UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Santa Barbara

Playing the Victim:

Using YouTube Comments to Analyze the Disputed Victimization of Taylor Swift

A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree Master of Arts

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in Sociology
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by
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Matthew Allen Fritzler

Committee in charge:

Professor Geoffrey Raymond, Chair

Professor Jon Cruz

Professor Kevin Whitehead

December 2019
 ProQuest Number: 27546090

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 The thesis of Matthew Allen Fritzler is approved.

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Geoffrey Raymond, Committee Chair

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Jon Cruz

____________________________________________

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Kevin Whitehead
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October 2019
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 ABSTRACT

Participants in disputes and conflict often claim membership in some category to

justify their actions against their opponents; yet a participant’s membership in a category

can also be disputed. I examine how the use of categories shows tacit norms associated

with those categories and how disputes about membership in categories are used within

broader conflicts. Specifically, using a conversation analytic framework adapted to digital

interaction data, I analyze how commenters use the phrase “play the victim” in YouTube

comments on Taylor Swift’s music video “Look What You Made Me Do” to dispute

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Swift’s membership in the category “victim” and how doing so positions them in the larger
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conflict between Swift and other celebrities, along with their respective fans.

By hosting the music video and allowing members of the community to comment
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on it, YouTube provides both an occasion for those who claim a moral imperative to

sanction Swift and a means to do so, however ineffectually. Without a locally and
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publically available institutional authority to grant victim status, those who take her actions

as a serious claim of victimization can take it upon themselves to sanction her for using the

category illegitimately. Such sanctions frequently deploy the phrase “play the victim”

which members can use to re-categorize Swift as a special type of offender who has the

negative features of both the categories “victim” and “offender.” Additionally, commenters

can use and subsequently invert the perquisites of victim status afforded to Swift to de-

legitimize her claim of victim status. This is because members can reinterpret Swift’s

appeal to and use of victim status to relieve her of responsibility for her injuries as Swift

refusing to take responsibility for her actions.

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 INTRODUCTION

On August 27, 2017, Taylor Swift released the music video to her then-new single

“Look What You Made Me Do.” In it, Swift references many antagonistic and widely

publicized past events. Her use of these references is ambiguous because the degree to

which she uses irony and self-deprecation is unclear. A few days after its release, my

friend asked if I had heard it. I had not. This was apparently an error that needed

immediate correction. As she found the song on YouTube, she explained that it had a

certain kind of venom that she found particularly satisfying and that it was a very striking

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shift from how Taylor Swift is typically portrayed, specifically how she was taking charge

of things and asserting her agency while highlighting and mocking those who have tried to
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ridicule and vilify her in the past.
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Soon after hearing the song, we met up with a mutual friend. When I mentioned the

song I had just heard, this friend quickly cut in, expressing how she hated it because it was

the exact same type of thing that Taylor Swift had been doing her entire career, specifically
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hiding behind others and not accepting responsibility for things by continuously playing

the victim.

I then watched two of my friends argue about what this song actually indicated and

what it actually told us about who Taylor Swift was as a person. I stood back in confused

silence because each of my friends looked at the exact same video and came to

diametrically opposed conclusions. I was amazed at the interaction unfolding before me

and wondered both why my friends felt so passionately about Swift and if this kind of

passionate dispute was unique to them. This thought was apparently somewhat naïve

because when I watched the music video later that evening, I saw that it already had

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several million views, roughly a million dislikes, and several hundred thousand comments.

A cursory glance at those comments showed fans ardently defending Swift against her

haters, who attacked her with equal fervor. It felt clear to me that this was more than

simply people arguing on the Internet. For those who wrote the nearly half-million

comments on the video, engaging with the video by commenting was clearly deeply

meaningful.

