abstract: This dissertation explores the rhetorical significance of persecution claims produced by demonstrably powerful publics in contemporary American culture. This ideological criticism is driven by several related research questions. First, how do members of apparently powerful groups (men, whites, and Christians) come to see themselves as somehow unjustly marginalized, persecuted, or powerless? Second, how are these discourses related to the public sphere and counterpublicity? I argue that, despite startling similarities, these texts studied here are best understood not as counterpublicity but as a strategy of containment available to hegemonic publics. Because these rhetorics of persecution often seek to forestall movements toward pluralism and restorative justice, the analysis forwarded in this dissertation offers important contributions to ongoing theoretical discussions in the fields of public sphere theory and critical cultural theory and practical advice for progressive political activism and critical pedagogy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication Studies 2011

Larissa Ennis Doctor of Philosophy Department of English March 2012 Title: Melodramas of Ethnicity and Masculinity: Generic Transformations of Late Twentieth Century American Film Gangsters The gangster film genre in America has enjoyed a long history, from the first one-reelers

If we want to take the agency of the oppressed seriously, we need to think about their normative situation. We need to understand what oppression does to victims, and what victims ought to do as a result. The first half of my dissertation develops a new account of oppression, one that identifies cases not by the wrongs that oppressors embody but by the burdens that victims suffer. The second half questions what kinds of moral and political actors victims can and should be. According to the prevailing "group relationship" of model of oppression, the members of a social group are oppressed when they're subordinated, marginalized, constrained, or displaced in a way that benefits the members of a different social group. In place of this prevailing view, I propose a new, effects-centered model: a person is oppressed when their autonomy or their life prospects are systematically and wrongfully burdened. I then use this account to understand the moral and political agency of the oppressed. I argue that victims have a self-regarding moral obligation to resist their oppression, grounded in considerations of objective well-being. And I develop Aristotle's account of political virtue to apply across ideal and oppressive circumstances alike, adapting it as a defense of nonviolent civil disobedience. This dissertation is the beginning of a larger research project concerned with the nature of victimhood, how injustice affects agency, and how obligations can be grounded in the absence of just institutions.

This dissertation analyzes personal and institutional narratives that shape the Canadian phenomenon of anti-LGBT violence as hate crime and locate queers within and without the discursive figure of the responsible, legitimate and undeserving victim of hate crime. These socio-legal narratives were taken from interviews with LGBT community activists involved in anti-violence projects, mainstream and gay print news media reportage of two notable homicides, Parliamentary debates of the enhanced sentencing provision that sought to include ‘sexual orientation’ to the list of biased motivating factors, Senate witness testimony on the amendment to Canada’s hate propaganda statutes which sought to include ‘sexual orientation’ to the list of protected groups, interviews with police officers who had direct experience with anti-hate crime initiatives, and judicial reasons for sentence. Utilizing an interdisciplinary analysis and drawing on hate crime scholarship and victimology, this dissertation asks: how is legitimate and, consequently, illegitimate LGBT hate crime victimization being represented and constituted through Canadian socio-legal narratives? In revealing how socio-legal actors and institutions have positioned LGBT individuals discursively within or without legitimate victimhood, that is, within and without the status of innocent victim deserving of social empathy and socio-legal institutional response, my dissertation illustrates how the spectre of illegitimate victimization is repeatedly invoked in socio-legal narratives of anti-LGBT hate crime. My analysis of these narratives about queer victimization and hate crime suggests that the figure of the responsible, legitimate and undeserving victim of hate crime remains an elusive and unstable identity for the queer victim of hate crime. Insofar as hate crime scholars have argued that the mobilization of hate crime activism has produced a victim whose hate crime status ensures its legitimacy, I contribute to this scholarship by arguing that this status is particularly challenging for the queer victim of hate-motivated violence. I demonstrate that the resiliency of the figure of classic victimology’s self-endangering and risky ‘homosexual’ and the sustained ideological resistence to LGBT individuals as full citizens, despite their notable legal gains, positions LGBT individuals, particularly gay men, ambiguously, situating them conceptually both without and within legitimate victimhood.

