Sarah Lee
PhD student
University of Memphis
Learning to Listen: (Im)possibilities of Trust and Witness in the Aftermath of Sexual Violence
This project considers how testimonies of sexual violence challenge our everyday modes of ethical and epistemological sense-making. I argue there is a double senselessness in sexual violence. The first level is the senselessness suffered by the survivor as a relational self. Sexual violence alienates the survivor from a shared world of meaning in breaching her relations of trust with others. The second level is the senselessness produced at the level of society by “rape cultures,” which trivialize and minimize the harm of sexual violence. Importantly, as Linda Martin Alcoff points out, rape cultures are discursive formations that operate prior to any logical determination of truth or falsity. As such, I argue, rape cultures intervene in interpretative processes of judgment at the level of affective perception. I conclude by using Alia Al-Saji’s concept of “critical hesitation” to describe an ethical mode of trustfully listening to survivor testimonies by tarrying with, rather than avoiding, the difficult emotions that stories of violence provoke. In so doing, listening enables us to bear witness to the past in order to open a feminist future that both supports the remaking of the survivor’s self and transforms the social world as we know it.