances” need to be challenged, just not with the feminist political vocabulary of victimisation. It is Roiphe’s objection to an expanded definition of sexual victimisation which provide the basis for a polarisation between serious and petty instances. This polarisation served to undermine feminist redefinitions of sexual harassment, and effectively placed less extreme instances of it into a black box.
The dangers of black boxing are addressed in a body of feminist work through the idea of a continuum which highlights the link between normative heterosexual practices and various manifestations of sexual violence (see Chapter 1). Kelly’s (1988) work in particular was highly influential in the field. She defines the notion of a continuum as “a basic common character that underlies many different events” and/or “a continuous series of elements or events that pass into one another and cannot be readily distinguished” (p. 76). Crucially, Kelly’s work avoids conflating the continuum with a hierarchy of harms in order to avoid the minimisation of certain forms of sexual victimisation. While Kelly recognised how victim status can distract from the agentic ways in which women resist and survive, she also drew attention to how the use of continuum means that “a clear distinction cannot be made between victims and other women” and “the fact that some women only experience violence at the more common everyday end of the continuum is a difference in degree not in kind” (2002, p. 138). While continuum thinking has been a crucial frame for complicating the normative with the aberrant, it was such theorising that became a target for postfeminist critiques of victim feminism.
The Non-Labelling of Sexual Harassment: Passivity, Agency and Resistance
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the popular problematisation of victim politics appeared to discourage women from using the term sexual harassment to describe their experiences. As Kitzinger and Thomas (1995) note, “Women’s unwillingness to present themselves as victims is clearly a feature of their refusal to use the label sexual harassment” (p. 39). Kitzinger and Thomas interpret women’s non-labelling of sexual harassment as a means for them to exercise the limited power their subordinated position will allow. They suggested that by non-labelling, women were attempting to refute their passive status in relation to men and define their experience on their own terms. However, Kitzinger and Thomas also note that this particular exercise of women’s constrained agency is costly because non-labelling “may not be in the best interests of women as a group” (1995, p. 39).
Kitzinger and Thomas’s (1995) arguments expose a set of complexities around how women’s labelling connects to broader challenges against sexual harassment for all women. More specifically, labelling is treated as part of the wider political act of disrupting sexual harassment. Kitzinger and Thomas do not explicitly articulate how exactly women’s acts of labelling can constitute disruption outside of their individual circumstances. However, it would seem reasonable to presume that they were connecting labelling to feminist speak-out activism. Speaking out has been regarded as disruptive because of its ability to break silences and redraw the parameters around what can be said about experiences of sexual violence (Loney-Howes, 2019). While tasking women with this kind of broader disruption is complicated, not least because not all women could or would want to take up the disruptor role, the debate nevertheless points to how victim identity and resistance came together. More specifically, in feminist discourse, when women claimed the identity of victim, they became constituted as agents of resistance. However, as Thomas and Kitzinger’s (1997) work suggests, women who refused to label experiences as sexual harassment became positioned as non-resisting or passive—as women who risked complicity in their own oppression. This is aptly captured in part one of Thomas and Kitzinger’s classic book on the issue of non-labelling which was entitled “refusing the label, declining to protest” (1997, p. 19).
The conflation of non-labelling with non-resistance and passivity became widely referenced in feminist psychological scholarship on sexual harassment. In much of this work, women were not only described as reluctant but also “confused” and “uncertain” about how to define sexual harassment (e.g. Herbert, 1994, 1997; Hinze, 2004; Kitzinger & Thomas, 1995; Thomas & Kitzinger, 1997). Brewis and Linstead (2000) argued that the construction of women as uncertain and confused in sexual harassment research “implies a learned helplessness, an understood inability to prevent or even understand men’s behaviour towards them and an understood dependency on others” (p. 89). The formulation of labelling as agentic and non-labelling as passive represented a reversal of the arguments against victim feminism which conflated labelling with victim passivity and non-labelling with agency. Within this complex landscape, women who had experienced sexual harassment were caught in a set of tensions in which both labelling and non-labelling were potentially subject to the trouble of feminine passivity. What is also illuminated is how passivity and agency have been conceptualised in polarised terms, with passivity rendered bad and agency as good (Lazard, 2009; Stringer, 2014).
men often do not realise that their behaviour might be objectionable and stop the behaviour as soon as they are confronted with it. (Rubenstein & De Vries, 1993, p. 62)
it is always women who are held to consent to men. The “naturally” superior, active and sexually aggressive male makes an initiative, or offers a contract, to which naturally subordinate, passive women “consents”. (p. 164)
However, as Gavey (2018) argues, women are not passive objects in such discourses of male sexuality—they become positioned as sexual gatekeepers in which they agree to or reject advances. The role of gatekeeper, as the agent of consent, has long been recognised to place responsibility on women for monitoring not only their own behaviour but also the behaviour of men (Kurth et al., 2000). Notions of women as sexual gatekeepers, coupled with ideals of the resisting victim, have been frequently mobilised in order to refuse victim recognition in sexual harassment cases (e.g. Rubenstein & De Vries, 1993).
In analysing patterns around the construction of women’s agency and passivity in the sexual harassment literature, Brewis and Linstead (2000) argued that discourses which position women as agentic and responsible for stopping sexual harassment, and discourses which present women as passive victims, are equally problematic. Their argument is resonant with those made in relation to rape in which discourses of female victimisation and female culpability seem to perpetuate conditions for the reproduction of sexual violence. As discussed in Chapter 1, Gavey (2018), in her groundbreaking thesis on rape, argued that the positioning of women as passive or at least agentically constrained may work at a broader cultural level to maintain and perpetuate ways of being and acting that make sexual violence possible. Underpinning these cultural patterns is the reproduction of rigid gender binaries on which heterosexuality is reliant, and which position women in narrow and limiting ways. Women’s desires have either been historically absent, passive, constrained, secondary to, or in the service of men. Men have been, in contrast, predominantly positioned as actively seeking to fulfil their own sexual needs and desires. Thus, within dominant understandings of heterosexuality, men’s persistence in seeking sex and women’s experiences of unwanted sexual activity becomes normalised.
Victimisation and Harassment in the New Millennium
Coexisting with the active male–passive female cultural template for heterosexuality is the visibility of new sexually agentic and empowered femininities (see Chapter 1). The increased predominance of such femininities has been tied to a postfeminist cultural sensibility in which new postfeminist agency is taken as evidence that feminism has done its job and can now be relegated to a gender unequal past (Gill, 2007, 2008; Gill & Scharff, 2011; McRobbie, 2007). Since women’s agency and empowerment has often been treated as the antidote to women’s sexual victimisation, it would not be unreasonable to expect a significant reduction in sexual harassment. This was, indeed, reflected in survey data which indicated a drop in reporting of sexual harassment by both men and women in the 2000s compared to the 1990s (e.g. Lazard, 2018; U.S. Merits System Protection Board, 1995, 2016). There was also a decline in interest in the topic of sexual harassment across both popular and academic arenas (Lazard, 2018). The odd sexual harassment case came to public attention in the 2000s but the issue was not so extensively discussed as it was in the 1990s (Lazard, 2017).
The relative decline in interest in, and the reporting of, sexual harassment seems to have occurred alongside a more general waning of engagements with sexism in the 2000s. As Gill (2011) suggests, sexism had virtually disappeared from feminist writings in the 1990s. Decreased engagements with both sexism and sexual harassment appear to be interlinked because they are conceptually conjoined in feminist theorisations and activism. This is reflected in the legal prohibition of sexual harassment as a form of workplace sex discrimination as well as in how sexism has been built into definitions of sexual harassment in social science research (e.g. Fitzgerald et al., 1995; MacKinnon, 1979; Wright Dziech & Weiner, 1990). With the decline in attention to sexual harassment, and the rise of new “empowered” feminine sexual subjectivities, the postfeminist sentiment that feminism has done its job and is no longer needed seemed to ring true. However, Gill (2011) has argued that rather than inequalities disappearing, what we have witnessed is a change in practice that has given rise to new sexisms. With parallels to how racist practices have been transformed by anti-discrimination movements, sexism has changed form, becoming more subtle and dynamic. Gill (1993) demonstrated this in her analysis of interviews with radio producers on the lack of female broadcasters in the industry. Gill argued that disclaimers of sexism were common as were claims of admiration for women in radio producers’ accounts that persuasively justified why more women were not hired. Justifications for not hiring women included, for example, the lack of women applicants and the idea that audiences preferred men. Gill (2011) makes the point that the decline in visibility of sexism (and, I would argue, sexual harassment) as a critical vocabulary for articulating structural gender inequality, coupled with new subtle practices of sexism, appears to be connected to the rise in postfeminist celebrations of women’s agency and (supposedly achieved) equality.
