Obstacles to Empathetic Listening After Sexual Violence

Abstract

Building on Linda Martín Alcoff's analysis of subversive speech in Rape and resistance, Lori Gruen's account of entangled empathy, and what Susan Brison calls the remaking of self in Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self, we introduce subversive listening as a way to resist obstacles to empathetic listening after sexual violence. Specifically, we identify and aim to interrupt five overextended frameworks (legal, medical, academic, fixing, and identifying) that commonly obstruct empathetic listening. To demonstrate the practical value of our work, we conclude by showing how a reader might avoid these overextensions when engaging with V's (formerly Eve Ensler) The apology.

1. Introduction

In this paper, we are interested in obstacles faced when listening to first-person narratives. If we say we value first-person accounts for theorizing, how do we best prepare ourselves to listen to these accounts? What gets in the way? Building on Linda Martín Alcoff's analysis of subversive speech in Rape and resistance, Lori Gruen's account of entangled empathy, and what Susan Brison calls the remaking of self in Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self, we introduce subversive listening as a way to resist obstacles to empathetic listening after sexual violence. Specifically, we identify and aim to interrupt five overextended frameworks that commonly obstruct empathetic listening, i.e. the legal, medical, academic, fixing, and identifying frameworks. To demonstrate the practical value of our work, we conclude by showing how a reader might avoid these overextensions when engaging with V's (formerly Eve Ensler) The apology.

Regarding the purpose and methodology of this paper, we identify a problem, make a suggestion for addressing it, and model how this might work in practice. We take seriously the important role first-person testimony should play in developing theory on sexual violence. We also take seriously the learned and structural limitations we have as those who listen to testimony on sexual violence. In “Philosophizing from experience: First-person accounts and epistemic justice,” Abigail Gosselin points out that first-person accounts are able to “provide a means of theorizing” from which we can expand philosophical understandings and frameworks (2019, 46). She argues that people with firsthand experience have an epistemic and hermeneutic authority that puts them in a better position than an inexperienced person to contribute to the development of theory. Gosselin notes that in academic discourse personal experiences are often discounted due to the assumption that the individual is too emotionally connected to the event to be able to offer substantial contributions to the development of theory. As a discipline, philosophy is particularly answerable to this kind of malpractice. As Brison notes, “philosophers are far behind legal theorists in acknowledging the need for a diversity of voices. We are trained to write in an abstract, universal voice and to shun first-person narratives as biased and inappropriate for academic discourse” (2002, 5). The account of subversive listening we develop and offer in this paper, in part, troubles the norms Brison describes as so pervasive in the discipline of philosophy.

2. Empathetic listening and epistemic injustice

In her book Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self (2002) Susan Brison explores some of the philosophical dimensions of trauma in response to her experience of sexual violence. We will look to two of Brison's central claims: (1) sexual violence can “undo” the self and (2) that the self can be “remade” through the retelling of traumatic experiences to empathetic listeners.¹

Brison demonstrates how conceptions of self that rely on (1) mind-body dualism, (2) continuous memory over time, and (3) the self as “the locus of autonomous agency” all fall short for explaining how the self is impacted by trauma (2002, 41). First, regarding the limitations of thinking about memories and emotions as primarily cognitive, Brison writes, “my mental state (typically, depression) felt physiological, like lead in my veins, while my physical state (frequently, incapacitation by fear and anxiety) was the incarnation of a cognitive and emotional paralysis resulting from the shattered assumptions about my safety in the world” (2002, 44). Brison points out that traumatic memories “are more tied to the body than memories are typically considered to be”; if a person has been raped, certain triggers can revive memories of the trauma and cause a physical response (like a racing heart or crawling skin) and often these memories and consequent reactions are “lodged in the body” not (only) the mind (2002, 44–45).

