0 Bewertungen0% fanden dieses Dokument nützlich (0 Abstimmungen)
197 Ansichten8 Seiten
This document discusses the limitations of labeling women who experience sexual violence as either "victims" or "survivors". It argues that these terms deny women narrative agency over their own experiences by defining the experience from a male perspective. The author shares her own experience of sexual assault and how she was celebrated for resisting her attacker, while another woman was made to feel ashamed for freezing in fear during her assault. The document calls for allowing women to define their own experiences from their own bodily perspectives, rather than through existing patriarchal language.
This document discusses the limitations of labeling women who experience sexual violence as either "victims" or "survivors". It argues that these terms deny women narrative agency over their own experiences by defining the experience from a male perspective. The author shares her own experience of sexual assault and how she was celebrated for resisting her attacker, while another woman was made to feel ashamed for freezing in fear during her assault. The document calls for allowing women to define their own experiences from their own bodily perspectives, rather than through existing patriarchal language.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Verfügbare Formate
Als DOC, PDF, TXT herunterladen oder online auf Scribd lesen
This document discusses the limitations of labeling women who experience sexual violence as either "victims" or "survivors". It argues that these terms deny women narrative agency over their own experiences by defining the experience from a male perspective. The author shares her own experience of sexual assault and how she was celebrated for resisting her attacker, while another woman was made to feel ashamed for freezing in fear during her assault. The document calls for allowing women to define their own experiences from their own bodily perspectives, rather than through existing patriarchal language.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Verfügbare Formate
Als DOC, PDF, TXT herunterladen oder online auf Scribd lesen
and "survivor" in women's narratives of sexual violence. by Tami Spry At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice. - Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings In 1979, at 19 years old, I entered the circles of women who have experienced sexual violence. After the night it occurred, it took me two years to tell that story again. Since that time I have been a teller of my own and witness to many other women's experiences involving violence against women. And in the 14 years since my first telling, I remain uncomfortable with and psychically fragmented by the few and phallocentric linguistic options available for telling a woman's story of violence. As I struggled to free myself from my assailant, I did not know I would have a similar struggle in seeking to understand my experience from within the hegemonic assault of a phallocentric language that allows my body to be spoken of only as an object that things are done to, or as erased from the experience completely. As Maya Angelou's quote indicates, acts and issues of surrender, resistance, and choice become highly complex and contested when considering the acts and issues of sexual violence against women. Specifically, I will critique two of the most predominant labels attached to women who have experienced sexual violence. Labeling a woman as a victim or survivor of sexual violence hegmonizes and conceals her bodily experience from her by offering these linguistically phallocentric perspectives from which to tell her story. I argue that the agency of a woman as meaning maker of her own experience is denied in having to choose between the categories of victim or survivor. The pain and confusion following the assault is further complicated by having to structure and make sense of her experience within the assailant's language. She is already and always held in relation to the phallus; she is victim to it or survivor of it. The question then becomes, How can a woman's experience of sexual violence be defined from her perspective, not as victim of or survivor of, but as a woman with narrative agency, with the opportunity to narrate the experience from the site of her own active body? How can one tell a story of sexual violence from a woman's bodily narrative point of view? Though vaginal rape is a biological (f)act known only to women, our language labels/defines the experience from the perspective of the phallus, thereby continuing the discursive separation of a woman from her own bodily knowledge, from her self as a knower, a self-reflexive agent in the construction of her reality. I will first address why our language has no discursive room for a woman's story of sexual violence by discussing the concepts of victim and survivor as metaphors which construct hegemonic linguistic categories. We use these categories to tell or witness sexual violence narratives. I will argue that these categories deny a woman narrative agency by representing her body from a phallocentric perspective, or erasing her body from the expression of the experience altogether. Further, the categories are reductive of the intimacy and diversity of sexual violence experiences, thereby disallowing a complex and problemitized understanding of sexual violence to be expressed by a woman to her self and her culture. This discussion will be followed by a (re)locating of a woman's body as an active agent in the telling and defining of sexual violence. I will then offer the concept of a liberatory epistemology which allows for a "room of one's own," a (re)located site where a woman might tell a story of sexual violence where