The Cultural Rules of Victimhood: Can Movements of Low-income Minority Women Utilize the Victim Frame?

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Intersectionality in Social Movements

Abstract

In this interdisciplinary paper, I trace the cultural boundaries of victimhood in American public discourse, focusing on low income single mothers and women of color. Studying news media’s portrayals of welfare activists and welfare recipients in Massachusetts around the passage of the state’s welfare reform in 1995, I used frame analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze 195 newspaper articles from the Boston Globe and Boston Herald. Framing social activists and beneficiaries as victims can serve as a critical entry point to public discourse and politics for marginalized populations. Most theoretical discussions of the victim frame use a universal color- and gender-blind language to investigate the frame’s utility. In contrast, I assert that in order to be accorded with legitimacy, the imagined “ideal victim” (Dunn 2004) must adhere to specific cultural rules that are race- class- and gender- specific. In this analysis, I show how these rules are often internally contradictory, demanding victims to be simultaneously passive and active in order to be granted the cultural benefits of the “ideal victim” status. By showing how intersecting identities operate to accord or deny a victim title to social movement activists and beneficiaries, I am able to extend and complicate our understanding of the victim frame in public discourse. This theoretical contribution has special significance for social movement scholars and activists since I can show how race, class and gender norms and stereotypes might inhibit movement’s strategic use of the victim frame, thus denying them an important, albeit not perfect, strategic tool.

Author

• Noa Milman, University of Massachusetts-Amherst