130: Victimization

Overview & Synopsis

This text describes how victimization is associated with innocence, femininity, and gender-based violence in Law and Literature, legal processes relating to sexuality-related crime, as well as in Literature and Human Rights. Problematically, the collocation of childhood innocence and (white) femininity with suffering serves to reinforce legal, humanitarian, and aesthetic representational patterns whereby some groups are depicted as eternal victims and others as perpetual saviors, thus reinforcing legal paternalism and neocolonialism. While acknowledging the affective power of depictions of victimization in texts ranging from Antigone to Game of Thrones, as well as in human-rights discourse, this entry simultaneously asks how to move beyond categories that perpetuate the victimhood status of certain groups towards a post-categorical law and aesthetics.