Wronged

In a moment when competing victim claims overwhelm public discourse, leading many to shun victim talk, Wronged gets so much right. By disentangling systemic precarity from privileged grievance, Chouliaraki recuperates the language of victimization for the most vulnerable. Wronged is a rich and sophisticated study that makes a major contribution to overcoming our current political impasse. -- Alyson Cole, author of <i>The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror</i> How have powerful and privileged men managed to pass themselves off as the victims of their own victims? This important book offers a new and convincing answer. It is essential reading for feminist scholarship, cultural and media studies, and the study of intersectionality. -- Eva Illouz, author of <i>Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism</i> Where has the holy sorrow of silent saints gone? Lilie Chouliaraki has an answer. It’s vanished into the market of competitive suffering, one that, like all markets, advantages the usual suspects. She urgently and eloquently calls us, in the name of a just and beautiful polity, to attend to suffering undistorted by power. -- John Durham Peters, author of <i>The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media</i> Wronged is an instant classic for anyone seeking to make sense of the pervasive politics of victimhood in the era of digital platforms and profound polarization. In writing that is both strikingly original and deeply moving, Chouliaraki performs the magic trick of rendering visible what was previously unseen: even if suffering is universal, the politics of pain is deeply embedded within power relations and privileges the voices of the powerful over those of the powerless. -- Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, author of <i>Emotions, Media, and Politics</i>