No One is Listening, No One Hear: Re-conceptualizing Testimony of Sexual Abuse

• In Event: 1480 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. Sexuality, Health, and Crime

Abstract

Based on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘critique’, this paper suggests re-conceptualizing testimony of sexual abuse in a way that moves away from binaries of silence and speech and creates new spaces of testimony that critique and challenges the power of patriarchy.
To understand the concept and functions of testimony of sexual abuse, I draw mainly on the theories of Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard to demonstrate the limitations of our current conceptualization of testimony, which constructs it in binaries terms of speech and silence, and confines it to the setting and logic of the courtroom (even when it occurs outside of it). A main focus of this analysis is Lyotard’s concept of the ‘Differend’, which reveals an impossible conflict in testifying about trauma - we perceive witnesses who can testify of their trauma and speak of it as "not traumatized enough" and yet demand that they speak. The ‘Differend’ creates and maintains a hierarchy of suffering which posits sexual abuse survivors relatively to their ability to talk about their trauma and to how severe the trauma is perceived to be. This hierarchy is reinforced by feminist law reform initiatives and other feminist campaigns that posit speaking as center to the act of testifying.
To re-conceptualize testimony as such a space I refer to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field suggesting repositioning testimony of sexual abuse in the ‘field of listening’ instead of in the ‘field of law’. Applying Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’ together with Judith Butler’s post-critique of Foucault and feminist articulations of listening allows re-conceptualizing testimony as to become a space which not only has the potential to challenges power but dismantle it. It does so by allowing for multiple ways of testifying that do not engage in speech or silence but rather in listening, observing and being.

Author

• Ruth Carmi, University of Notre Dame