Knowing victims : feminism, ressentiment and the category 'victim'

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s feminism was criticised for being centred on a representation of women as 'victims', a representation which purportedly is substantially untrue, inimical to female agency, and politically regressive. This criticism has gained increasingly broad purchase both outside and within feminist circles, and has become something of a mass media truism. The main task of this dissertation is to examine salient articulations of this criticism, firstly within the sphere of popular feminism, and secondly within the sphere of feminist political theory. The concern motivating the dissertation is that this criticism, while illuminating in some important respects, predominantly has operated as a vehicle through which attempts are made to curtail feminism's potential to foster radical social change. The first part of the dissertation addresses popular feminist critiques of 'victim feminism'. The popular accounts are found to construe the 'victim problem in feminism' as a venue for reasserting traditional liberal feminist edicts and for cultivating a neoliberal feminism. With a view to elucidate the generic turns of 'victim talk' in liberal democratic settings, and with particular attention to the issue of sexual violence, my analysis reveals (inter alia) that the association these accounts set up between 'the victim problem' and radical feminist politics relies on an elision of the latter's guiding construction of 'victims' as agentic subjects. The second part of the dissertation exammes accounts by feminist political theorists in which the question of feminism's relationship with hecategory 'victim' is taken up under the aegis of Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment. These accounts argue that feminism has become a politics of ressentiment-a resubordinative disposition which reifies women's victim status and encourages apolitical moralism-and ought to construe its political horizon as a move beyond ressentiment. However, my analysis reveals fundamentally conflicting judgements in these accounts regarding which feminist political strategy-liberal/neoliberal or radical-counts as ressentimental and, therefore, which could lead the move beyond ressentiment. With this problem in mind, but agreeing that Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment has explanatory power for interpreting feminism's relation with the category 'victim,' I set out to examine this concept in the third part of the dissertation. The dissertation's third and final part offers a critical re-reading of the concept of ressentiment, most notably as it is articulated in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Rather than uphold Nietzsche's condemnatory attitude toward ressentiment, I present a positive reading of ressentiment as the affective venue in which the relatively disempowered craft the agentic capacity to articulate, problematise and ameliorate their experience of, and vulnerability to, victimisation. On this reading, liberal feminist strategy appears as a containment of ressentiment, while radical feminist strategy appears to mine its energy for far-reaching socio-political change. On the basis of this reading I also articulate my view that feminism's relationship with ressentiment is twofold in character: feminism is both 'within' and 'against' ressentiment. This view posits that feminism will move beyond ressentiment when it has successfully redressed the configurations of power which serve to incite ressentiment in the first instance. My reading of ressentiment also suggests that this concept can perform a greater variety of labours for feminist political theory than that of intra-feminist diagnosis. Most notably, I suggest that this concept can be used to interpret aspects of the relationship between men, masculinity and violence. The analyses presented in the dissertation draw on literatures within feminist theory, political theory, criminology and Nietzsche scholarship.