she - her body - is the locus of meaning for her experience. But first - mired as they are in a phallocentric language system - I must tell my stories. They must be told here as they are woven into the fabric of this work, its concepts and origins. In 1987 as a white female middle-class graduate student working on my Ph.D, an interpersonal communication class that I was teaching had entered into a rather disclosive discussion about gender relations. The time seemed right. I told my story. I had never told it in front of this many people. I recounted how mine was the rare "man jumping out of the bushes" assault, how he grabbed me from behind, dragged me down a 50 foot river bank pulling at my shirt and the top of my pants. I told how I kicked, screamed, elbowed, cursed, and eventually clawed my way up the bank of the Huron river. The police man typed in "attempted rape." In other words, no penetration of phallus. I had fought the phallus and won. The class seemed quite taken with and focused upon the idea that I had "fought off" the assailant. And although I heard myself stressing the idea that as I did not know if the man was "armed" this fighting could have gotten me killed, I realized that their reactions were celebrating and respective of this traditional form of resistance. I later wondered if I would have told the story had I chosen a less aggressive form of resistance. I seriously doubt that that story would have been as equally celebrated. Immediately after class a young woman, who I will call Beth, and who spoke very little during the course, approached me. She was visibly upset and asked if she could talk with me in my office. With tears and great anguish Beth recounted her acquaintance rape, but concentrated primarily on and seemed most ashamed by the idea that she had not "fought back." She said she was frozen and afraid and just wanted it to stop. She wondered then if she had somehow "allowed" it to happen. Beth said that people always ask her if she "fought back." She said she was presently in counseling, but that she had also been overeating so as not to be "attractive to men" anymore. Not only did this woman feel shame and degradation about the assault, she was also made to feel ashamed about her reaction during the assault. So I sit here with my red badge of courage pinned to my brave and stouthearted chest, a survivor in a "battle of the sexes." I am to feel pride in the telling of my story. My chosen form of resistance is acceptable to a patriarchal Darwinian culture. Within this dualistic construct then, a moral judgment is passed down; within this dichotomous frame the survivor is aloud to retain a measure of dignity and integrity while the victim is cast to receive pity. Following a most intimate kind of brutal assault, her actions are questioned, mine are celebrated. Yet, certainly, the measure of dignity and integrity afforded the survivor is there to perpetuate further submission to and gain further admission into the master's house. The badge of courage is a master's tool, it will not dismantle. My chest appears brave and stouthearted only in relation to an androcentric reaction to the form of resistance I happened to chose. Beth's form of resistance - although viewed as morally questionable (which is also an acceptable androcentric view of women) - also gains her admission into the master's house, for there can be no survivors without victims, masters without slaves. And Beth and I and all of the circles of women know where we are supposed to fit in the latter dichotomy. The Absence of the Word and the Body With its foundations in dualism, western thought is historically tangled in dichotomous distinctions of mind/body, rational/emotional, order/chaos, sacred/secular, objective/subjective. And within its further entanglements of white supremacy and misogyny, has situated corporeal embodiments of its hegemony such as women, people of color, and the body itself at the negative end of its linear thought processes. Critical theorists have clearly articulated the linguistic connections rooted in western thought which situates man as the builders of high culture and women bound to nature, body, earth, indicating a moral hierarchy where woman is at the bottom. Donna Wilshire writes, "Hierarchical dualisms - with their prejudice for Mind (i.e., maleness) and bias against the Body and Matter (i.e., femaleness) - lie at the foundations of western epistemology and moral thought" (95). Upon the European insurgence of land ownership and Christianity, woman's connection to her body and its power of reproduction was feared and thus linguistically denigrated causing a woman to separate herself not from a powerful, passionate, life-giving agent, but a base, profane, messy, dirty object in constant need of modification through make-up, diets, and restrictive clothing. Seeing one's body through a European white male gaze, hearing and speaking one's experience of that body through a phallocentric discourse makes the discovery and articulation of self/body centered knowledge difficult to attain. A further hegemonic constraint to body centered knowledge involves the suppression of emotion required if one is to be considered logical under a western thought doctrine. In the mind/body separation constructed by western thought, emotions are housed in the body; they are viewed as a pollutant to logic, a disfigurement to reason. The body is viewed as intellectually bereft and academically unseemly. The argument of body centered knowledge rests upon the tenent that knowledge is housed in and emanates from the body. Within misogynist western logic, women are believed more susceptible to the "hysterics" of emotions. Our language separates not only women, but men as well from words which may express emotional