Power of Vulnerability

de Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä, Ingrid Ryberg

In popular campaigns such as #metoo and #timesup, questions of power and agency are increasingly discussed as issues of injusry or empowerment. Vulnerability has emerged as a key concept in these discussions and their academic analyses. This book investigates the historical legacies and contemporary forms and effects of the language of vulnerability. In today's media culture, traumatic first-person or group narratives have popular currency, mobilising affect from compassion to rage in order to gain visibility and political advantage. Vulnerability is seen as a kind of capital; not only as victimhood but also as a resource that can be adopted for various purposes. Contributors to the book, including Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed, examine how affect and vulnerability not only reveal but also obscure asymmetries of power, how media activism and state policies address so-called vulnerable groups, and how we determine whose vulnerability counts as socially and culturally legible. Providing keen insights into the political potential as well as the constraints of vulnerability for feminist, queer and anti-racist criticism, the book will be of interest to scholars and students in media and cultural studies, affect theory, gender studies, queer theory and critical race studies.