These shifts in the social landscape achieved something of a sleight of hand when it came to understanding sexual harassment and violence. As Burkett and Hamilton (2012) argued in their study of women’s experiences of pressurised sex with men, within postfeminist discourses of sexual empowerment, women can still be held responsible for monitoring relationships, but the inequalities underpinning such heterosexualised expectations are rendered invisible. Burkett and Hamilton (2012) suggest that “the compulsory sexual agency of postfeminist sensibilities negates the on-going negotiation of consent because women can no longer express distress if the genders are now equal” (p. 828). Similarly, studies have suggested that voicing experiences of sexism is constrained by postfeminist agency. More specifically, when women claim to have experienced sexism, they are also claiming that someone had power over them. This claim positions women and girls as powerless victims and undermines their ability to align themselves with independent and empowered femininities (e.g. Pomerantz et al., 2013). Compulsory postfeminist agency thus presents a particularly complex set of challenges to voicing and labelling experiences as sexual harassment.
The ways in which postfeminism could be flexibly deployed to obscure sexual victimisation worked comfortably with how neoliberalism has broadly worked to erase victim politics (Laster & Erez, 2000). Within neoliberalism, agency is understood as individual choice—the ideal neoliberal subject can choose to rise to the challenge of adversity and make the best of all situations (Phipps, 2014). This, Phipps argues, is reflected in psychological therapeutic literature in which victimhood has become represented as an unfledged moment on the path towards self-actualisation. Within neoliberal frames, victimhood is self-made, and suffering becomes a psychological choice rather than something inflicted by a wrong. It is perhaps not surprising then that empirical work on sexual violence more generally has seen an increased rejection of victim identity by women, and a greater emphasis on women’s empowered choices which are embedded in the need to rise above sexual harassment and violence (e.g. Baker, 2010). Notable is how these empowered victim discourses have paralleled the growth of austerity measures in the UK. In line with the rollback of welfare and social provision under neoliberalism, substantive cuts to the national funding of women’s sexual and domestic violence services were made post the 2008 global economic crisis and recession (Conley, 2012). Taken together, it appears that cultural support and empathy for women who identified as victims was severely limited by these developments.
New Victim Politics?
The widespread and high-profile speak-outs against sexual harassment in recent years, which culminated in #MeToo, represents an extraordinary historic turnaround. We seem to have witnessed a shift from a widespread reluctance to name experiences as sexual harassment to a pervasive labelling of the phenomenon on a scale unimaginable in the 1990s and early 2000s. The emergence of #MeToo, of course, was shaped by relevant shifts in the cultural landscape. The mainstreaming of feminist ideas, for example, has been implicated in the rise of the movement (e.g. Rottenberg, 2019). Within the last ten years, the regrowth of feminism’s popularity has been undeniably visible (Rivers, 2017). Against this backdrop, there was a growing pattern of outing high-profile men as “sexual predators, abusers and violators” in the media from around 2015 (Matthews, 2019, p. 271; see also Chapter 5).
In making this point, Zarkov and Davis (2018) draw attention to how those publicly calling out sexual harassment were also socially privileged—an issue that is echoed in the growing literature on #MeToo (see also Chapter 1). The distinction between agents and victims made by Zarkov and Davis (2018) resonates with the long-standing victim/agent dichotomy constituted in sexual harassment discourse discussed earlier. This raises questions about how agency and victimisation are constituted in more recent constructions of sexual harassment and the implications this has for speaking rights within contemporary victim politics.While it certainly took courage to come out on #MeToo, it was also a platform for individual women who were confident enough to stand up and powerful enough to be heard. Many of the women were well-known celebrities and they situated themselves as agents, not as victims. (p. 5)
Agents, Not Victims….Again?
To unpack the “agent not victim” distinction made by Zarkov and Davis (2018) further, I would like to briefly focus on two cases reported in the media which preceded #MeToo but have become identified as significant contributors in its rise. The first is the high-profile court case of the sexual harassment and assault of Taylor Swift by DJ David Mueller that was reported in August 2017. The second is Ashley Judd’s early attempt to call out Harvey Weinstein in 2015 in an interview with Variety magazine (see also Chapter 2). Both Swift and Judd were subsequently named in Time magazine’s listing of #MeToo “silence breakers” whose “voices… launched a movement” (Zacharek et al., 2017). Important to the reporting of both Swift and Judd was how both women were seen as challenging secondary victimisation—the disbelief, victim blame and lack of sympathy that individuals are frequently exposed to in the aftermath of sexual violence (Anderson & Doherty, 2008; Williams, 1984).
