Wronged

In a moment when competing victim claims overwhelm public discourse, leading many to shun victim talk, Wronged gets so much right. By disentangling systemic precarity from privileged grievance, Chouliaraki recuperates the language of victimization for the most vulnerable. Wronged is a rich and sophisticated study that makes a major contribution to overcoming our current political impasse. -- Alyson Cole, author of The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror
How have powerful and privileged men managed to pass themselves off as the victims of their own victims? This important book offers a new and convincing answer. It is essential reading for feminist scholarship, cultural and media studies, and the study of intersectionality. -- Eva Illouz, author of Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism
Where has the holy sorrow of silent saints gone? Lilie Chouliaraki has an answer. It’s vanished into the market of competitive suffering, one that, like all markets, advantages the usual suspects. She urgently and eloquently calls us, in the name of a just and beautiful polity, to attend to suffering undistorted by power. -- John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media
Wronged is an instant classic for anyone seeking to make sense of the pervasive politics of victimhood in the era of digital platforms and profound polarization. In writing that is both strikingly original and deeply moving, Chouliaraki performs the magic trick of rendering visible what was previously unseen: even if suffering is universal, the politics of pain is deeply embedded within power relations and privileges the voices of the powerful over those of the powerless. -- Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, author of Emotions, Media, and Politics
[Chouliaraki] does an excellent job establishing the real-world importance of her ideas. -- Lily Meyer * The Atlantic *
A nuanced analysis of how victimhood is politicised in contemporary society...a powerful and urgent warning to readers about the culture of victimhood in contemporary times. * LSE Review of Books *
Wronged demonstrates with aplomb the current market logic of victimhood narratives and helps to illuminate the problems of present political discourse beyond rote lamentations of ‘polarization.’ * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *
Though sophisticated and theoretically complex, Chouliaraki’s narrative is laid out in clear and accessible prose and is grounded throughout by a broad range of contemporary case studies, making Wronged a valuable teaching resource (for students of feminist theory, politics, media and cultural studies, and critical discourse analysis) as well as a pathbreaking theoretical text. * European Journal of Cultural Studies *