Research Topic
The Emotional Labor of Sexual Violence Survivors in Mainstream Media: A Study via Auto-Ethnography and Interviews
My thesis explores the emotional labor of sexual violence survivors who collaborate repeatedly with mainstream media platforms to publicly share their experiences of trauma and their identities. While the #MeToo movement has yielded a proliferation of media discourse around rape survivors and scholarly analysis of those texts, the labor and media practices producing that discourse – and the emotional experiences of the mediated survivors – remain largely invisible.
I combine two methods of data collection in my research: semi-structured interviews with survivors who have maintained visibility in newspapers, television, or radio over the course of years; and an auto-ethnography of my own media experiences as a rape survivor, writer, and activist, from 2008 until 2022. Focusing on the temporality of an individual’s ‘journey’ from private victim to public survivor and inadvertent media worker, I explore how and why survivors choose to ‘go public’ in the first place, what are the emotional costs of maintaining that visibility, how those costs are justified or compensated, and finally, how intersectional differences impact individual experiences and outcomes.
My research situates individual survivors as agentic in their decisions, who are highly aware of stereotypical representations of rape, and learn to actively negotiate with media platforms about their visibility. Central to my analysis is Hochschild’s theory of emotional labor: Not only must survivors regulate their emotions to communicate effectively about their trauma, but media visibility is produced through their own, often unpaid labor, performed within the workplace of the creative industries. My findings indicate that their emotional labor is intense and multi-layered, a convergence of existing forms of emotional labor embedded in the multiple subjectivities that a public survivor inhabits: as a survivor of trauma, a visibilized female subject, and a media worker. Within the creative industries, where financial compensation and practices of care for workers are often poor, individuals can feel constrained from asking for pay, by an ‘economy of believability’ which is quick to judge public rape victims as ‘gold-diggers.’
In lieu of pay, compensation is sought in emotional rewards and a strategic use of media visibility as publicity for one’s self-brand. Ultimately, individuals with cultural capital are privileged in shaping a sustainable, increasingly neoliberal career as a public survivor, while other voices become excluded.
Supervisor: Dr Shani Orgad
Biography
Winnie M Li is an author, activist, and researcher best known for her work on survivor-centered cultural narratives around sexual violence. A Harvard graduate, Winnie worked as a film producer in London before her life was disrupted by a violent stranger rape in Belfast in 2008. Her debut novel, DARK CHAPTER, is a fictional retelling of that event from victim and perpetrator perspectives. Translated into ten languages, it won The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize and was nominated for an Edgar Award. She is currently adapting it for the screen, funded by Northern Ireland Screen and the British Film Institute. Her second novel COMPLICIT was published in Summer 2022 and selected by The New York Times for their monthly book club. In addition to her PhD research at LSE on the emotional labour of rape survivors in mainstream media, Winnie also co-founded the Clear Lines Festival, the UK’s first-ever festival addressing sexual assault and consent through the arts and discussion. Winnie has given over 200 public talks and appeared on the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4, The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The Times, The Irish Times, and TEDx London. She holds an honorary doctorate of law from the National University of Ireland in recognition of her writing and activism, and is also an Associate Lecturer in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. http://winniemli.com