Swift was combative at times with Mueller`s lawyer who pressed her: “Why did the front of your skirt not move? Because my ass is located in the back of my body.” Swift said she would not allow Mueller`s attorney to make her feel as if it`s her fault. (“Swift and Furious”, 2017)
Mueller’s attorney, Gabe McFarland, cross-examined Swift, and multiple sources reported that she stood firmly with her initial statements throughout the entire process… Swift forwent all formalities (like “sir”) and simply called McFarland by his first name. Her answers were direct, stern, and unwavering. We’ll let you read them for yourself. Here are the 10 most powerful comebacks she said in court today. (Rosa, 2017, para. 4–5)
“I’m not going to allow you or your client to make me feel in any way that this is my fault, because it isn’t,” she said. “I am being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions and not mine”. (Vogue, 2017, para. 3)
Swift’s successful resistance to victim blame and reattribution of responsibility to Mueller, represents a public disavowal of secondary victimisation. The media reporting of the Mueller Vs. Swift case thus provides some grounds for Zarkov and Davis’s (2018) claim around the agentic presentation of women in the celebrity speak-out around sexual harassment.
I have a feeling if this is online and people have the opportunity to post comments, a lot of the people will say, “Why didn’t you leave the room?”, which is victim-blaming. (Setoodeh, 2015, para. 3)
I beat myself up for a while. This is another part of the process. We internalize the shame. It really belongs to the person who is the aggressor. And so later, when I was able to see what happened, I thought: Oh god, that’s wrong. That’s sexual harassment. That’s illegal. I was really hard on myself because I didn’t get out of it by saying, “OK motherf—er, I’m calling the police”. That’s what I should have done, because I’m smart. That also contributed to my journey of coming forward, because I felt bad about myself initially for the way I maintained my safety and got out of the room. When, in fact, what I did was exceedingly clever and brilliant and self-preserving. That’s another element of how we internalize those attitudes and talking to other people is so crucial is being able to take action. (Setoodeh, 2015, para. 6–7)
Here, Judd problematises her own self-blame as a reflection of the wider cultural reflex of victim blame. As Anderson and Doherty (2008) argue, this cultural reflex is produced by social perceptions of sexual victimisation as avoidable. Judd’s recognition of self-blame resonates with particular notions of survivorship. For McCaffery (1998), the victim/survivor nexus is not one defined by passivity/agency in any straightforward sense. Rather, as Stringer (2014) argues “the survivor is not a non-victim but rather one who is subverting the experience of victimisation, a subversion often marked by refusal to cooperate with the idea that they themselves and women in general are responsible” (p. 78). Survivorship has thus been treated as having the potential to unsettle victim/agent binaries as well as practices of secondary victimisation. These ideas are present in the reporting of Judd’s personal testimony in which particular notions of “survivor rhetorically establishes that one has been victimised, yet also implies that one should be recognised for overcoming the often debilitating effects of sexual victimisation” (McCaffery, 1998, p. 278). Much like the reporting of the Swift case, Judd is positioned as agentic by disavowing secondary victimisation and reattributing shame and blame to the perpetrator.
Actors and writers and journalists and dishwashers and fruit pickers alike: they’d had enough. What had manifested as shame exploded into outrage. Fear became fury. This was the great unleashing that turned the #MeToo hashtag into a rallying cry. (Zacharek et al., 2017, para. 42)
This description of victims who challenge sexual harassment is not dissimilar to the presentation of women victim activists in the 1975 New York Times article discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Victimhood is connected not only to passivity but also to agency through anger and mobilisation. Resonances between constructions of the 1970s’ women activists and the #MeToo silence breakers would appear to represent a resurgence in feminist victim politics. In turn, this may suggest that postfeminist understandings of victimhood are now a thing of the past (Gill, 2016). However, Boyle (2019) astutely draws attention to the selective and limited reference to feminist politics in the Time article. More specifically, the word “feminist” is only used twice and when used it invokes suspicion. For example, the article references some self-declared feminists’ support for Bill Clinton, despite the sexual harassment charges brought against him in the 1990s. Feminism is also disavowed through the mention of how some women who are speaking out have disclaimed a feminist identity. Thus, traces of postfeminism can be found in the article through the ways in which feminism is taken into account only for its contemporary relevance to be refuted. The danger this presents is a decoupling of contemporary speak-outs from feminist politics that articulate links between sexual harassment and the structural bases of oppression (Gill & Orgad, 2018).