This dissertation analyzes personal and institutional narratives that shape the Canadian phenomenon of anti-LGBT violence as hate crime and locate queers within and without the discursive figure of the responsible, legitimate and undeserving victim of hate crime. These socio-legal narratives were taken from interviews with LGBT community activists involved in anti-violence projects, mainstream and gay print news media reportage of two notable homicides, Parliamentary debates of the enhanced sentencing provision that sought to include ‘sexual orientation’ to the list of biased motivating factors, Senate witness testimony on the amendment to Canada’s hate propaganda statutes which sought to include ‘sexual orientation’ to the list of protected groups, interviews with police officers who had direct experience with anti-hate crime initiatives, and judicial reasons for sentence. Utilizing an interdisciplinary analysis and drawing on hate crime scholarship and victimology, this dissertation asks: how is legitimate and, consequently, illegitimate LGBT hate crime victimization being represented and constituted through Canadian socio-legal narratives? In revealing how socio-legal actors and institutions have positioned LGBT individuals discursively within or without legitimate victimhood, that is, within and without the status of innocent victim deserving of social empathy and socio-legal institutional response, my dissertation illustrates how the spectre of illegitimate victimization is repeatedly invoked in socio-legal narratives of anti-LGBT hate crime. My analysis of these narratives about queer victimization and hate crime suggests that the figure of the responsible, legitimate and undeserving victim of hate crime remains an elusive and unstable identity for the queer victim of hate crime. Insofar as hate crime scholars have argued that the mobilization of hate crime activism has produced a victim whose hate crime status ensures its legitimacy, I contribute to this scholarship by arguing that this status is particularly challenging for the queer victim of hate-motivated violence. I demonstrate that the resiliency of the figure of classic victimology’s self-endangering and risky ‘homosexual’ and the sustained ideological resistence to LGBT individuals as full citizens, despite their notable legal gains, positions LGBT individuals, particularly gay men, ambiguously, situating them conceptually both without and within legitimate victimhood.

The objective of this research was to examine advertising in gay media publications, namely, The Advocate, in order to assess how advertising corresponds with gay identity formation. This study differed from previous inquiries in that the application of hegemony theory formed the basis of the project and was used as a tool to explicate the preponderance of certain images in gay media advertising and what they signify for gay men. Likewise, a phenomenological method of analysis was applied to the advertisements in order to render them more accessible as aesthetic and literary mediums. Classifying the advertisements according to their notional basis resulted in the partitioning of the ads into groups or "parables" of advertising, a method of classification which mimics historical categories recognized in American history and culture. The sum of the project emphasizes the hegemonic structures that characterize gay male images within a broader GLBT sociocultural framework.

It has been widely accepted that history education is key in the formation of identity by providing groups with knowledge and understanding of their common past. Historical consciousness is, thus, formed through the transmission of history education. In the context of collective victimhood, official and unofficial historical narratives in this research became the tools for the transgenerational transmission of collective victimisation, resulting in a victim-based identity. The formation of identity which is based on either official or unofficial history is believed to lead to a double-consciousness, where the historical consciousness created through official history interacts with a sense of collective victimhood. This qualitative case study had the dual purpose of conceptualising and understanding pre-service teachers’ sense of collective victimhood as a historical consciousness that indicated a specific social identity. Data for this study was obtained using an open-ended question from an electronic survey distributed in 2018 as part of an existing project. A total of 138 narrative responses from the purposively sampled first-year education students at the University of Pretoria in 2018 was analysed using critical qualitative content analysis. Findings from the data analysis conceptualised three social identities, namely South Africanness, rainbowism and Black victimhood. Of these three social identities, the historical consciousness presented through the use of historical thinking skills was different in the way that group-based effects manifested in the narrative responses. The historical consciousness contained within South Africanness manifested in attitudes of civic responsibility and justice. Rainbowism and Black victimhood presented a sense of collective victimhood through hostility and injustice, where rainbowism’s sense of collective victimhood was influenced by colour-blind ideology. Historical-thinking concepts were selectively used in the victim-based identities of rainbowism and Black victimhood, suggesting the presence of a double-consciousness. The findings from this study contributed to the broader field of history education and collective victimhood respectively in its understanding and conceptualisation of a pre-service teachers’ sense of collective victimhood as historical consciousness indicative of specific social identities. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria 2020. / pt2021 / Humanities Education / MEd / Unrestricted

