Being a Survivor of Sexual Violence is a Way of Knowing The World

In a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how and when I choose to reveal to my classes the fact that I am a survivor of sexual violence. I have not written much, however, about how people other than my students, who have been unanimously supportive and even grateful, have responded to that revelation. I’ve been thinking about this over the past couple of months because choosing to be as public as I have been since receiving a grant from the Queens Council on the Arts inevitably raises the question of the necessity, timing, propriety, and even wisdom of identifying myself as a survivor. Just last week, for example, a friend invited me to a small gathering at her apartment. The other people there were mostly artists and filmmakers, only one of whom I already knew, and so I found myself thinking twice about how and whether to say more than that I am working on my second book of poems and that I have received a grant in support of that effort. I wasn’t worried about what anyone else might think or how they might react. I just didn’t feel like dealing with the other-than-simply-supportive kinds of attention—from well-meaning but ignorant questions to uncomfortable silence—that revealing I’m a survivor could have brought. In the end, I told only one other person at the party, and that was because she and I started talking about the value of doing work that is rooted in your lived experience, and so not to say anything would have been dishonest.

My point is that the choice about whether or not to say anything was mine and no one else’s, which is how it should be. It was and is up to me, and me alone, to decide when and whether it is necessay and/or appropriate to assert publicly my identity as a survivor of sexual violence and to lay public claim to the knowledge and wisdom that being a survivor has given me. It may sound strange to talk about being a survivor in terms of knowledge and wisdom, but being a survivor of sexual violence is a way of knowing the world, one that is too often relegated to—or, perhaps more accurately, circumscribed by—therapy, survivors’ groups, fundraising pitches and other activities that tend (not unreasonably) to highlight survivors as a group apart. It’s not that we aren’t a group apart; in very important ways we are. It’s that the knowledge, experience, and wisdom we have earned in the process of becoming survivors is, or should be, relevant to everyone, even those who have never been sexually vioated.

I am thinking of one incident in particular–or, rather, one part of a larger story–which I wrote about briefly in a post I have linked to a couple of times already. At the heart of that post is the transformative experience I had doing an independent study with two women, each of whom wanted to be a writer and who wanted specifically to write about her experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence. In order to receive credit for the work they did with me, the women were required to present the results of that work at the end-of-semester honors colloquium, which is usually attended by the college president, the vice president for academic affairs, other members of the administration, honors faculty, the student presenters, their friends and families. It is, in other words, an event that the college takes quite seriously, and, as the date of the colloquium drew near, my students were concerned that the pieces of writing they were going to read—which were personal, confrontational, and sexually explicit—would be considered inappropriate and even insulting when placed next to the more traditionally academic projects the other presenters were going to talk about. This was not an unreasonable fear, so I said I introduce them by identifying myself as a survivor and talking a little bit about what it had meant for me to be able to work with them. This way, anyone who had a problem with the content of their essays would have to come through me first.

If you want to know the full story of that experience, or to read the introduction I gave, please check out that earlier post. Here, I want to talk about something I did not really deal with there: the responses of my colleagues, two in particular. The first one, whose student had presented on some very interesting mathematics research she’d done, came up to me after the colloquium was over and said, “You’ve turned what was supposed to be a celebration of our students’ scholarship and intellectual achievement into a cheap group therapy session.” The standing ovation my students had recevied, he suggested, had less to do with the quality of their work (which was significant) than with the day-time-talk-show nature of their narratives. “How could we not applaud?” he asked. “How could their fellow students, especially the women, not stand up in sympathy and solidarity?” The second colleague whose response I want to tell you about did not speak to me directly. Instead, in her capacity as coordinator of the Honors Program, she approached one of my students a day or two after the colloquium and asked, “Whose idea was it for you to write those essays in the first place?” On the surface, they seem like two very different responses, but I think they have a common root.

The student who told me what the Honors Coordinator asked her was insulted by the question, since it implied that a very conscious choice she had made was in fact the result of kind of sleazy manipulation on my part. For me, I told her when we discussed it, the issue was not the question itself, but rather its timing. Academia is filled with stories of male professors who sexually manipulate and exploit the women who are their students, and so it did not seem unreasonable to me that my colleague would ask such a question. The problem, I thought, and still think, was that she only expressed this concern after hearing the content of my students’ essays. She could have wondered about how the independent study came to be at the very beginning, when my students explained to her what they had in mind (which they had to do since, as the Honors Coordinator, she was responsible for initially approving the project); and she could have asked after reading their proposals, which very plainly stated that the end product of the independent study would be at least one substantive personal essay, along with working drafts of a couple of others, about their experiences as survivors of child sexual abuse.