Since that interaction, I have necessarily become more familiar with Swift and the

ongoing disputes that surround her. Many of these disputes are foregrounded by their

location on YouTube, which provides an occasion for fans to annotate and interpret

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popular culture, and their participants’ self-assortment into competing fandoms. YouTube
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provides an occasion for fans to annotate and interpret popular culture. Much like my two

friends, one who argued defending Swift and one who argued attacking Swift, YouTube
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commenters organize themselves as different fandoms publicly disputing celebrity

conflicts, such that “fans” defend Swift and “haters” attack her.

One recurrent topic in these conflicts is whether Swift is a victim, particularly in

the past events she references in the video. As such, the immediate focus of the disputes I

analyze is the interpretation of what the music video means: What is Swift claiming in the

music video? What is Swift doing by posting it? Are her claims and actions ironic or

genuine? In disputing these questions commenters pull on a great deal of presumed shared

background knowledge regarding Swift and her past interactions.1 One critical feature of

these past interactions is how people have used the phrase “play the victim” to discredit

and de-legitimize Swift’s reported injuries and dispute her claims about how the past

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See Appendix for a summary of these interactions. Relevant aspects are cited as needed
throughout.

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interactions unfolded.

As it happens, the phrase “play the victim” has become associated with Swift. In

fact, Swift explicitly references both this phrase and how it has been used to attack her in

the music video of “Look What You Made Me Do.” Most notably, the music video ends

with a scene featuring several versions of Swift that correspond to different moments in

her career. These different Swifts interact with each other by repeating complaints and

accusations, often verbatim, that other celebrities have made regarding Swift. One of these

accusations is “There she goes, playing the victim. Again.”

The tone and message that the music video sets is also the initial context of the

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YouTube comments section where any member of the public may write comments in
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response to the video. By referencing previous attacks over victim status, especially

“playing the victim,” Swift provides an occasion for her fans and haters to participate in
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this dispute, debating her ostensible victimization in the comments section of that same

music video. Furthermore, the data suggest that both sides in the conflict overwhelming

see this scene as Swift responding to those past attacks. The particular discrepancy
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regarding this scene is whether that response is justified or not--in other words, whether

Swift is or is not a legitimate victim. The interactions around this discrepancy can reveal

unique insights into the aspects and norms participants connect with being a legitimate

victim.

As Holstein and Miller demonstrated, determining whether someone is a legitimate

victim is not as simple as demonstrating they were injured, because that person’s claim and

the circumstances of their injury must be interactionally interpreted (1990). Thus, in

disputing Swift’s victim status, commenters are arguing about what interpretation of events

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accurately reflects what happened. Yet, by advancing a particular interpretation of events,

commenters do more than make claims about what really happened. Using the phrase “play

the victim” advances such an interpretation, which raises the following questions: (1) What

do commenters accomplish by deploying the phrase “play the victim” within these specific

disputes? and (2) What can these disputes reveal regarding commenter’s use of the

categories “victim” and “offender” specifically and practices of competing fandoms in

general?

VICTIMIZATION FRAMEWORK

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Interactional Victim Assignment
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Victim status is administered interactionally, not as a de facto consequence of

injury (Holstein and Miller 1990; Spencer 2011). Yet some assertion of suffering is still
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normatively required for victim status and as such, victimization involves interpretative

descriptions of events, which “are not disembodied commentaries on ostensibly real states
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of affairs. Rather, they are reality projects—acts of constructing the world.” (Holstein and

Miller 1990:105 emphasis original). Thus, victim status is not determined by injury; it is

determined by how injury and the circumstances around injury are interactionally

interpreted to create victims who are not responsible for their suffering. A portion of

remedial action granted as a perquisite of victim status is redress from injury. When the

suffering is at the hands of some agent, it is often unclear which party is responsible for the

harm caused. In such cases, disputes about who is the victim and who is the offender can

occur.

