Thesis: 'Speaking Rape: Engaging Experience for a Feminist Social Practice of Rape Survivorship'
Feminists have historically appealed to personal experiences as a source for theorizing a shared struggle that can offer the basis for an action-oriented group politics. Through practices like feminist consciousness-raising, engaging cross-experientially has been a prevalent social practice that has enabled the bridging of feminist theory and feminist politics where personal experiences have been harnessed for mediating political coming-together and the generation of knowledge. In recent years, public disclosures of rape experiences have become a commonplace enactment of rape survivorship. Such disclosures, however, treat experience as if it were self-evidently politically salient rendering such appeals to rape experiences as susceptible to either reproducing gender relations or, worse yet, to advance a troubling exclusionary politics. Instead, I argue that there must be a feminist social practice of rape survivorship in which particular experiences of rape can be engaged with each other. In my thesis, I advance a feminist methodology of cross-experiential engagement for a feminist social practice of rape survivorship. This social practice is aimed at engaging the lived experience of survivors with each other for the purposes of revealing the plural means, forms and configurations that rape can take. My thesis is interested in how experiences can be engaged to advance a feminist social practice of rape survivorship where experience can only be politically salient when it is engaged with and in relation to others. I argue that this mode of cross-experiential engagement could advance a feminist social practice of rape survivorship that could constitute a basis for a radically inclusive and politically salient social collective of rape survivorship.