Victim's Talk: Doing "Being a Victim" and Managing Its Dilemma

There has been a lot spoken by all sorts of victims in this disastrous world. In order to become a victim, people are asked to talk about what they have experienced and how they have been suffering from such experiences. In other words, becoming a victim is an interactional and discursive practice. Drug-induced Suffering (DIS) is one such difficulty. DIS stems from problems caused by pharmaceuticals, including the Thalidomide incident, the HIV contaminated blood-products incident, the MMR vaccine-induced suffering, etc. DIS is not just limited to adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals. Further difficulties include relational, economic and social damages caused by those pharmaceuticals. DIS has been a well-known concept of such social problems in Japan. I have been researching on DIS in Japan for over 10 years with both my colleagues and the victims of DIS. I have analysed what and how some victims of DIS talk about their difficulties, using Discourse Analysis and have found that their talk about difficulties involves an interactional job in managing the dilemma that accompanies "being a victim". In other words, doing "being a victim" can be considered not as a simple and straightforward job like a job of doing "being ordinary" (Sacks 1970) but as an exquisite job that such sequences in a victim's talk should manage the dilemma that has emerged by the talk itself. That is because the DIS victims not only do "being victims" in order to accuse the pharmaceutical companies and even the government of inflicting damages, but also live their own lives. Their own lives are much more than what the victims' lives are generally expected to be. I will show how we can analyse victim's talk and the dilemma with Discourse Analysis and will discuss the implication of the analysis and the result.