LILIE CHOULIARAKI
"The battle over Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination was described by the media as a "turning point' in America's history of female witnessing" (Time), a "tale of two internets" (Wired), and a "duel with tears and fury" (NYT). Each of these headlines highlighted a significant aspect of what the hearings revealed about American culture: the triumph of women's voices in the age of #MeToo; anxieties around echo chambers that divide political communication; and the hyperemotional nature of politics in the era of far-right populism. None, however, captured the deepest, and perhaps most insidious, character of this event as a battle over who is a victim. While these accounts describe or explain victimhood as a dominant discourse of Western cultures at large, they do not address what kind of world is a world of proliferating victims where two sides compete to establish their suffering as more legitimate than that of others? How did it come to be as it is today? What are the benefits of living in it? And, more importantly, what are the costs? In Wronged!, Lilie Chouliaraki's grapples how the proliferation of victims produces its own victims by obfuscating truth itself, and populating public discourse with too many voices of pain while selectively authorizing some of those voices over others. Just like the spread of fake news blurs the boundary between fact and rumor, competing claims to pain blur the line between systemic and tactical suffering. Chouliaraki examines this distinction to navigate the difference "between fighting for victimized people," which demands an account of the conditions of their suffering, and "promoting a victimhood culture," which encourages claims to pain. Fighting for the victimized is the moral drive of her argument, while promoting a victimhood culture is the object of her analysis"-