The Time article, as well as the reporting of Swift and Judd, are further complicated by the presentation of victim politics and intersectionality. While Swift and Judd are clearly positioned as privileged across a host of fault lines, the Time article attempts to represent diversity in the images and content included, at least across, economic, raced and gendered positionings. However, this representation belies inequalities around speaking rights. Boyle (2019), for example, argues that the Time article references a very selective white liberal feminist history. In doing so, what is ignored is othered histories of activism against sexual violence and how these are relevant to #MeToo. As discussed earlier, the #MeToo literature has raised a clear concern that, although the hashtag has had substantial reach, it is nevertheless the victimisation of white privileged women that has been most visible. The operation of raced power inequalities has been highlighted in #MeToo. However, this has been driven to an extent by the relative lack of credit given to the founder of the #MeToo movement in 2006—Tarana Burke, an African-American civil rights activist—even as Milano’s #MeToo tweet went viral. This is perhaps not surprising given Milano’s celebrity. However, Burke’s marginalisation is also reflective of the ways in which women of colour are often invisible as victims of sexual violence. Their invisibility has been tied to how victim ideals are marked by privilege (e.g. Patil & Purkayastha, 2015).
The ways in which victimhood becomes constituted in relation to processes of racialisation have long been a focus of theorisation in postcolonial writings. Mohanty (1986, 2012), for example, draws attention to how the women-as-victims trope typically presents non-Western women as more thoroughly victimised by “barbaric” non-Western cultures. This representation of victimhood creates distinctions between Western/non-Western women as respectively more or less agentic. Agency can thus become understood as an articulation of white feminine empowerment (e.g Amos & Parmar, 2001; Bulbeck, 1998; Parashar, 2016; Spivak, 1994). As Stringer (2014) argues “either the non-western woman is excluded from victim recognition while the struggles of white women are centred and humanised; or the non-western woman is included by way of a dehumanising representation as a more complete victim -totally or more abjectly dominated by male despotism…standing in need of rescue by western feminists” (pp. 121–122). For some scholars, notions of survivorship have been used to complicate raced notions of passivity and agency in ways which recognise and legitimise the experiences of women of colour (e.g. Hooks, 1984, 2015).
Phipps (2019) draws on postcolonial writings around victimisation to argue that the current popular feminist trend of speaking out about sexual harassment and violence is constituted within frames of political whiteness. Phipps’ argument is rooted in how the fragility associated with victimhood is more accessible for white women than it is for women of colour. In her words, a certain “robustness [is] expected of black women [which] reflects [less privileged] raced and classed histories” (p. 10). The emphasis on fragility inscribed in #MeToo testimonies have been countered in recent black feminist activism through notions of resilience and reclamations of robustness. However, Phipps points to how resilience is not a straightforward antidote to white fragility. This is because resilience is about surviving within a profoundly unequal status quo within which resilience has become an adjunct to neoliberal ideals of good citizens who take personal responsibility for the state of their lives and overcome adversity. In addition to this, Phipps (2019) argues that while notions of resilience can intersect with ideas around the strong black woman, it has also become a key quality of postfeminist and neoliberal femininities, and represent “a new norm in neoliberal patriarchy…which is coded as white and middle class” (p. 12). For Phipps (2019), these cultural patterns highlight “a double bind for women of colour within contemporary oppositions between survivorship and victimhood, woundedness and resilience” (p. 12).