Nothing about the project, in other words, raised any red flags for her until my students expressed, on their own terms and in their own language, not only with the facts of how and by whom they were violated, but also with what they’d learned from that experience. Similarly, the colleague who told me I’d made a mockery of the occasion was discomfited not by the subject of child sexual abuse per se. As we discussed his reaction, he said he would have been fine if they had presented sociological or psychological, or historical or literary analytical research. What he objected to—and I am guessing that this was also what prompted the Honors Coordinator’s concern—was the content of the essay, one of them in particular, in which my student wrote about how the woman who violated her had left unable to experience sexual penetration as anything other than painful. As an example, she told the story of pretending to like it when a boyfriend fingered her, because he was a nice guy and she liked him, because he was tender and considerate and he really wanted to give her pleasure, and because she knew it was supposed to feel good. She wanted him to think she was having a good time, in other words, because she did not want to hurt his feelings. She just pushed her own feelings out of the way. The rest of the essay was about how, years later, she’d learned to trust herself enough to trust the man she was with, which enabled her, finally, not only to have sex that was not painful, but also to have her first-ever-with-another-person orgasm. 

When the audience responded with a standing ovation, they were responding not only to my student’s personal triumphs, but also to the strength of the language she’d crafted—language she’d honed for weeks, examining both herself and her prose with an intellectual, emotional, and creative assiduousness that I would match pound for pound with that displayed by any of the other wonderfully brilliant students who spoke. When my colleague dismissed what my students had achieved as “cheap group therapy,” then, he was dismissing not just what they’d learned about themselves as survivors, as women, as sexual beings, as lovers; he was also dismissing everything they had learned about being writers. For him, that knowledge simply did not belong in the academy. Or, perhaps more accurately, it did not deserve the same kind of recognition as the objective, research-based, ostensibly disembodied and therefore “purely” intellectual work of the other student presenters. To put it another way, for him, my students’ work transgressed against the mind-body split, and he was unwilling to engage the questions I started to ask him about whose interests that split serves and what it accomplishes by walling off the kind of knowledge my students had presented as somehow beneath the dignity of the academy, or at least not deserving of recognition at the Honors Colloquium.

The mind-body split is something that survivors of sexual violence know an awful lot about. Many, if not most of us, can remember clearly the experience of leaving our bodies while we were being violated, of becoming, in some sense, pure mind, such that we experienced what was being done to us physically as being done to someone else. Healing that split—for me, it felt like clicking into place inside my own skin—is central to our healing as a whole, to what it means finally to be able to know ourselves, to lay claim, on our own terms, to the physical presence in the world that those who violated us tried to deny us. For me, that clicking-into-place is not different in kind from the physical sensation of rightness that I have felt in the intellectual and pedagogical work I do as an academic, and I am guessing it is also not so different from the sensation I have heard researchers describe when they finally solve the equation that’s been eluding them for weeks or months or years; when they make sense of what had been a formless blob of bewildering data or locate the textual sources they need to move their project forward; or when they fully understand what an informant has been saying. All knowledge, in other words, is embodied knowledge. The question is whether we include that embodiment in what we think it means to know something.

To ask whose interests the mind-body split serves, then, is not just to ask who controls knowledge, but also who controls what it means to engage in the process of knowing, which is  a deeply political question, because to reveal the embodied nature of knowledge is inevitably to remind those to whom it is revealed that they also have bodies, that they also know what they know through their bodies—that, in other words, their bodies are their only and inescapable connection to the world around them. When I choose to tell people that I am a survivor, whether in conversation, in a poem, an essay, or a post like this one, the revelation roots them very precisely in the question of what we know through our bodies; and I am very aware that because what I know as a survivor is transgressive—because it is rooted in the act of transgression that I survived—making that knowledge visible inevitably courts an audience’s discomfort, resistance, anger, and even shame. Inevitably, what I say remind them (as I think my students reminded my colleagues) that their bodies are no less vulnerable than mine, that they could, if they choose, be no less predatory than the men who violated me (which, if you think about it, is also a kind of vulnerability).

It’s no wonder, then, that most people don’t really want to hear what survivors have to say. I am very glad that those of you reading this are not among them.

Thank you.

Cross-posted.