experience. The dualistic phallocentric conceptualizations surrounding the words victim and survivor in relation to sexual violence construct hegemonic linguistic categories. By linguistic categories I mean the thoughts and words chosen to describe an experience, in this case, the experience of a woman as victim or survivor of sexual assault. These linguistic categories are directly reflective of two discursive acts which hegemonize and separate a woman from her own bodily experience of sexual violence. First, the victim and survivor categories tell the woman's story from a phallocentric perspective by referring to the woman's experience only in relation to the active phallic (male) body. Second, the categories seek to erase or conceal the woman's active body from the experience. My discussion will address both of these acts in tandem as they simultaneously inscribe and reify one another. In discussing the exclusion of women's perspectives and experiences from naming and defining language, Deborah Cameron writes of the: absence of words for certain feelings and ideas, those the male language-makers have chosen not to 'name' because they do not fit in with the official male worldview. Since feelings and ideas without words to express them are fleeting, inchoate, and unrecognized by the culture at large, our languages are less than perfect vehicles for expressing women's most pressing concerns (13). When following the argument that language shapes reality, women live in a reality that does not recognize the complexity and diversity of their experiences with sexual assault because the words to describe them do not presently exist. The uncomfortability and psychic fragmentation which I and many women feel in the telling of our story is the lack of words to express the ideas, ideas which are not dualistic or phallocentric. This kind of hegemony silences a woman from speaking her experience to society and, more importantly, to her self. The absence of woman centered language perpetuates misunderstanding of sexual violence since women, as intimate knowers of the experience, must struggle to articulate it. Since a woman's body is primary in the experience of rape and other sexual violences, concerns about the linguistic phallocentrism and the erasure of a woman's body from the discursive action of telling and understanding are tantamount in feminist criticism. Because the body is a primary cultural symbol which functions as a central emblem of class, gender, and other forms of social stratification, language which interrogates the colonializing and normalizing of bodily cultural symbols is needed when seeking to express experiences not in keeping with dominant cultural codes. The separation of woman from her body is a result of making a woman's body absent through the linguistic focus on the phallus, or by defining her body from a phallocentric perspective. In working toward reconstructing feminist discourse on the body, Susan Bordo writes, "The body, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, is a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body" (13). "The concrete language of the body" takes on particular significance when the discursive activities of a language seek to silence or hegemonize the stories of particular bodily experiences such as sexual assault. The cultural rules and hierarchies of gender specific reactions to and stories about sexual violence become reified as they are inscribed (or concretized) and reinforced by a dualistic phallocentric language. In discussing the body's relation to language and literacy, Carolyn Marvin writes, "For some time the body has been the focus of a paradigm in which it is both a classifying social metaphor and a locus of social action where struggles for domination are played out" (129). Conceptualizations of victim and survivor suggests that something has ultimately been done to a woman. Arleen Dallory writes, "Not only has woman's voice or experience been excluded from the subject matter of western knowledge, but even when the discourse is 'about' women, or woman are the speaking subjects, (it) they still speak(s) according to phallocentric codes" (53). Such discourse objectifies the experience by removing the focus of the action from the woman's body to the perpetrator's. The language of victim or survivor defines the meaning of the assault in relation to his action rather than her experience; she survived it or was a victim of it. The perpetrator's body is viewed as the locus of action and power. Dallery writes, "Male or phallocentric discursive practices have historically shaped and demarcated woman's body for herself" (59). A woman's body is viewed as surviving a powerful force or being victim to a powerful force, rather than existing as a powerful force in its own right. Within the restrictive dualistic conceptualization of victim or survivor, a woman's body is viewed as an object that something was done to, that was ultimately overpowered. A body that is not under her power is not, in a very real sense, her own. Dallory states, "Woman's body is already colonized by the hegemony of male desire; it is not your body" (55). The power and agency of her body is denigrated or erased completely as we are linguistically asked to focus not on her, but rather on what was done to her by the male body. Peggy Phelen addresses the co-optation and/or erasure of the female body in writing about the performative tactics of anti-abortion activists. In a chapter on the use of fetal images by white men, she writes, "Erasing the woman from the image has allowed the fetal form to become a token in discourse of and about men. Cropped out of the picture, the pregnant woman's life and reasoning are rendered both invisible and irrelevant" (133). Similarly, the image