The emotional labor of sexual violence survivors in mainstream media: a study via auto-ethnography and interviews

Li, Winnie M. (2024) The emotional labor of sexual violence survivors in mainstream media: a study via auto-ethnography and interviews. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This 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 (1983) 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 multilayered, 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.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Winnie M Li
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Sets:	Departments > Media and Communications
Supervisor:	Orgad, Shani and Helsper, Ellen
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4724

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