Second, conceptions of the self that hinge on continuous memory over time, such as the self as an ongoing, cohesive narrative, are similarly challenged by the aftermath of trauma (Brison 2002, 45). Brison points out that because memory is so drastically disrupted by traumatic events, it is difficult to make sense of a view of the narrative self without being willing to accept that the self before the traumatic event is distinct from the self after the traumatic event. Memory is affected in multiple ways by trauma. Memories can be repressed, intrusive, nonveridical, or inconsistent, which makes a previously cohesive narrative (and self) shaky. Not only can memories of life before the trauma become distant or even inaccessible, a person may struggle to envision a future, which further dislocates them. All of this, Brison says, gives rise to an “epistemological crisis [that] leaves the survivor with virtually no bearings to navigate by” (2002, 50).

Third, the view of the self as “the locus of autonomous agency” is similarly upset by the experience of trauma (2002, 59). Trauma “reconfigures the survivor's will, rendering involuntary many responses that were once under voluntary control” such as intrusive thoughts or startle responses that accompany PTSD (Brison 2002, 59). Brison notes that this change not only affects what someone can or cannot do, but it also changes what someone wants to do. The entangling of the mind and body, the disruption of memory and the ejection of a person from a previously sensible narrative, and the reconfiguration of an agent's will, according to Brison, stand as evidence that trauma gives rise to the “undoing of the self” (39).

The self becoming undone is not necessarily permanent; a self can be remade. Brison argues that the remaking of a self hinges on an understanding of the self as relational and interdependent. “When the trauma is of human origin and is intentionally inflicted, the kind I discuss in this book, it not only shatters one's fundamental assumptions about the world and one's safety in it, but it also severs the sustaining connection between the self and the rest of humanity” (2002, 40). Feminist philosophers have emphasized the relational nature of the self, which is to say the self is formed and understood by relations to others and sustained by the social contexts in which it exists (2002, 41). Brison argues that one relation necessary for rebuilding the self is the relation between a person post-trauma and empathetic listeners:

in order to construct self-narratives we need not only have the words with which to tell our stories, but also an audience able and willing to hear us and to understand our words as we intend them. This aspect of remaking a self in the aftermath of trauma highlights the dependency of the self on others and helps to explain why it is so difficult for survivors to recover when others are unwilling to listen to what they endured. (2002, 51)

Since Brison's book was published in 2002 a lot of work has been done on speech after trauma. Attention to these developments can deepen our understanding of how structures of power can get in the way of speaking and listening after trauma. Next we briefly situate Brison's idea of empathetic listening within contemporary conversations about epistemic injustice.

People speaking about their experiences of trauma face the epistemological challenge of simply being believed. Miranda Fricker introduces terminology that gets widespread uptake for what other thinkers, like Brison, have demonstrated in their work. In her book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Fricker explicates two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, when a speaker's credibility is reduced as a result of their marginalized social status; and hermeneutical injustice, an obstruction of the interpretive resources developed from the marginalized perspective that are necessary for understanding the world as it is, including its oppressive features (Fricker 2007, 1). In the case of sexual violence, women are regularly subject to credibility deficits due to their social position, which in turn results in testimonial injustice; their accounts of sexual violence are disbelieved. In order for empathetic listening to achieve what Brison argues it is capable of doing when a speaker's self is undone, a speaker's testimony must be believed.

The nature of our socially influenced unjust epistemic structures further challenges a person who intends to speak about their experience of sexual violence. As Kristie Dotson points out in her paper “Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing” (2011) women are in an epistemic position that invites a kind of self silencing in that they are reliably disbelieved as a result of their speech being met with improper uptake. Doston calls this “testimonial smothering.” Testimonial smothering is “the truncating of one's own testimony in order to insure that the testimony contains only content for which one's audience demonstrates testimonial competence” (Dotson 2011, 244). Anticipating that a listener may not believe a speaker's testimony (as a result of identity prejudice or a lack of necessary hermeneutical resources), a speaker will limit or alter their testimony so that their speech, such as it is, can be met with proper uptake. The initial obstacles to empathetic listening, then, are not limited to the kind of testimonial injustice Fricker described, but a speaker herself may be challenged by her own testimonial smothering. Offering a truncated and self-censored version of her experience, tailored to suit a listener, does not empower the kind of speech and listening after trauma that Brison describes. In the case of testimonial smothering, a speaker is not speaking in ways she needs and wants to speak about her experience, a necessary component according to Brison.

Before empathetic listening can be possible, a person's speech about their sexual violence must overcome several epistemic hurdles. Brison's picture of empathetic listening, however, goes beyond the need for survivors to be awarded due epistemic credibility. While Brison is vague about what exactly empathetic listening entails, what is clear is that it involves a more complicated relationship between speaker and listener than what is typically understood in an instance of testimony. For Brison, the kind of empathetic listening that is important for self-rebuilding often occurs between friends and loved ones, that is people with whom we build these self-constitutive relations. In these relations, often, the speaker is already believed. In instances like this, it seems, a person may have overcome the initial epistemic challenges that testimony faces; she can speak freely and her listener believes her insofar as they award her due epistemic credibility. What Brison's account lacks is a more detailed picture of how empathetic listening goes beyond believing survivors. In this project, we aim to build on Brison's account to begin to develop a roadmap for self-remaking empathetic listening.

3. Subversive speech and entangled empathy

In Rape and resistance, Linda Martín Alcoff identifies “a set of programmatic questions concerning the nature of experience and the strategies of resistance vital for the movement against sexual violence to move forward” (2018, 18). Alcoff investigates the relationship between experience and expertise in contexts of sexual violence, paying close attention to how capitalist, white supremacist, misogynist culture co-opts narratives of sexual violence. Alcoff observes, “The impressive amount of survivor discourse that has been disseminated over the last several decades seems to have had little effect on the epidemic of sexual violations. The silence is being broken, but the question is, has our speech become so co-opted and domesticated that its subversive impact has been seriously diminished?” (2018, 183). Citing powerful examples from daytime television talk shows, Alcoff charts patterns of how these television shows “sensationalized and exploited” survivors (2018, 180–81). For example, after hearing from people who have experienced sexual violence, daytime talk show hosts often pivot to an “expert,” e.g. a psychologist or a skeptical third party. “Survivors were constituted as damaged, weak, and dependent upon expert help,” Alcoff explains. As we note in the previous section, speaking as a survivor of sexual violence does not guarantee that audiences will afford you the credibility to theorize about or interpret what happened (2018, 181). There are powerful social, economic, and political forces that work against widespread public recognition of survivors as reliable knowers and the public as reliable listeners.

According to Alcoff, we should learn to identify what she calls “recuperation,” which “works differently than silencing by allowing the speech but subsuming it within existing frameworks in such a way that it is no longer disruptive” (2018, 187). With Brison's call for empathetic listening in mind, we wonder, how can we listen to the narratives of people who have experienced sexual violence without participating in this kind of recuperation and co-optation? Moving forward in this paper, we offer readers practical suggestions for how to avoid endorsing this process of “subsuming” narratives of sexual violence under existing frameworks that ultimately reinforce rather than resist many of the systems of domination and control that support patterns of sexual violence. Alcoff writes, “We need to transform arrangements of speaking to create spaces where survivors are authorized to act as both witnesses and experts, reporters of experience and theorists of experience” (2018, 198). So, what makes speech or the relationship between speakers subversive? Alcoff clarifies this, “Subversive activity is disruptive. Whether it involves lying down in front of cop cars, or marching into banks and making unruly noises, or spray-painting body outlines on college sidewalks, sometimes we need to disrupt the smooth flows of capitalist and patriarchal commerce” (2018, 201).

We now build on Alcoff's discussion of “subversive activity” to consider possible obstacles individuals may encounter when attempting to serve as the empathetic listeners Brison describes as necessary to the process of remaking the self. We should not assume we know how to listen empathetically. Lori Gruen develops the practice of “entangled empathy,” or “a type of caring perception focused on attending to another's experience of wellbeing” that recognizes our interdependence and aims “to be responsive and responsible in these relationships by attending to another's needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and sensitivities” (2015, 3). We follow Gruen in thinking we can “hone our skills” and improve on how we practice empathy (2015, 82). This matters as we explore Brison's claim about the importance of empathetic listeners for the process of remaking the self after violence. What skills do we need to reliably become empathetic listeners in this context? We should worry about failing in this role.

Gruen explains how “empathy can go wrong” and identifies two specific ways empathy can fail. She writes, “Sometimes there are things we don't know or perceive adequately enough. These are what I call epistemic inaccuracies. There are also mistakes that we make when we try to weigh values in different situations. These are what I call ethical inaccuracies” (2015: 82).² To this we add that empathy can go wrong when we slip into socially conditioned scripts and listen as if we are playing a role inappropriate to our actual subject position, e.g. listening as if we are cross-examiners, physicians, professors, fixers, or listeners who too quickly refocus the conversation on our own traumatic experiences. This may (and we suspect often does) happen unbeknownst to the listener. When a listener adopts scripts associated with these common societal roles in an attempt to condemn, diagnose, understand, fix, or relate, they risk overdetermining the conversation and inhibiting the speaker's ability to communicate in ways that assist with the process of remaking the self after sexual violence.

Consider the popularity of “true crime” and medical dramas. When listening to those sharing their experiences of sexual violence, we can imagine having made the mistake of adopting patterns of questioning like a prosecutor based on the popular media we have consumed that features sexual violence. To correct empathetic mistakes, Gruen argues:

Amplifying the significance of another's experiences often results when one has a heightened sensitivity that blocks one's ability to assess the situation accurately. One remedy for this sort of empathetic failure is greater self-knowledge. When the empathizer becomes aware of her tendency to let her emotional or political dispositions cloud her ability to understand the perspective of another, in principle she will be able to correct this failure either by keeping the tendencies that contribute to overestimating in check (which, admittedly may be difficult to accomplish, but worth trying) or by critically reflecting on the judgments she makes, paying particular attention to the distortions that are likely to emerge. (2015, 84–85)

Building on Gruen's notion that we can improve as empathetic listeners and Alcoff's discussion of subversive speech as disruptive, we offer our account of subversive listening. By subversive listening, we mean practices of listening aimed at resisting and disrupting the tendency to respond to accounts of sexual violence in ways that are inappropriate given our relationship to the speaker. As listeners, we do not begin from a neutral epistemic nor empathetic stance. This is why subversive listening is necessary; we begin already playing defense against dominant frameworks that will subsume these narratives unless we resist. We diagnose the following pattern and problem:

Listening as if one is x, where x plays a widely socially recognizable role and that role has prescribed pathways of uptake, but the listener is not x.

These socially conditioned scripts often reinforce the “smooth flows of capitalist and patriarchal commerce” (Alcoff 2018, 201) and resisting these scripts makes empathetic listening difficult. But, with Gruen, we think it is worth trying.

So, in order to become the kind of empathetic listeners Brison describes, we may need to engage in subversive listening along the way, with the aim of disrupting our tendencies to co-opt, correct, undermine, or over-identify with a speakers’ narrative of sexual violence. We ought to think more about what it means to be empathetic listeners who are aware of possible obstacles and actively work to avoid them. Gruen's account of entangled empathy offers a valuable starting point for identifying obstacles because, by virtue of being entangled, we are susceptible to epistemic and ethical mistakes as we attempt to serve as empathetic listeners. As Gruen explains, her account of empathy resists how “traditional theories tend to ignore or downplay not just the meaning of the relationships we are in, but the way those relationships shape who we are” (2015, 14).

4. Avoiding obstacles by practicing subversive listening

In this section, we identify five obstacles to avoid when attempting to serve as an empathetic listener for someone who is sharing their experience of sexual violence. This list is not exhaustive; we encourage readers to build on our work. To identify these obstacles, we pay close attention to the overextension of certain frameworks. These frameworks can do important work in specific and limited domains. The overextension of these frameworks inappropriately stretches them beyond their scope. We suggest five different frameworks: the legal, medical, academic, fixing, and identifying that, when overextended, obstruct empathic listening.³

We offer Table 1 with the aim of assisting readers in avoiding common obstacles that obstruct empathetic listening in the context of sexual violence. We do not think that these obstacles operate in mutually exclusive ways; it is common for listeners to meet multiple obstacles when listening to a speaker share a narrative of sexual violence.

Table 1 Listening as if one is x, where x plays a widely socially recognizable role and that role has prescribed pathways of uptake, but the listener is not x.

First, in a legal setting, understanding speech after trauma often focuses on verdictive, juridical or punitive goals; we call this the legal framework. When the legal framework is overextended, the listener acts as if they are an investigator. For example, it may be tempting for a listener to hear a person's experience and ask for details to make the narrative make sense in a certain timeline or location; this reaction is a symptom of overextending the legal framework by treating the narrative first and foremost as evidence that needs to be linear and consistent. The investigator risks co-opting the narrative in the name of justice or “objective” truth. When this framework is overextended by listeners, empathetic listening is hindered.

Second, in a medical setting, understanding speech after trauma focuses on assessment, diagnosis, and treatment; this is the medical framework. When a traumatic experience is shared in the context of healthcare, the listener (a therapist, psychiatrist, physician, or other health care provider) will likely prioritize the diagnosis of the person, relying on their knowledge of trauma and PTSD to understand a person's story to provide treatment. This framework is necessary in a certain setting, but when the primary goal is empathic listening, the extension of this framework to non-medical settings can be obstructive. An overextension of the medical framework sets up the listener as a clinician. For example, the friend of someone harmed may be tempted to psychologize their friend's narrative by using what they learned in their own therapy. This temptation is likely enhanced by the proliferation of armchair psychology and sensationalization of psychology in the media.

Third, in an academic setting, understanding speech after trauma focuses on, broadly, theoretic importance and implications; we call this the academic framework. For an academic, the temptation might be to fit a person's experience of sexual violence into a conceptual schema for harm, to use the expression of that experience as anecdotal support for a theory. The overextension of the academic framework positions the listener as a professor. One need not be an academic to overextend the academic framework as we see in examples of mansplaining, when someone acts as if they have the authority to explain instead of listening to the speaker.

Fourth, in social settings, listening to speech after trauma is vulnerable to the listener acting primarily as someone who wants to quickly fix or improve the situation; we call this the fixing framework. By overextending the fixing framework, the listener aims to support the speaker by attempting to fix the situation without invitation to fix. This often takes the form of unsolicited advice. Brison points to this overextension when she describes the way her loved ones were reluctant to talk about her experience because they were worried about retraumatizing or upsetting her; this worry of the listener, that they would trigger or further hurt the person harmed, can actually prohibit the kind of empathetic listening required for the rebuilding of self (Brison 2002, 12–13). This overextension is particularly pernicious because a listener can seem to be listening in the “right” way and still obstruct the remaking of self. The fixing framework may include approaches developed in social activist spaces, e.g. the tactic of de-centering the perpetrator to be victim-focused in anti-violence work. Here, the obstacle to empathetic listening shows up as a temptation to privilege being seen as a “good feminist” or politically correct activist over listening carefully to the speaker.

The fifth framework that gets overextended is what we call the identifying framework. Falling prey to the overextension of this framework leads to over-identifying with a speaker. Given the importance of the #MeToo movement, it is not surprising that sometimes a listener will jump too quickly to share their own experiences in order to establish trust or solidarity. However, it is so important to stay present with the person sharing their experiences. When listening, a listener should think carefully about if and when they want to share their own story.

To summarize, by identifying these five common overextensions of dominant social and professional frameworks, we invite readers to engage in subversive listening. Subversive listening is necessary because when we attempt to serve as empathetic listeners for those who have experienced sexual violence, we do so already entrenched in dominant frameworks for attending to this violence. So, try to resist slipping into these recognizable, often internalized roles when you are listening by asking yourself, “Am I acting as if I am x when I am not x?” Given our focus on the practical value of identifying these obstacles, we now turn to The apology by author, artist, and activist V (formerly Eve Ensler) to demonstrate subversive listening.

5. Reading V's The apology to practice subversive listening

The apology is a brave and brutal book in which V writes a letter to herself in the voice of her late father, Arthur, who sexually, physically, and emotionally abused her. Through V's father's perspective, you see and feel along with him and her as he rapes and abuses young V. Arthur observes the dismantling of V's sense of self because of his continued abuse. He watches as the effects of the trauma he inflicted cascade into toxic relationships, physical and mental health problems, and embodied pain for his daughter. The apology is a detailed remembering from Arthur for V. After a lifetime of waiting, V wrote the apology she never received. This is a difficult text to understand given its form and content, which makes it especially vulnerable to the obstacles we argue often obstruct empathetic listening after sexual violence. We offer examples of how a reader may encounter these obstacles in The apology and suggest how they might engage in subversive listening instead.

First, we are confident a reader will need to resist the urge to overextend the legal framework. In her father's voice, V writes, “I beat a child half my size. I battered a little girl. I used my hands, my fist, and belts as whips” (Ensler 2019, 72); “Your violent death was ever present. And each murderous episode escalated the states and the brutality” (2019, 76); “I wanted you dead, Eve. I tried on several occasions to murder you. I had to kill what I had already destroyed. I had to erase the evidence” (2019, 70–71). Upon reading these passages, a reader will be tempted to think punitively, especially because V's father was not prosecuted for his crimes before he died. But if the reader becomes fixated on reading for evidence of criminal wrongdoing, they will fail to attend to other important aspects of this text, namely the fact that V writes this as an apology, not primarily as a confession.

Second, a reader is likely to think, “V's father was a psychopathic narcissist.” She even has him ask himself this question:

Was I a coldhearted monster, or a man with a broken and revengeful heart? Is there a difference? Does it matter? Certainly not in terms of the pain my cruelty inflicted on you … Was I a psychopath? That would be an easy out. No. I was not insane. I was a privileged, forceful man. I lived above this world, above criticism, above reproach. (2019, 63–64)

While V's father observes that thinking of himself as a psychopath would be an easy way out, that is also true for the reader who may be tempted to think of The apology as an account of the inner workings of someone who engages in child sexual abuse. By doing this, a listener misses V's point because the aim is not to diagnose her father. The aim is for her father to apologize to her.

Third, a reader may be tempted to overextend the academic framework by becoming fixated on how the text fits into or resists established theoretical models of apology and forgiveness. The genre of this text is unclear; it does not fit neatly into existing academic disciplinary categories. V begins the letter with the following questions, “Am I writing in a language I never spoke or understood which you have created inside both of our minds to bridge the gaps, the failures to connect? Maybe I am writing as I truly am, as you have freed me by your witness. Or I'm not writing this at all but simply being used as a vehicle to fulfill your own needs and version of things” (Ensler 2019, 1). As philosophers, we were especially vulnerable to the overextension of the academic framework. For example, when we first approached this text, we were tempted to investigate it as a speech act. A reader may also get stuck thinking too much about what it means for V to imagine what her dead father would have said to her. It is also worth noting here that one might be tempted to overextend both the medical and the academic frameworks simultaneously as they think about what it means for her to create what is “inside both of our minds to bridge the gaps” (2019, 1).

Fourth, an empathetic reader will have the overwhelming desire to “fix” so many of the situations described in the letter. At one point near the middle of The apology, V has her father question the value of such a detailed recounting. He asks, “Yes, I realize there is no apology without a meticulous accounting. But I seriously wonder if unearthing the depth of my cruelty and confirming it to you might be more devastating than curing. Will knowing the harsh specifics of my vicious actions serve your self-hatred, or your freeing?” (2019, 45). A reader who overextends the fixing framework may be tempted to argue V's “meticulous accounting” of the abuse her father inflicted serves “self-hatred” and risks retraumatizing. However, when serving as an empathetic listener, it is so important not to interrupt this recounting in the name of “fixing” or “saving” the speaker from sharing because of one's own discomfort as a listener. Of course, we know too often people who experience sexual violence are expected to repeat their narratives, especially if they report this abuse in medical and criminal justice systems. If we can work with the person who experienced sexual violence to limit the number of times they need to share what happened, this is importantly different from failing to listen and attempting to “fix” because we are uncomfortable with what we are hearing.

Finally, a reader may overextend the identifying framework when reading The Apology, especially because of the structure of the text. V's decision to write the apology from her father in the form of a letter to her means the reader often encounters the second personal “you”:

All along, I made you feel like you were the one who had done something terribly wrong. Always anxious, in an ongoing state of unnamable guilt and dread, I made you a carrier of your father's sin. You carried it like a warrior. You carried it like a wound. You carried it like a mutated cell that later became illness. You carried it like a scarlet letter imprinted on your defiled body, like a sign that you were disposable and forgotten. You carried it like an invitation to waiting predators to inflict more harm. You carried it like an omen that you would not live to be thirty. You almost drank yourself to death, putting yourself in constant danger, secretly dreaming that someone would take you out, stop the pain, undo the curse. (2019, 93)

When serving as an empathetic listener, then, the reader may need to engage in subversive listening in order to resist the urge to read the “you” first and foremost as themselves instead of V. The apology ends with the following words, “Eve, I free you from the covenant. I revoke the lie. I lift the curse. Old man, be gone” (2019, 112). We read the last few sentences of The apology repeatedly. We feel the release and freedom that V describes when she writes, “Old man, be gone.” If a reader too quickly pivots to their own experiences and away from V's narrative when reading this text, they risk neglecting the importance of the ending of the letter.

V has expressed ways that The apology has been transformative for her; most notably, perhaps, is that V changed her name after sharing her story through The apology. In 2020, she wrote on her website:

I have changed my name. After finishing The Apology, I was able to release my father. I hold no rancor or bitterness or rage towards him any longer but, I hold no desire to live with his name any longer or the name he gave to me. Names determine so much and inspire so much. V is my chosen name. It is a portal. It is a pyramid. It is voluptuous, vulnerable. It is an invitation. I invite you to call me V.

The “About” section of her website now features the following quotation from journalist Arifa Akbar, “She is no longer Eve Ensler, not since writing her memoir, The apology, which excavated the dead father who violently abused her throughout her childhood. She is now V, joyously freed from the last vestige of that prescribed paternal identity” (V 2022). While initially we were uncertain how to understand The apology, it is clear that the text is, at least, an act of remaking the self for V. We contend that by engaging in subversive listening aimed at addressing and avoiding obstacles to empathetic listening, we are better positioned to witness the transformative power of a text like The apology.

6. Conclusion

We have discussed the challenges to empathetic listening after sexual violence. Building on Brison's claim that empathetic listening is necessary for a person to rebuild the self after trauma, we identify some of the challenges to this kind of listening. We argue that not only must speech after trauma overcome epistemic hurdles, that is a speaker must be believed, there are further obstacles that can prevent the kind of empathetic listening that Brison suggests. Looking to Alcoff, we suggest that, even when speech after trauma is believed, the speech itself may still be co-opted or subsumed by dominant frameworks. As listeners, we argue, we must engage in a kind of subversive listening to resist the interpersonal co-optation of speech after trauma. We argue that one valuable way to practice subversive listening involves resisting the overextension of certain frameworks. We offer an operative definition of the overextension of frameworks in an instance of speech after trauma: Listening as if one is x, where x plays a widely socially recognizable role and that role has prescribed pathways of uptake, but the listener is not x. Building on our definition, we develop a practical program for resisting some commonly overextended frameworks. While these frameworks are useful interpretive tools in certain domains, when they are overextended, they can prevent or inhibit empathetic listening to testimony of sexual violence. To illustrate these obstacles, we identify The apology by V as an example of speech after trauma that invites the reader to engage in subversive listening because the content and style of the text may challenge empathetic readers.

Our account prompts a number of worthwhile directions for future work. The kind of empathetic listening Brison describes is not the only kind of empathetic listening. Similarly, we think our account of subversive listening (as a bridge to empathetic listening) is not the only way we can practice subversive listening. We practice subversive listening when listening involves actively working to disrupt socially sanctioned scripts that reinforce oppression.

We also hope to further develop this account of subversive listening in future work on restorative and transformative justice. In Until we reckon: Violence, mass incarceration, and a road to repair, Danielle Sered, the founder and executive director of Common Justice in New York, offers readers five key features of accountability as distinct from punishment and demonstrates how these features have worked in practice. She argues that too often we refuse to consider alternatives to extreme punishment in order to preserve white supremacy in the United States. In a particularly powerful passage, Sered makes it clear how white Americans engage in patterns of dehumanization and paternalism to inhibit empathy and justify punishment:

As punishers, white people can further protect ourselves from the pain our empathy would cause us and free ourselves from the constraints it would place on our behavior if we add to dehumanization another familiar American ingredient: paternalism. If we go a step beyond telling ourselves that the person we are punishing will not feel the pain in the same way we would and also tell ourselves that the pain we inflict will make them better in some way—“teach them a lesson”—then we may even feel ethical as we do harm that would otherwise be unthinkable. (2019, 57)

While we did not explicitly include “acting as if a parent when one is not a parent” or “paternalism” in our typology, we see how subversive listening may be necessary for white Americans committed to anti-racist, accountability-based alternatives to punishment after violence. White Americans would do well to watch out for obstacles to empathetic listening grounded in assumptions that “protect ourselves from the pain our empathy would cause us” at the expense of learning to listen in ways that resist reinforcing the prison industrial complex.

In “‘Something else to be’: A Chicana survivor's journey from vigilante justice to transformative justice,” Lena Palacios explains that “a transformative justice feminist praxis is driven by the formation of radical, oppositional models of justice, redress, and response—namely the creation of transformative systems of accountability” (2016, 94). Palacios identifies another obstacle to empathetic listening we might think of as adjacent to what we call the identifying and the academic frameworks. Palacios says, “Too many of us have subscribed hook, line, and sinker to an anticolonial, revolutionary, and cultural nationalist politics that are built on and require the suffering and exclusion of girls, women, queer, and trans people of color” (2016, 105). This can lead to a romanticizing of community that Palacios challenges us to disrupt:

After receiving one too many apologias for sexual violence authored by self-identified race-radical feminists, we have been compelled to work “against the romance of community” (Joseph 2002) and are no longer in denial about how our so-called benevolent communities are shot through with and structured by gendered and sexualized violence. Realizing that we can't rely on romanticized notions that our friends, families, and lovers are ready to be held accountable and to engage in the process of transformative justice, we ask ourselves on a daily basis: What does it mean to build “community,” more broadly, when its epicenter holds a silenced history of violence against black women and other women of color? (2016, 106).

We think subversive listening may serve as an important practice of resistance against white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist obstacles when listening to those who have experienced sexual violence. With Palacios, we want to be careful not to romanticize social justice movements in ways that fail to listen to experiences of intra-group violence in these movements. The identifying and academic frameworks are often overextended to this end. There is no “community” or “movement” outside of the specific people and power relations in that community or movement. In the future, we are interested in further developing how subversive listening can serve as a solid practice of resistance against harmful romanticizing.

Finally, we recognize the value in thinking about the limitations of a typology in that listeners may be shifting between the overextensions we identify in the paper. This was true of our experiences reading The apology. In particular, we found ourselves shifting between the academic and identifying as we attempted to listen empathetically to V. We offer this paper in the spirit of providing a useful analysis and tool for people to become better empathetic listeners. We know this is hard work, but, as Gruen reminds us, empathetic listening “may be difficult to accomplish, but [it is] worth trying” (2015, 84–85).