| This month, we are highlighting journalist Kylie Cheung’s new book, Playing the Victim: How the Powerful Deny and Attack Survivors of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Genocide. The book explores the connections between different forms of violence—reproductive violence, administrative violence, state violence, interpersonal violence, and Zionist violence—and offers a clear-eyed assessment of self-defense, when it’s employed as a tactic by abusers or as a means of survival by people who have been harmed. Kylie spoke with Repro Nation via e-mail about her latest book and what readers should take away from it.
RM: The connections you draw between gender-based violence, state violence, and imperialism are so crucial to understanding how power is wielded, maintained, and expanded. Why was it important for you to talk about these issues and connections through the lens of victimhood?
KC: I was moved to write the book by my frustrations with how bureaucratic and administrative violence, like being denied health coverage in a for-profit health system, is invisibilized and normalized, while acts of interpersonal violence—like, say, assassinating a health insurance CEO—are the only forms of violence that are visible and condemned. Violent reactions to oppression are always the central point of condemnation rather than the original, violent oppression to which these acts are responding. I started to see connections with domestic violence and how responses and reactions to abuse are portrayed as the only violent behavior, and the ways that power dynamics inherent to interpersonal, abusive relationships are often obscured. As I write in the book, never has this been more striking to me than in the paradigm of Israel and Palestine, where a colonial oppressor and occupying force that has been holding a population captive for decades is framed as the victim, engaging in “self-defense,” as a means to justify genocide. We see this, too, in how the anti-abortion movement frames abortion providers and patients as murderers to justify violence against them. I was then moved to examine DARVO—deny, attack, reverse victim and offender—which is a conceit in interpersonal abusive relationships, as a tool to justify state violence too. I believe that having this vocabulary and literacy in the tactics of abusers can help people more readily identify state violence and systemic oppression.
RM: Your book feels very timely in light of the conversations around campus sexual assault, in particular the lack of institutional accountability, and the ongoing fight for justice for Epstein survivors. How does the performance of victimhood allow institutions and those with power in our society to continue to harm their victims with impunity?
KC: The throughline of this book is DARVO, which reverses who holds power and who the oppressed person in a dynamic is. This is not new: to accuse someone of gender-based violence has always been treated as persecution in and of itself. This paradigm of DARVO is at the root of pervasive defamation lawsuits against abuse victims who publicly come forward. As a result, as we often see on college campuses, this is why accused students often receive academic accommodations or benefits when accused, whereas victims do not, supposedly to present the image of impartiality, as the researcher Dr. Nicole Bedera has written on at length. Another central example in the book is Israel as it perpetrates its genocide against Palestinians, while framing acts of resistance to apartheid and occupation—or even slogans like “free Palestine” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—as oppressive and anti-Semitic. Then, after establishing that the object of your abuse and oppression is actually the one who is abusing or oppressing you, this justifies further violence and abuse.
RM: What do you hope readers take away about the responses to the different forms of violence we are witnessing at the interpersonal, state, and international levels?
KC: At the conclusion of my book, I analyze and discuss different theories of political violence and violent resistance to state oppression—for instance, Luigi Mangione’s alleged assassination of the UnitedHealthCare CEO—as self-defense. My book does not prescribe any one response to state violence, presenting the different arguments for nonviolent, mass action, while aiming to contextualize political violence by pointing out that it is unfair to ignore the state violence to which acts of political violence are often responding. Ultimately, a key reason I wrote this book is that I believe that literacy about power dynamics, about how bureaucratized, administrative, invisibilized forms of state violence are oppressing us, is a first step for us to meaningfully resist these structures. I wanted to shine light on forms of violence that are so often invisibilized, while resistance to this violence is sweepingly demonized. |
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