Trauma-lama ding dong.
Couldn't sleep last night, although I got some excellent sleep during the previous day. I am going to nap for an hour or two, I think. The illustrious life of an insomniac, chapter whatever it is.
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There was a thread on the Fuck City forums about rape and self-defense. As you may imagine, several people on that thread were Wrong on the Internet. This is sort of about that, and sort of not. I'm not necessarily talking about any one person, although the exchange between Sanskrit and Icedmaple got me started.
Quickly, because I have been misconstrued in the past:
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Trauma kind of fascinates me. When I say something fascinates me, I don't mean I approve of it, which I hope is obvious here. What I mean is that trauma seems to draw my attention, sometimes seemingly against my will.
I think of trauma as the aftermath of an event of excessive violence, whether physical or emotional/mental. The most accurate way that I have been able to conceive of trauma, for my own purposes, is that trauma is a response to something that is unspeakable. I cannot articulate how I felt, or the pain I went through. Language is the way that I deal with the world; when my ability to speak about my experience is taken away or becomes null, I am left without tools. I am helpless to narrate my own experience without interruption or discontinuation.
For me, my performance of this trauma is silence and disassociation. A while ago, back when I was butcher than I am now, I got roughed up by a group of guys. They were drunk, I was in the wrong place, such is queer life. They weren't responding to me in a sexually violent way, but they were responding in a gender violent way. I dealt with this event -- which was traumatic, whether or not it seems serious to you -- in a couple of ways. I briefly flirted with a serious drinking problem. I didn't talk about the event at all, because I didn't have anything to say about it, and believed it to be something I made up. Now I primarily joke about it, or use it as an example for an argument. I think the only time I really got choked up about it (stereotypically enough) was in a feminist studies class, and it was an embarrassing and shitty experience.
I would not have been a good person for the "tough love" response, or -- as I seem to understand it -- the encouragement for the traumatized person to reach peace with the event and be happy. I am a vicious, cold bitch who is at times very masculine, and I would have cut down and destroyed anyone who approached me in that way.
I am not making this event equivalent to being raped. However, that is my point: no violent event, or trauma, can be made equivalent to any other violent event or trauma. Trauma is absolutely unique. There are certain characteristics that experiences of trauma might share. However, there is no making one trauma equivalent to another. When I was hit by a car, it was not the same as being surrounded and beaten. When I was surrounded and beaten, it was not the equivalent of my friend Aaron being surrounded and beaten. When I was hit by a car, it was not the equivalent of my ex's experiences with sexual assault. &c, &c.
This is why I find the idea of prescribing a certain response to rape problematic. There is no way to dictate a universal response to something that is absolutely impossible to duplicate. (Language is the way that we reproduce ideas; if something is outside language, unspeakable, it cannot be reproduced.) Aaron, for example, came to me and wept, asked me to hold him, and then left; he moved off campus and hid in his apartment. I shut down certain emotional responses, and put myself in positions where I was sure to incur some sort of other traumatic event. You may have had the same response as either one of us, but at the same time it is difficult to say how someone "should" have approached us. And there's certainly no blanket approach; you couldn't have known that I had just gone through something, because according to me it didn't happen. As my phrase tended to go at the time, Fuck you, hope you eat shit at gunpoint and die alone. :D Have fun tough-loving that girl!
The only "should" I have been able to figure out is that if or when you find out that someone you know has gone through something traumatizing -- whatever that something might be, of whatever severity -- you should respond to them, not some idealized referent of a victim. This unfortunately leaves you without a guidebook. You are unmoored, even; this is why I often counseled the friends who brought in rape survivors for counseling.
But experiencing this feeling of dislocation produces the possibility, I think, of sympathizing with the survivor of a traumatic event. In feeling dislocated, you're feeling your subjectivity in question, just like the survivor is; in speaking to them, viewing them as an individual subject, not as "a rape victim," you can help them to relocate themselves, and they in turn can help you relocate yourself.
To speak from experience, again; I dated someone who was the survivor of several instances of sexual assault. She was athletic, very strong, and skilled in martial arts; however, she had frozen in these assault situations. She had a lot of guilt and emotional responses that didn't seem logical. I cannot say that I helped her through her trauma, because I'm so very not that awesome, but I can say that I saw her as an individual, took into account her past experiences, and then continued to relate to her as a person. I think some people might conceive of this as "tough love," but it wasn't. I didn't force her to find happiness, or even encourage her to find happiness. Most of the time I was in a state of "lol idk wow that sux :|." But I tried to relate to her, and I saw her as herself. It wasn't honorable or admirable, really; it was how I related to her (because I loved (and still love) her). But it made me realize that those times I had said "oh man, she's so strong, I can't believe she was a victim, someone should help her," I was unwittingly being a dicksmack.