Healing comes in a lot of different ways. Some things require intensive, contained work. Some things could be resolved with a good run or punching bag or an interaction with the perpetrator, in which one is able to take one’s power back. (Setoodeh, 2015, para. 9)
In this context, I would argue that another unintended outcome is the opening up of the complexity in narratives of experience, which can touch on the contextual and fluid movements of passivity/agency in victim politics.is informed by a market calculus, it is uninterested in social justice or mass mobilisation…. There is nothing about this feminism that threatens the powers that be. Yet one of its unintended effects may well constitute a threat. Precisely because neoliberal feminism has facilitated the widespread visibility and embrace of the F-word, it has concurrently paved the way for a militant feminist movement. (para. 8, 9, & 10)
not to countenance a slide into overly simplified readings of difference, marginality and exclusion. Such a slide would suggest that marginality derives its meaning from the centre. It is also predicated on notions of fixed centres of power and meaning that structure and order the surrounds…. By reifying those at the centre and the margin, such notions fail to recognise that within sameness there is difference and sameness difference. At the same time, they are divested of the notion that’s one’s social location necessarily determines opportunities for speaking, hearing and being heard. (p. 222)
In mapping the terrain of victim politics, I would argue that polarisations around agency and passivity can be flexibly deployed in the service of both old and new heteronormative ideals and systems of privilege. These deployments shape “who gets to speak, what they are able to say and what legitimacy is afforded to their voices” (Worrell, 2003, p. 222). Relevant to speaking rights is Gavey’s (2018) considerations of the problem of passivity in victim politics. She explores the possibilities of opening up spaces in which a diversity of resistance narratives can be heard. This includes narratives where women have fought back and won, and those where women were not psychologically devastated by their experiences. Gavey (2018) acknowledges the risk of opening up such a plethora of narratives. For example, a comparison of women’s responses may fuel the secondary victimisation of some women who did not fight back or overcome adversity within neoliberal frames. Rather than dismissing the language of victimisation, she argues instead for a move towards legitimising various narratives of resistance which could pave the way for a more nuanced understanding of agency/passivity in practice. This, she argues, could potentially disrupt cultural templates around women’s passivity or constrained agency in relation to men. Stringer (2014) similarly explores how discourses of agency and passivity have shaped victim politics. Stringer’s (2014) argument focuses on how neoliberal ideals of agency have shaped the widespread rejection of victimhood and the pervasive disregard for others’ experiences of victimisation. In this context, Stringer argues for a reclaiming of victimhood by engaging with the rich histories of feminism obscured by notions of “victim feminism”. These include the “robust feminist critique and politicisation of victim blame, critiques of the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, colonialism, imperialism and class in the politics and social construction of victimhood, conceptions of victimhood and agency that refuse the victim/agent dichotomy… These are all good resources for challenging neoliberal victim theory and forging new political terrain” (p. 160). Gavey and Stringer’s arguments are not, I would argue, oppositional. A reclaiming of narratives of resistance in which neither victimhood nor agency is celebrated, denigrated or abandoned may trouble re-signification and de-politicisation of feminist political strategies within neoliberalism. Recent challenges to sexual harassment have begun to open up different ways of signalling harm and injustice. These challenges do not always or easily translate into characterisations of the neoliberal resilient rejector of victimhood, or of the passive and powerless victim. The task in front of us, and one that is well underway, is to link these narratives to a sustained critique of the social and structural subordinations which support sexual harassment, particularly those which in the current climate, service neoliberal agendas.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have explored the notion of victimhood in the trajectory of feminist challenges against sexual harassment and violence. I have explored how polarisations around agency as good and passivity as bad have circulated within feminist, postfeminist and neoliberal discourses around victimhood. These polarisations were particularly sharp in predominant discourses in the 1990s and early 2000s. I have argued that these discursive frames meant that women were caught in a set of tensions, where their choices to voice or not voice their experiences as sexual harassment were subject to the trouble of navigating maligned passive feminine identities. These tensions become increasingly complex for other women who do not or cannot easily align with ideals of feminine victimhood which have been marked by, for example, white middle-class privilege. The more recent challenges made in and around #MeToo have seen some push back to the well-entrenched associations between femininity, victimhood and passivity. While this push back parallels the rise of visibility of neoliberal feminism, which addresses privileged women and the gender unequal challenges which affect them, it (alongside the mainstreaming of other popular feminisms) has also indirectly contributed to a greater visibility of narratives which are not straightforwardly hinged on agency/passivity polarisations. This, I suggest is important, for legitimising the speaking rights of those who have struggled to be heard. However, in order to challenge the privileges that underpin unequal rights to speak and be heard, these narratives must be linked to the broader project of disrupting intersecting social, economic and structural inequalities under neoliberalism. My consideration of speaking rights is extended in the next chapter where I consider the visibility of male victims in #MeToo.