{"title":"Damaged Goods: Victimhood‐Survivorship and the Social Marking of Identity","authors":"Gabrielle LaFleur","doi":"10.1002/symb.699","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a cultural cognitive theory of sexual violence: a Zerubavelian reading of its classificatory, attentional, perceptual, semiotic, mnemonic, and temporal dimensions. It maps the asymmetric syntactic contrasts between the cultural trifecta of “Victim‐Survivors,” “Victimizers,” and the hitherto unnamed, taken‐for‐granted “Unvictims,” arguing that those who experience sexual violence are marked in contrast to both those who victimize and those who have never been victimized. Suggesting that one need not be the actor of a marked act to be marked by it, a victimizing person's marked act crystallizes as a marked identity for the person they victimize, a process I call “semiotic ricochet.” Extending critiques of the victimhood‐survivorship frame, this article argues that the “rigid‐minded,” binary classificatory scheme of “Victim” or “Survivor” reifies, universalizes, derivatizes, and temporally displaces its attributed. It proposes hyphenating, encasing in scare quotes, and capitalizing the identity category of “Victim‐Survivor,” as well as referring to individuals as “those who experience sexual violence.” Using the Zerubavelian theoretico‐methodological practice of “concept‐driven” sociology, it identifies the “Victim‐Survivor” as merely one specific instantiation of the generic social type the “Damaged Good,” alongside other identities derived from marked non‐acts such as placement in foster care or undergoing a mastectomy for breast cancer.","PeriodicalId":47804,"journal":{"name":"Symbolic Interaction","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Symbolic Interaction","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.699","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article offers a cultural cognitive theory of sexual violence: a Zerubavelian reading of its classificatory, attentional, perceptual, semiotic, mnemonic, and temporal dimensions. It maps the asymmetric syntactic contrasts between the cultural trifecta of “Victim‐Survivors,” “Victimizers,” and the hitherto unnamed, taken‐for‐granted “Unvictims,” arguing that those who experience sexual violence are marked in contrast to both those who victimize and those who have never been victimized. Suggesting that one need not be the actor of a marked act to be marked by it, a victimizing person's marked act crystallizes as a marked identity for the person they victimize, a process I call “semiotic ricochet.” Extending critiques of the victimhood‐survivorship frame, this article argues that the “rigid‐minded,” binary classificatory scheme of “Victim” or “Survivor” reifies, universalizes, derivatizes, and temporally displaces its attributed. It proposes hyphenating, encasing in scare quotes, and capitalizing the identity category of “Victim‐Survivor,” as well as referring to individuals as “those who experience sexual violence.” Using the Zerubavelian theoretico‐methodological practice of “concept‐driven” sociology, it identifies the “Victim‐Survivor” as merely one specific instantiation of the generic social type the “Damaged Good,” alongside other identities derived from marked non‐acts such as placement in foster care or undergoing a mastectomy for breast cancer.
期刊介绍:
The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction is a social science professional organization of scholars interested in qualitative, especially interactionist, research. The society organizes panels and sessions at annual conferences such as the American Sociological Association and Midwest Sociology Society Annual Meetings, and each Spring holds the Couch-Stone Symposium. As the main voice of the Symbolic Interactionist perspective, Symbolic Interaction brings you articles which showcase empirical research and theoretical development that resound throughout the fields of sociology, social psychology, communication, education, nursing, organizations, mass media, and others.