As a sidebar: telling people who have been assaulted that they should learn self-defense is privileged horseshit. I know women who have black belts in karate who have been assaulted. While self-defense is a very good skill to have, and I encourage everyone to learn it, it is not the band-aid for rape or violence. Simply because it would reduce the number of rapes if women (and I should hope men, because men are raped too) learned self-defense isn't a good enough reason to condescendingly tell people that they should be better equipped. If you're in a privileged group, you're speaking from that privilege, and it's going to come off condescending. It reeks of blaming the survivor, and that makes me want to shove a fork up someone's ass tines-first. :D Now that's what I mean by tough love. You maybe don't want me as your mama.
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I have a couple of quotations that I kept thinking about as I was reading that whole thread. They're by Judith Butler, in her book Giving An Account of Oneself (2005). Butler's texts are like a language unto themselves; I've kind of translated, but you might be better off rolling your eyes and skipping this.
Whoever you are, you constitute me fundamentally and become the name for a primary impressionability, for the uncertain boundary between an impression from outside that I register and some consequent sense of "me" that is the site of that registering. Within this founding scene, the very grammar of the self has not yet taken hold. And so one might say, reflectively, and with a certain sense of humility, that in the beginning I am my relation to you, ambiguously addressed and addressing, given over to a "you" without whom I cannot be and upon whom I depend to survive. (pp. 80-81)
Whoever you are, you become a symbol that represents an intersection. This intersection is between my performance of myself (a self performed for others, conceived through what I assume other people are seeing, "an impression from outside that I register") and my idea of my internal self ("sense of 'me' that is the site of that registering"). If we acknowledge that there is no pre-existing self -- that the child's concept of self is formed through interactions with others, through it's entrance into language and social relation -- then we also acknowledge that my idea of myself (the intersection I just described, that is referred to in shorthand by "I") is completely dependent on another person, on you. Whoever you are.
Let me try again: What I think of when I think of "myself" is both a) my body, the site from which I speak, and b) the sense of how I am perceived by others. I am established as a self through my interactions with others. When I say "I," then, my entire concept of what "I" means is actually dependent on the person I am in relation to, the "you." You are therefore implied in I.
(If you've ever read something that mentions interpellation, this is basically what Butler is talking about.)
Butler later explains the Levinasian view of responsibility; according to Levinas, persecution places responsibility on the persecuted. This isn't to say that the persecuted somehow caused their persecution; instead, it is meant to address the frightening complexity of experiencing persecution by "the Other who has a face." That is, we are not persecuted by ephemeral entities; our persecutors are people, just like ourselves.
In relation to this Other, I still have an ethical responsibility. "Indeed, responsibility is not a matter of cultivating a will, but of making use of an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for becoming responsive to the Other. Whatever the Other has done, the Other still makes an ethical demand upon me, has a 'face' to which I am obligated to respond -- meaning that I am, as it were, precluded from revenge by virtue of a relation I never chose" (91). It's incredibly frustrating to think about, that something done to a person against their will creates a relation of responsibility to their persecutor. However, I think that's accurate to the frustration of being persecuted.
This is the passage I always come back to in this book:What might it mean to undergo violation, to insist upon not resolving grief and staunching vulnerability too quickly through a turn to violence, and to practice, as an experiment in living otherwise, nonviolence in an emphatically nonreciprocal response? What would it mean, in the face of violence, to refuse to return it?" (p. 100, my emphasis)
...
Violence is neither a just punishment we suffer nor a just revenge for what we suffer. It delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away, which we cannot finally resolve in the name of the subject, but which can provide a way to understand that none of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other's hands, at each other's mercy. This is a situation we do not choose. It forms the horizon of choice, and it grounds our responsibility. In this sense, we are not responsible for it, but it creates the conditions under which we assume responsibility. We did not create it, and therefore it is what we must heed. (p. 101, my emphasis)
Essentially, Butler takes that idea of interpellation, and realizes that this means that I (the subject) am constantly vulnerable to the situation and the other subjects that have constituted me, and vice versa. You are given over to me, and I to you.
---
There was a thread on the Fuck City forums about rape and self-defense. As you may imagine, several people on that thread were Wrong on the Internet. This is sort of about that, and sort of not. I'm not necessarily talking about any one person, although the exchange between Sanskrit and Icedmaple got me started.