<p>This dissertation examines the conflict in Eastern Anatolia in the early 20th century and the memory politics around it. It shows how discourses of victimhood have been engines of grievance that power the politics of fear, hatred and competing, exclusionary claims to statehood and territory by Turks, Armenians, and Kurds. Grounded in extensive archival research in American, British, Turkish, and Armenian historical repositories, I trace how discourses of communal victimhood were generated around the traumatic ordeals in the two decades that preceded the Armenian genocide of 1915-6, carried out by the Young Turk government. The dissertation pays special attention to the nature of political tension and debate among Armenians on the eve of the genocide as well as rethinking the events and later interpretations of the iconic Armenian uprising in the Ottoman city of Van in 1915. The analysis here goes beyond deterministic, escalationist and teleological perspectives on the antecedents of the Armenian genocide; instead, it highlights political agency and enabling structures of the war, offering a new perspective on the tragic violence of Eastern Anatolia in the early 20th century.</p> / Dissertation

The aim of this thesis is to probe subnational varieties in compensation enacted for war victims in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. The current literature in transitional justice posits that mainly the nature of previous conflicts, democratic and economic development, international normative pressures, and the regional clustering of justice explain why only some post-war countries award material assistance to victims (Olsen et al. 2010; Kim 2012; Risse and Sikkink 2013; Powers and Proctor 2015). While these explanations provide critical insights into the processes behind compensation adoption across states, they do not explain why only some victim categories within a state secure compensation. Drawing on a large database of qualitative data ranging from interviews to newspaper articles collected during fieldwork in Bosnia, this thesis explores compensation for military and civilian war victims, victims of torture and sexual violence, and families of missing people. By zooming in on these victim categories in the Bosnian context, this thesis advances a new understanding of compensation for victims as an outcome of complex political, external, and economic influences exerted on the main domestic policymakers. This thesis uses a new analytical framework about the inter-category varieties in compensation that draws upon arguments about bounded agency of war victims who are constrained by the parameters of post-war political structures that to a large degree shape their strategies. I show that the different compensation outcomes can primarily be explained by the varying effectiveness of victims in convincing domestic political authorities that compensation is in their political interest by using framing and advocacy strategies at the domestic and international level. While such strategies are limited by the political and socioeconomic characteristics of the state, victim categories that are able to strategically frame their demands and access resources to mobilize are more likely to secure compensation adoption. Therefore, this thesis introduces three tools that victims can leverage - international salience, moral authority, and mobilization resources - that are shaped by both structural conditions and the victims' agency.

Conflict is a gendered phenomenon and in later years research have discovered how women play several different roles in conflict. They can experience it as victims and hence be vulnerable to forms of violence, as well as agents where the women are either a warring actor or works an agent of change. However, when knowledge about what kinds of roles women experiences in conflict goes unrecognized, it leads to consequences. The consequences can be such as not taken women’s experiences and needs into consideration when making post- conflict programmes. By conducting a qualitative content analysis, this thesis examines how women’s experiences are taken into consideration in post-conflict programming. The analysis is based on a feminist perspective. The theoretical framework consists of three themes which are Gender and Power, Intersectionality and Victimhood and Agency. The same themes are the basis for the analysis. By analysing the Government of Nepal’s National Action Plan on implementing Resolution 1325 and Resolution 1820 in a post-conflict society, it is found that women’s diverse experiences are to some degree considered. However, a deeper analysis of the complex positions and several axes are not found to be considered by the Government of Nepal.