Instagrammable humanitarianism and the politics of guilt

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is based on a study of the collaboration between the Danish pop singer Medina and Act Alliance, the TV-program Medina and the Refugees—Access with Abdel and the harsh attacks on Medina and her humanitarian engagement on social media. The article follows three trajectories. Firstly, I suggest that Act Alliance uses celebrity advocacy in a mediatized campaign effort to mobilize young Instagrammers accustomed to peer-to-peer communication. Secondly, I suggest that Medina’s advocacy manifests as a particular form of politics of guilt, which on the one hand positions her as an “icon-body” that reproduces the classic distinction between active Westerners and passive sufferers and on the other hand challenges this distinction when her celebrity body becomes agentic. The politics of guilt is crucial because Medina and Act Alliance ask for recognition of a collective Scandinavian guilt, i.e. guilt about being on the receiving end of global inequality and consequently redemption through aid. Thirdly, I study the ways in which the politics of guilt is rejected when newspapers, bloggers and Facebook users cross-feed each other and affectively intensify a collective shaming of Medina. This kind of shaming, it is argued, is a way of rejecting guilt towards suffering others by shaming and denying Medina agency and insisting that she is merely an icon-body. Finally, while the article distinguished between politics of guilt and the shaming strategies directed at Medina, both work according to the logics of affective governmentality, seeking to govern who has agency and what the appropriate affects in the face of suffering might be. In this context, the analysis shows, shaming reflects a neoliberal and ethnocentric welfare-protectionism that conceals its own anti-refugee ideology.