Quickly, because I have been misconstrued in the past:
- Rape and sexual violence are bad. Rape victims deserve help and care. I have had traumatic experiences, both minor and major. A member of my family is a survivor of sexual abuse, and many of the people I am close to are survivors of assault. I have been a rape counselor for college students. I do not believe that you need to have experience with rape or trauma to talk about rape or trauma intelligibly. However, I would like to note that this is a subject I take seriously, and which is very personal to me. I do not intend to make light of it.
- This post got kind of radically personal, just because it's the text I have to work from. I'd appreciate it if you didn't *hugs* or mock me for being a sadsack, because I'm an emotional android "dead inside" not aiming for sympathy, just using it as an example.
- I read most of the pages in that thread, but I might have missed something salient. I would love it if you could link me, if you think I'm missing something.
- If I say something to offend you, the place to tell me I've offended you is here. Otherwise I can't fix myself, and will keep being a jackass. I'm making this public so that you can comment anonymously, if necessary. I dislike being ripped a new one elsewhere just because that means I have to hunt it down. I promise that I will respond thoughtfully and with interest, and will try to admit if I am wrong. I'm still kind of figuring this shit out.
---
Trauma kind of fascinates me. When I say something fascinates me, I don't mean I approve of it, which I hope is obvious here. What I mean is that trauma seems to draw my attention, sometimes seemingly against my will.
I think of trauma as the aftermath of an event of excessive violence, whether physical or emotional/mental. The most accurate way that I have been able to conceive of trauma, for my own purposes, is that trauma is a response to something that is unspeakable. I cannot articulate how I felt, or the pain I went through. Language is the way that I deal with the world; when my ability to speak about my experience is taken away or becomes null, I am left without tools. I am helpless to narrate my own experience without interruption or discontinuation.
For me, my performance of this trauma is silence and disassociation. A while ago, back when I was butcher than I am now, I got roughed up by a group of guys. They were drunk, I was in the wrong place, such is queer life. They weren't responding to me in a sexually violent way, but they were responding in a gender violent way. I dealt with this event -- which was traumatic, whether or not it seems serious to you -- in a couple of ways. I briefly flirted with a serious drinking problem. I didn't talk about the event at all, because I didn't have anything to say about it, and believed it to be something I made up. Now I primarily joke about it, or use it as an example for an argument. I think the only time I really got choked up about it (stereotypically enough) was in a feminist studies class, and it was an embarrassing and shitty experience.
I would not have been a good person for the "tough love" response, or -- as I seem to understand it -- the encouragement for the traumatized person to reach peace with the event and be happy. I am a vicious, cold bitch who is at times very masculine, and I would have cut down and destroyed anyone who approached me in that way.
I am not making this event equivalent to being raped. However, that is my point: no violent event, or trauma, can be made equivalent to any other violent event or trauma. Trauma is absolutely unique. There are certain characteristics that experiences of trauma might share. However, there is no making one trauma equivalent to another. When I was hit by a car, it was not the same as being surrounded and beaten. When I was surrounded and beaten, it was not the equivalent of my friend Aaron being surrounded and beaten. When I was hit by a car, it was not the equivalent of my ex's experiences with sexual assault. &c, &c.
This is why I find the idea of prescribing a certain response to rape problematic. There is no way to dictate a universal response to something that is absolutely impossible to duplicate. (Language is the way that we reproduce ideas; if something is outside language, unspeakable, it cannot be reproduced.) Aaron, for example, came to me and wept, asked me to hold him, and then left; he moved off campus and hid in his apartment. I shut down certain emotional responses, and put myself in positions where I was sure to incur some sort of other traumatic event. You may have had the same response as either one of us, but at the same time it is difficult to say how someone "should" have approached us. And there's certainly no blanket approach; you couldn't have known that I had just gone through something, because according to me it didn't happen. As my phrase tended to go at the time, Fuck you, hope you eat shit at gunpoint and die alone. :D Have fun tough-loving that girl!
The only "should" I have been able to figure out is that if or when you find out that someone you know has gone through something traumatizing -- whatever that something might be, of whatever severity -- you should respond to them, not some idealized referent of a victim. This unfortunately leaves you without a guidebook. You are unmoored, even; this is why I often counseled the friends who brought in rape survivors for counseling.
But experiencing this feeling of dislocation produces the possibility, I think, of sympathizing with the survivor of a traumatic event. In feeling dislocated, you're feeling your subjectivity in question, just like the survivor is; in speaking to them, viewing them as an individual subject, not as "a rape victim," you can help them to relocate themselves, and they in turn can help you relocate yourself.
To speak from experience, again; I dated someone who was the survivor of several instances of sexual assault. She was athletic, very strong, and skilled in martial arts; however, she had frozen in these assault situations. She had a lot of guilt and emotional responses that didn't seem logical. I cannot say that I helped her through her trauma, because I'm so very not that awesome, but I can say that I saw her as an individual, took into account her past experiences, and then continued to relate to her as a person. I think some people might conceive of this as "tough love," but it wasn't. I didn't force her to find happiness, or even encourage her to find happiness. Most of the time I was in a state of "lol idk wow that sux :|." But I tried to relate to her, and I saw her as herself. It wasn't honorable or admirable, really; it was how I related to her (because I loved (and still love) her). But it made me realize that those times I had said "oh man, she's so strong, I can't believe she was a victim, someone should help her," I was unwittingly being a dicksmack.
As a sidebar: telling people who have been assaulted that they should learn self-defense is privileged horseshit. I know women who have black belts in karate who have been assaulted. While self-defense is a very good skill to have, and I encourage everyone to learn it, it is not the band-aid for rape or violence. Simply because it would reduce the number of rapes if women (and I should hope men, because men are raped too) learned self-defense isn't a good enough reason to condescendingly tell people that they should be better equipped. If you're in a privileged group, you're speaking from that privilege, and it's going to come off condescending. It reeks of blaming the survivor, and that makes me want to shove a fork up someone's ass tines-first. :D Now that's what I mean by tough love. You maybe don't want me as your mama.
---
I have a couple of quotations that I kept thinking about as I was reading that whole thread. They're by Judith Butler, in her book Giving An Account of Oneself (2005). Butler's texts are like a language unto themselves; I've kind of translated, but you might be better off rolling your eyes and skipping this.
Whoever you are, you constitute me fundamentally and become the name for a primary impressionability, for the uncertain boundary between an impression from outside that I register and some consequent sense of "me" that is the site of that registering. Within this founding scene, the very grammar of the self has not yet taken hold. And so one might say, reflectively, and with a certain sense of humility, that in the beginning I am my relation to you, ambiguously addressed and addressing, given over to a "you" without whom I cannot be and upon whom I depend to survive. (pp. 80-81)
Whoever you are, you become a symbol that represents an intersection. This intersection is between my performance of myself (a self performed for others, conceived through what I assume other people are seeing, "an impression from outside that I register") and my idea of my internal self ("sense of 'me' that is the site of that registering"). If we acknowledge that there is no pre-existing self -- that the child's concept of self is formed through interactions with others, through it's entrance into language and social relation -- then we also acknowledge that my idea of myself (the intersection I just described, that is referred to in shorthand by "I") is completely dependent on another person, on you. Whoever you are.
Let me try again: What I think of when I think of "myself" is both a) my body, the site from which I speak, and b) the sense of how I am perceived by others. I am established as a self through my interactions with others. When I say "I," then, my entire concept of what "I" means is actually dependent on the person I am in relation to, the "you." You are therefore implied in I.
(If you've ever read something that mentions interpellation, this is basically what Butler is talking about.)
Butler later explains the Levinasian view of responsibility; according to Levinas, persecution places responsibility on the persecuted. This isn't to say that the persecuted somehow caused their persecution; instead, it is meant to address the frightening complexity of experiencing persecution by "the Other who has a face." That is, we are not persecuted by ephemeral entities; our persecutors are people, just like ourselves.
In relation to this Other, I still have an ethical responsibility. "Indeed, responsibility is not a matter of cultivating a will, but of making use of an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for becoming responsive to the Other. Whatever the Other has done, the Other still makes an ethical demand upon me, has a 'face' to which I am obligated to respond -- meaning that I am, as it were, precluded from revenge by virtue of a relation I never chose" (91). It's incredibly frustrating to think about, that something done to a person against their will creates a relation of responsibility to their persecutor. However, I think that's accurate to the frustration of being persecuted.
This is the passage I always come back to in this book:What might it mean to undergo violation, to insist upon not resolving grief and staunching vulnerability too quickly through a turn to violence, and to practice, as an experiment in living otherwise, nonviolence in an emphatically nonreciprocal response? What would it mean, in the face of violence, to refuse to return it?" (p. 100, my emphasis)
...
Violence is neither a just punishment we suffer nor a just revenge for what we suffer. It delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away, which we cannot finally resolve in the name of the subject, but which can provide a way to understand that none of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other's hands, at each other's mercy. This is a situation we do not choose. It forms the horizon of choice, and it grounds our responsibility. In this sense, we are not responsible for it, but it creates the conditions under which we assume responsibility. We did not create it, and therefore it is what we must heed. (p. 101, my emphasis)
Essentially, Butler takes that idea of interpellation, and realizes that this means that I (the subject) am constantly vulnerable to the situation and the other subjects that have constituted me, and vice versa. You are given over to me, and I to you.