She crosses cultures: She is Priya, the star of a new Indian comic book who rides a tiger and fights back against her rapists. She is Maima, currently strutting across a stage on Broadway, an AK-47 strapped to her chest, in “Eclipsed,” Danai Gurira’s play about sexual captives during the Liberian civil war. Even when imprisoned, like the mother in “Room” or the “unbreakable” Kimmy Schmidt, she is endlessly resilient.

And she comes to life in recent campus protests against sexual violence. Last year Karmenife Paulino, a Wesleyan student, staged a photo shoot at the fraternity where she said she was raped, posing triumphantly in dominatrix gear alongside bound and gagged actors playing fraternity brothers. “One thing that has been very therapeutic to me as a survivor was finding creative outlets for my pain,” Paulino told a campus blog. “And so I just thought, What would reclaiming that space look like?”

The preference for “survivor” over “victim” is a shift in language that is as much ideological as linguistic. In “Bright-Sided,” her 2009 critique of America’s obsession with positive thinking, Barbara Ehrenreich noted a similar development among cancer patients. “The word ‘victim’ is proscribed,” she writes, deemed too self-pitying. Martial metaphors are preferred, and those who “lost the battle” are quickly forgotten. “It is the ‘survivors’ who merit constant honor.” And so, the pendulum swings from one extreme to another: from casting rape as insurmountable pain to casting the survivor as possessing superhuman strength.

It’s “looking-glass shame” all over again — that terror of facing your vulnerability — a treasonous thought in a society that is desperately optimistic and addicted to recovery narratives. There exists a small shelf of antisurvivor accounts full of frank, almost voluptuous despair — Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life,” Raymond M. Douglas’s memoir “On Being Raped” — all men’s stories, interestingly. But generally, the onus seems to be not only to survive but, as quickly as possible, to lift up others. Sexual-violence activists admit to the strain. Wagatwe Wanjuki, one of the people who stood with Lady Gaga at the Academy Awards, wrote recently at the women’s website the Establishment of the “invisible cost” of being a survivor: “You’re best known for enduring the worst experiences of your life.”

A word that was conceived to free women from stigma now feels, to some, prescriptive. “Compulsory survivorship depoliticizes our understanding of violence and its effects,” Dana Bolger, the executive director of Know Your IX, a “survivor and youth led organization” dedicated to fighting sexual violence in schools, wrote at Feministing.com. “It places the burden of healing on the individual, while comfortably erasing the systems and structures that make surviving hard, harder for some than for others.” The logic of “compulsory survivorship” neatly anticipates the conditions so many victims of violence face: the disbelief or indifference, the paucity of social support — to say nothing of the fact that, as Jon Krakauer notes in his book on campus rape, “Missoula,” if an individual is raped in America, more than 90 percent of the time the rapist will get away with it. It makes sense that an ethos of pluck and hardiness has taken hold. There is simply no alternative.

In Japanese, the word “trauma” is expressed with a combination of two characters: “outside” and “injury.” Trauma is a visible wound — suffering we can see — but it is also suffering made public, calcified into identity and, inevitably, simplified. Perhaps there was some latent wisdom in Woolf’s ungainly little phrase: “the person to whom things happen.” It’s roomy and doesn’t pin you down at any stage of suffering or recovery. It centers the person and not the event — which is crucial. Those who have faced sexual violence are so commonly sentimentalized or stigmatized, cast as uniquely heroic or uniquely broken. Everything can be projected upon them, it seems — everything but the powers and vulnerabilities of ordinary personhood.