A Call to Arms: The Centrality of Feminist Consciousness‐Raising Speak‐Outs to the Recovery of Rape Survivors

Abstract

This article explores the various challenges that survivors of rape and sexual violence face when attempting to construct a narrative of their experience under political and epistemic conditions that are not supportive: including the absence of adequate language with which to understand, articulate, and explain their experiences; narrative disruptions at the personal, interpersonal, and social levels; hermeneutical injustice; and canonical narratives that typically further the harms experienced by survivors. In response, I argue that feminist consciousness‐raising speak‐outs should be revived by contemporary feminists since they are able to do significant work to ameliorate the above‐mentioned challenges and thereby aid in the recovery of rape survivors.

Investigating Rape Culture in News Coverage of the Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford Cases

“…Waterhouse-Watson, (2019) labeled tweets as anti-rape culture that countered narra-tives that excused rape and pitied the accused over showing empathy for the survivor. Kelland (2016) notes online and offline anti-rape culture spaces provide refuge for survivors to discuss their experiences-something that can be difficult given the bar-riers to reporting. Gruber (2016) criticizes anti-rape culture in regards to college campuses by imply-ing that sexual abuse on college campuses may (or may not) be overreported and now includes an overabundance of acts beyond rape alone.…”

"Every Woman Knows a Weinstein": Political Whiteness and White Woundedness in #MeToo and Public Feminisms around Sexual Violence

“…Indeed, such experiences may intensify it. Rape represents a traumatic loss of power and control which is at least partly (re)constitutive of survivor subjectivity (Kelland 2016, Alcoff 2018, so regaining this power and control is often crucial to recovery (Harrington 2018). In relation to #MeToo and other public feminisms around sexual violence, a focus on power and control is apparent in the emphasis on 'taking down' powerful men.…”

“…Lorde's words, recently republished in a collected volume of her works entitled Your Silence Will Not Protect You, echo clinical principles situating narrative as central to recovery. Particularly in relation to sexual violence, telling one's own story and having this validated is a way of reclaiming subjectivity and control after it has been taken away (Kelland 2016, Serisier 2018. Sharing personal experience, then, is both political and therapeutic.…”

#MeToo? Legal Discourse and Everyday Responses to Sexual Violence

“…Advocates curate spaces specifically to avoid reifying traditional conversations about rape in which it is perceived as acceptable to evaluate claims of sexual violence and to treat them as private, individual, and aberrant. Instead, consciousness-raising seeks to promote empathy for survivors and to view sexual violence as collective, frequent and dehumanizing (Kelland 2016).…”