On Breaking Silence: Ethnographic Activism for Survivors

• In Event: Ethnography Caucus: Ethnography in the Age of Trump II

Abstract

The theme of this paper arises from an experience I had in January 2017 while presenting at the Society of Christian Ethics as an invited speaker on a panel addressing the sexual violence of the late Mennonite theologian and former SCE president John Howard Yoder. The theme of the panel was “Breaking Our Silence,” but after I and my co-panelist finished speaking, one of the panel’s conveners commented that both of our presentations spent far more time on the obstacles to breaking silence around sexual violence than on the transformative possibilities of the practice. Her comment was offered not so much as a critique as a question: was “Breaking Our Silence” the right theme? With the impending inauguration heavy on my mind, I found myself unable to conjure much of an answer. To me, as to many other survivors and advocates, Trump’s election stands as a sickening reminder of what many of us already knew: that speaking openly about what has been done to us, far from being a singularly redemptive act of liberation, opened us to judgment, retaliation, further cruelty, and, perhaps most daunting, further silences.

This paper contemplates the implications of this question, writ large, for activists and ethnographers documenting sexual violence: What does it mean to call for the breaking of silence from sexual violence survivors? When sexual violence functions as a tool within every form of subjugation that is endemic to the modern era, what are the ethical obligations incumbent upon those of us whose work entails calling for survivors to speak, across categories of social difference, about their experiences? As a white activist working in persistently white-dominated sexual violence advocacy, I have learned wariness about sloganeering meant to transcend difference; the costs of “breaking silence” falls unevenly across different victimized bodies, and the desire to minimize those differences in the name of simplicity of purpose has its own silencing—and whitening—effect. I draw my ethical grounding from Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence Into Speech and Action,” for its attention to intersectional vulnerabilities and difference and its simultaneous insistence on our collective responsibility to support one another’s silence-breaking, to “seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.”

Author

• Stephanie Krehbiel, University of Kansas