Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-mzp66 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-12T22:59:52.932Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Lindsay Kelland
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , Fall 2016 , pp. 730 - 745
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bartky, Sandra. 1976. Toward a phenomenology of feminist consciousness. Social Theory and Practice 3 (4): 425–39.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949/1997. The second sex. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Brison, Susan. 2002. Áftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Brownmiller, Susan. 1990. In our time: Memoir of a revolution. New York: The Dial Press.Google Scholar
Burrow, Sylvia. 2005. The political structure of emotion: From dismissal to dialogue. Hypatia 20 (4): 27–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cornell, Drucilla. 2000. Las greñudas: Recollections on consciousness‐raising. Signs 25 (4): 1033–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dubriwny, Tasha N. 2005. Consciousness‐raising as collective rhetoric: The articulation of experience in the Redstockings’ abortion speak‐out of 1969. Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (4): 395–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Dave, and Payne, Charmaine. 2009. What services and supports are needed to enable trauma survivors to rebuild their lives? Child Abuse Research in South Africa 10 (1): 27–40.Google Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2009. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haines, Steve. 2011. Dissociation and the body. http://www.stevehaines.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/dissociation-v8.pdf (accessed July 29, 2016).Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 2000. Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Houle, Karen. 2009. Making strange: Deconstruction and feminist standpoint theory. Frontiers 30 (1): 172–93.Google Scholar
Keating, Cricket. 2005. Building coalitional consciousness. NWSA Journal 17 (2): 86–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKenzie‐Mohr, Suzanne, and Lafrance, Michelle N. 2011. Telling stories without the words: “Tightrope talk” in women's accounts of coming to live well after rape or depression. Feminism and Psychology 21 (1): 49–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moi, Toril. 2006. “I am not a feminist, but … ”: How feminism became the f‐word. PMLA 121 (5): 1735–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neimeyer, Robert A. 2004. Fostering posttraumatic growth: A narrative elaboration. Psychological Inquiry 15 (1): 53–59.Google Scholar
Pityana, Barney. 2007. Reflections on 30 years since the death of Steve Biko: A legacy revisited. Public lecture delivered in the Senate Hall, Unisa. September 12.Google Scholar
Sowards, Stacey K., and Renegar, Valerie L. 2004. The rhetorical functions of consciousness‐raising in third wave feminism. Communication Studies 55 (4): 535–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar