Speaking rape: engaging experience for a feminist practice of rape survivorship

Abstract

This thesis advances a theory for a feminist cross-experiential practice of rape survivorship. This practice is aimed at engaging the personal and lived experiences of survivors with each other for the purposes of revealing the plural meanings, forms and configurative power relations that are invested in rape. To do so, I stress that experiences of rape are irreducible to each other; indeed, no two experiences are ever meaningfully identical, configuratively symmetrical, or substitutable with each other. This mutual irreducibility of experience is not inimical to the cross-experiential practice that I theorize, but rather animates it. In doing so, this thesis theorizes a distinctly hermeneutic cross-experiential practice where rather than seeking to better understand others, it compels one to better understand oneself in relation to others. This hermeneutic practice uses the mutual irreducibility of experience to reveal how subjects are asymmetrically situated in relation to each other and, in doing so, compels cross-experiential participants to reflect on their own position in relation to others. I argue that this cross-experiential model could advance a feminist practice of rape survivorship in which survivors can continuously reflect on the capacity in which their experiences are asymmetrically situated in relation to all others. In doing so, the lack of equivalence between experiences can be itself be revelatory of the plural configurative power relations that are implicated in rape. In my thesis, I therefore advance that the mutual irreducibility of experience can both generate a critique of power and ignite a transformative practice of relational self-reflexivity. Both of the features combined, I argue, can constitute a basis for a radically inclusive and politically salient collective of rape survivorship.