Additionally, victim status has requirements and is subject to ongoing gatekeeping,

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allowing some individuals to more easily gain this status but prohibiting others, while also

occasioning challenges to that same gatekeeping (Hearty 2019; Killean 2018; MacDowell

2013). Yet the victim status afforded to someone is not immutable because outside of

institutional authority (e.g. courts), the interactional process of interpretation is never

closed and finalized. Similarly, just because a claimant’s status was denied in one setting

by one group of people does not mean that they will not be granted victim status at some

other time or by some other group.

In the case of Swift, this gatekeeping is within the backdrop of contemporary

American culture because she is a highly visible contemporary American pop star. As I

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discuss in the following sections, in this context “victim” is tacitly associated with other
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categories, specifically “white” and “woman,” as well as associated features and

perquisites. Having one’s victim status legitimized also legitimizes one’s use of those
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perquisites, many of which give the victim a measure of social influence over others, often

the parties involved in their victimization (Berbrier 2000; Dorr 2000; Holstein and Miller

1990).
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Terms

I focused my analysis on the practices that participants accomplish when they

dispute victim status on the grounds that Swift plays the victim, often marked with that

exact phrase. However, commenters can use numerous variations on this practice that all

include the term “victim” along with some item that negates that category (e.g. scarequotes

or “pretends”). For clarity, I have included the various labels I used throughout this

analysis in Table 1 below. These terms mirror the terms posters use most frequently where

possible and are intended to be descriptive, but neutral.

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 Table 1: Victim Terms

Term Use/Meaning

(Victim) Role The category that a person may or may not occupy

Claim/Apply The assertion that a given person occupies a role

(Victim) Status The state of a person’s claim being treated as legitimate

Injury A necessary event for the victim role wherein a person is forced to

act or be acted upon and experiences harm therefrom

Victimization The local interactional processes whereby injury is interpreted and

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people are granted victim status

“Play the
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A practice participants can use in interaction that pairs “victim”

Victim” with some item that negates the applicability of the category to a
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given person in a given situation.

The Victim-Offender Standardized Relational Pair

The terms I have given above are explicitly related to “victim,” but that is not the

only category that is implicated in the disputes of Swift’s victim status. As Sacks observed,

people treat categories as belonging together; the term membership categorization device

(MCD) refers to such a group of related categories and the rules people use to apply them

to a population (Sacks 1972a). One use of MCDs is to categorize groups of people. Thus,

commenters use the “victim” MCD to categorize not only Swift, but also those that they

treat as related to her victimization. The most common person so implicated is a purported

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 offender. Interactions then often involve interpreting the past actions of the celebrities to

determine who is the “victim” and who is the “offender.” Individual categories have

category-bound activities and category-bound features that create a reciprocal relationship

between how people are categorized and how others interpret their actions (Jayyusi 1984).

For example, if someone is categorized as a “victim,” then their actions can be easily

seeable as pursuing a remedial interchange, but if that same person is categorized as an

“offender,” then those same actions can be easily seeable as blaming or attacking someone

else.

In addition to category-bound features, the relationship between categories is also

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important for disputation because “victim” and “offender” constitute a standardized
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relational pair (SRP), a pair of categories with associated rights and obligations relative to

each other (Sacks 1972b). These rights and obligations are informal and asymmetrical
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standards between categories, such as a child’s right to receive care and a parent’s

obligation to provide that care (Sacks 1992b). With the victim-offender SRP, if someone is

the victim, they have the right to redress for their injuries and if someone is an offender,
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they may be subject to remedial action and in the absence of a formal system anyone can

pursue that action (Holstein and Miller 1990; Jankowitz 2018).

Power and Responses to Injury

Victim status revolves around injury, a necessary incident wherein a person is

forced to act or be acted upon. Holstein and Miller go so far as to describe injury as “the

essence of being a victim” (1990:114). Responding to this injury is implicated in the victim

role, largely by virtue of the perquisites of victim status. There are four specific perquisites

of being assigned victim status: (1) “deflect responsibility,” the victim is absolved of

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