Politics of suffering and the mediatic narratives of natural catastastrophe
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1980-3729.2011.1.8808Keywords:
Catastrophes, virtual victim, mediaAbstract
This article proposes the concept of the virtual victim as a feature of contemporary subjectivity. The virtual victim emerges when, faced with mediatic narratives, individuals grasp the possibility of a sudden irruption of suffering in pleasurable routines. In its historical specificity the virtual victim causes three main transformations in the politics of piety that shaped the recognition of the suffering of others in modernity: 1) the shift from inequality to safe and pleasurable routines as a site for conceiving justice; 2) the replacement of piety towards the suffering poor to individual compassion at a distance; 3) the passage of denouncing the role of the State in perpetuating inequality to indignation rooted in the incompetence and immorality of “politicians”. In order to empirically present these shifts, the article confronts the narratives of recent floods and landslides in Angra dos Reis with media narratives of other natural disasters since the 1970s.Downloads
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