Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2022, 48(1)

The #MeToo movement provides an opportunity to critique the victim and survivor labels as they are deployed in everyday conversations, media, and interdisciplinary contexts. In this essay, I use personal experience to examine discourses of victimhood, survivorship, their binary formulation, and the narrative arc figured to connect them. Competing neoliberal and Christian discourses load the victim label with contradictory imperatives: when victims adhere to one set of expectations, they necessarily violate others and risk deleterious social consequences. Meanwhile, the development of the survivor label in psychology and politics following World War II, and the uptake of the term in feminist theory and activism, render survivorship a valorized alternative to victimhood. I develop the survivor imperative to critique the directive that victim/survivors perform postvictimization identity in a manner that is socially acceptable within neoliberal hegemony. I build on Suzanne McKenzie-Mohr and Michelle N Lafrance’s notion of tightrope talk to attend to my own speech as a victim/survivor and resist recuperation into dominant discourses. This essay draws from personal records of interpersonal conversations, building on Joan W. Scott’s call to take experience as a starting place for analysis while working to advance Sara Ahmed’s challenge to the theory/experience divide. I also use Rebecca Stringer’s neoliberal victim theory to consider how overemphasis on personal responsibility is problematic when gender-based violence remains a pervasive, systemic threat, even as #MeToo continues to reverberate. (Author's abstract). Record #8462