Gendered Victims

Abstract

Technologies of gender involve representations that, distinguishing between homosexual and heterosexual subjects, cast women and men, girls and boys differently as victims. The identification of a victim is a social, cultural, and political stake in which media have a key role. Media produce, mobilize, sell, justify, and challenge victimization in the realm of entertainment, news coverage, campaigning against gender‐based violence, humanitarian advocacy, self‐exposure, and storytelling. Media also constitute the social fields in which users can victimize and devictimize themselves, lose and gain voice, intertwining online and off‐line agencies. Particularly on digital media, feminist and LGBTIQ activism can arise in criticizing and subverting victim‐blaming and the reification of victimhood. In this way, the secondary victimization that the social response to gender‐based violence can entail could be highlighted and the lack of structural justice for eccentric subjects is denounced. Whereas, by broadcasting gendered politics, rights, cultural practices, ethnicized and racialized subjects, and humanitarian discourse, media can also convey suffering and victimhood in a way that depoliticizes vulnerability, corroborates social and moral hierarchies among lives, and displays neoliberal civilizing and victimizing regimes of meaning. As a result of content analysis, audience‐centered approaches, online and off‐line ethnography on media consumption and production, and media studies can articulate gender studies and account for the sociocultural implications and stakes of contextualized victimizations, disclosing the underlying gendered power relations and their historical shifting.