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- Author: Ingrid Ryberg x
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This chapter examines two rare lesbian film productions in Sweden in the 1970s, The Woman in Your Life is You (Lesbian Front, 1977) and Eva and Maria (Marie Falksten, Annalena Öhrström and Mary Eisikovits, 1983). The two films are unique cases illuminating the official shift from regarding homosexuality as a mental disorder to regarding homosexuals as a vulnerable group exposed to prejudice and discrimination in Sweden in the early 1980s. Both were funded by the state agency Socialstyrelsen [The National Board of Health and Welfare], the same agency in charge of the official classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in Sweden until 1979. Drawing from archival research and interviews, the chapter sheds light on the rhetorical twists and euphemisms through which lesbian filmmaking was inserted into the National Board of Health and Welfare’s budget and administered as an issue of birth control education. The notion of vulnerability, the chapter argues, played an instrumental and multifaceted role in the production of lesbian citizenship and audio-visual self-presentation at this moment in time.
The power of vulnerability interrogates the new language of vulnerability that has emerged in feminist, queer and anti-racist debates about the production, use and meanings of media. The book investigates the historical legacies and contemporary forms and effects of this language. In today’s media culture, traumatic first-person or group narratives have popular currency, mobilising affect from compassion to rage to gain cultural visibility and political advantage. In this context, vulnerability becomes a kind of capital, a resource or an asset that can and has been appropriated for various groups and purposes in public discourses, activism as well as cultural institutions. Thus, politics of representation translates into politics of affect, and the question about whose vulnerability counts as socially and culturally legible and acknowledged. The contributors of the book examine how vulnerability has become a battleground; how affect and vulnerability have turned into a politicised language for not only addressing but also obscuring asymmetries of power; and how media activism and state policies address so-called vulnerable groups. While the contributors investigate the political potential as well as the constraints of vulnerability for feminist, queer and antiracist criticism, they also focus on the forms of agency and participation vulnerability can offer.
This chapter introduces the main questions addressed in the book and thoroughly accounts for the concept of vulnerability, its various theoretical legacies and uses in feminist, anti-racist, and queer scholarship, and key role in present-day discussions about power, agency, and the media. Vulnerability is addressed both as a concept and as a political language. The authors highlight four aspects of how this language operates: as a human rights discourse, as a language easily appropriated by dominant groups, as a contested language invoking long-running debates in queer, feminist, and anti-racist media cultures, and as a language translated into cultural policymaking. The #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter campaigns exemplify how the public articulation of experiences of injury, trauma, and hurt can turn into powerful movements. However, in neo-liberal media culture, vulnerability operates as a political language not only for disadvantaged, but also for privileged groups. Claims of vulnerability can translate to claims to agency and voice, but these claims can have completely oppositional political consequences, depending on who is making them. Drawing from Lauren Berlant and Judith Butler, the chapter sheds light on this and other paradoxes that the concept of vulnerability evokes, and asks: what does the language of vulnerability do?
This chapter analyses the racial and emotional dynamics in the acclaimed crime series Top of the Lake: China Girl (Australia, Jane Campion, 2017), set in Sydney where Inspector Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) leads the murder case of an unidentified young Asian woman. Revolving around charged issues such as surrogacy, adoption and migrant sex workers, the series offers a rich and complex reflection on the current debate about the global division of reproductive work across axes of gender, race, nationality, migrant status and class. The authors show how the series sets conflicting notions of vulnerability in motion, evoking diverging positions in the current debate: a Western liberal notion of reproductive rights on the one hand, and a postcolonial critical notion of reproductive justice on the other. China Girl, they argue, privileges the Western notion of reproductive rights by amplifying the emotional vulnerability of the white intended parents at the cost of the illegally contracted Thai surrogates in the series.