Validating Testimonial Knowledge: Category Work in Activism Against Gender-Based Violence in Melodramatic Visual Production
摘要
Within the new digital media landscape, content is easily produced and diffused by amateur and novice creators. Grassroots activism against gender-based violence (GBV) has taken advantage of this by promoting empathy and identification with survivors through the production of their own materials. This includes the means to create and distribute their own quality podcasts and videos, showcasing and validating the experience and knowledge of those who have endured gender-based violence. In this chapter, I analyse one such video that went viral within the Icelandic media environment, called “We believe endures”. I show how speakers skilfully perform category work through moral casting of “endurers”, speakers and the audience via visual and auditory cues. By producing a visual order and a collaborative tied narrative, speakers organize and draw on categories and their associations and thus try to appeal to the moral agency of the viewer. The overall result is persuasive rhetoric aimed at strengthening the credibility and legitimacy of the “endurer” category and recognition of testimonial knowledge. The chapter highlights the potential of video activism and new media platforms and demonstrates how they are taken advantage of in the pursuit of social change through sophisticated multimodal category work.