Where Misery Meets Agency: A Critique of “Empowerment”, “Resilience” and “Bearing Witness” Models of Intervention

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

This session interrogates how pervasive neoliberal notions of “empowerment”, “resilience” and “bearing witness” shape and limit the possibilities of responding to human misery. With a particular interest in how global power relations are mediated through various projects designed to respond to misery and how Northern subjects are called upon to produce/consume the misery of the Global South, the presenters draw from an interdisciplinary feminist cultural studies framework to examine various ventures that declare to help the "Other" by empowering them, showcasing their resilience, transforming them from victims to survivors, and/or bearing witness on their suffering. Premised on an understanding of neoliberalism as a system that depoliticises and dehistoricizes the structures of injustice that lead to misery, the session draws attention to how helping responses that value “self-determination” and individualism in fact dilute, if not derail, the possibilities for social justice. To this end, the presenters put forward an analytic that highlights the dangers of discourses of agency and makes evident the structural violence behind understanding overturning misery as a privatized and or personal response.
The papers in this session examine helping responses to human misery in three disparate sites. Nguyen’s paper focuses on NGOs and non-profits to consider the implications of their persistent reframing of misery as opportunity and victims as survivors. Specifically, she highlights the neoliberal value of resilience that underpins the visual aesthetics and consequent spectatorships of contemporary appeals. Kwon’s paper is concerned with how, in large response to the misery of underemployed/educated youth in the “Arab world” and to quell their dissent, the United Nations has dedicated itself to youth as a category of care. Focussing on specific youth conferences and international youth coalition she examines these multi-state efforts to produce an empowered and therefore non-threatening youth subject. Mahrouse’s paper takes the session into the commercial realm to explore a new and burgeoning industry of war-zone tourism. She critically examines the virtues behind the notion of bearing witness as it emerges in the marketing of these tours as an opportunity to “see for yourself” the devastating effects of war” as well as claims that the tours “educate visitors about what's behind the conflicts and acquaint them with the ‘human side’ of trouble spots” (in Clark 2010).
Together these papers call for critical engagement on various responses to misery are enabled through the economic, gendered, and racialized privileges and are embedded in and shaped by global politics and markets.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• To Be Announced, NA

Individual Presentations

• The Politics of Misery, The Aesthetics of Resilience - Mimi Thi Nguyen, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (IL)

• Reproduction of Youth Misery in Global Youth Empowerment - Soo Ah Kwon, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (IL)

• The virtues and dangers of seeing misery up close: Bearing witness on “war-zone tours” - Gada Mahrouse, Concordia University, Montreal (Canada)