Thank you to Roxani for this deeply thoughtful engagement, which reads with such care the stakes and sensibilities of Wronged. Your reflections touch on one of the book’s central tensions: how to write theory from a position of embodied vulnerability without collapsing into self-referentiality; and how to take pain seriously without tying it too tightly to fixed narratives of victimhood.

As Roxani’s review so eloquently notes, the body is not absent from Wronged, least of all my own. It lingers just beneath the text, shaping the very structure and flow of my argument even as it resists explicit incorporation into my theoretical frame. This is not merely a narrative choice but also a political one. To foreground the body is not, as Roxani says, to prioritize personal suffering as an “endpoint of the story” but to open the body up to society and power—to the forces of social media and their attention economies, of white supremacy and patriarchy, of fascist politics and of social struggles for recognition that render the body intelligible in the first place. My body, similar to the bodies I write about, is in this sense already mediated: shaped and constrained by the logics of visibility, communicability, and hierarchy that the book seeks to interrogate.

The question about the triad of pain, suffering, and victimhood is also vital in this context. It is precisely in the slippages between these terms that power operates through categorizing, legitimizing, and excluding bodies and their claims-making. To me, pain is corporeal, suffering is affective and social, and victimhood is political—though, in the book, their interrelations are more fluid than such strict analytical distinctions imply. Wronged is indeed invested less in separating those terms and more in tracking the transitions between them: how pain becomes suffering, how suffering is translated (or not) into claims to victimhood, and how these translations are all culturally coded and institutionally validated.

So yes, I do think it is possible, in fact necessary, to attend to moments where their trajectories diverge, as in where subjects live with pain yet actively resist the vocabulary of victimhood. These possibilities are, as Roxani has powerfully shown, politically generative in that they can potentially challenge the scripts defining whose suffering counts and what forms of redress such suffering warrants. They also remind us that not all suffering seeks recognition—or that recognition alone may not be enough of a redress. At the same time, I remain cautious of celebrating resistance too quickly. The refusal of victimhood, as we both argue, can also be a form of disciplinary power: an internalized injunction to be resilient or stoic in the face of harm that, far from healing, perpetuates one’s suffering. Here, our critique must remain alert not to displace the lived specificity of pain but to situate it within the circuits of power that produce, distribute, and deny it.

Coming back to the beginning of my response, writing from the body is, to me, about writing with accountability; about understanding that our positions, our privileges, and our vulnerabilities shape what we can see and how we can speak. I am moved to know that this approach resonates with Roxani as well. It affirms the possibility of writing critical theory that can be both personal and political, intimate and expansive. That our theory can begin with pain but knows how to always move beyond it.