of a woman's body as powerful agent in an assault is often "cropped out." The survived or victimized body of a woman during or after sexual assault becomes a familiarized image and token of women's cultural existence. Rape and assault discourse perpetuates images about the power of men by linguistically tokenizing a woman's body as overpowered by man. Her body as a reasoning entity with power and discursive agency is invisible. Equally disturbing is the body that is visible as a cultural symbol, the female body that is viewed as always and already overpowered by the phallus or the threat of the powerful (violent) phallus. In a particularly insightful and articulate critique of the use of video in the Rodney King trail, Judith Butler problemitizes the image of Rodney King's body and its use as a cultural image of racism. She states: The video was used as "evidence" to support the claim that the frozen black male body on the ground receiving blows was himself producing those blows, about to produce them, was himself the imminent threat of a blow and, therefore, was himself responsible for the blows he received . . . According to this racist episteme, he is hit in exchange for the blows he never delivered, but which he is, by virtue of his blackness, always about to deliver (1993; 18-19). Narrating a woman's experience of sexual violence as a victim or survivor makes perfect sense in a phallocentric discourse as the inherent sexism and misogyny in the discourse emblemizes her as a symbol of powerlessness. We may feel sorrow and pity for her, but her survived or victimized body is evidence for the appropriateness of the predominant discursive acts used to describe her experience. The emblem of her overpowered body reifies the images created by the linguistic categories - evidence for the existence of patriarchy. In a dualistic Darwinian culture and language system there must be concrete evidence of winners and losers, of the weak and the strong, of the moral and immoral. Assaulted bodies offer such evidence. Survivor/victim linguistic categories perpetuate and reify the powerful symbol of the powerless woman. Further, what kind of hegemonizing linguistic categories are evidenced by the sexually assaulted black or red or yellow female body, the expensively clad or aged female body? What discursive opportunities are available to describe the complexities of race and class when telling one's story of sexual assault? Through the use of victim/survivor linguistic categories, the female body - and to a larger extent the female body of color - is reified as a social classifying object, an object used as "evidence" of the power of the racist phallus, as register of women's relegatory place within the social strata. When the body is erased or used as a symbol to silence its self, knowledge situated within the body is unavailable to the self, or if discovered, ridiculed as base or profane. Bodily knowledge is restricted by not only linguistic patterns of western thought, but also through the view that the body is an entity incapable of literacy. This has particular implications for women as they have been historically and culturally connected to conceptualizations of the body as an emotional, unruly, and profane entity. In western episteme, all valid knowledge and creation of knowledge occurs in the Mind. Being connected to or ruled by the body, then, would render one incapable of intellectual pursuits, i.e. the creation of knowledge. Within this paradigm, those who are ruled by the body are illiterate. In problemitizing the cultural and historical concepts and practices of the body and literacy, Carolyn Marvin writes: Though literacy cannot be taught or practiced without bodies, bodies have rarely been considered as a relevant dimension of literacy theory. That bodies are thought to be irrelevant to literacy, or capable of corrupting it, is a useful fiction. In fact, bodies are displayed or concealed at different levels in literate practice to accomplish social work, namely to locate their owners in a social and moral order. A mark of literate competence is skill in disguising or erasing the contribution of one's own body to the process of textual production and practice. A mark of literate power is the freedom to command other bodies for textual display or concealment, as the occasion warrants (129). Here we see that displaying or concealing the body in and from knowledge construction is viewed traditionally as an act of literacy as well as an act of power over the owners of those concealed bodies. As in Phelen's argument, the pregnant woman's body is concealed while the body of the fetus is displayed. If the woman's body is recognized, it is revealed as corrupting the body of the fetus, clearly marking who holds the literate power of representation in defining reproductive "rights." Similarly in Butler's argument, Rodney King's body is displayed in video not as evidence of white racism, but as a cultural command/lesson on white supremacy taught to us by those who hold literate power. The beating is justified by the marking of his body as the corporeal embodiment of violence against whites. Marvin continues, "The body filtered through literacy and positioned in terms of it is a social sorting device, part of a system for creating, perpetrating, and justifying the allocation of honor, purity, and power as social resources." Through Phelen's and Butler's arguments, then, female bodies and bodies with color are used as social sorting devices by justifying them as bodies without honor, purity, and certainly without power. The body of the woman as meaning-making agent is concealed. What is revealed to her and her culture is the sexually assaulted body as a site of illiteracy. Any claims made from this site are thus viewed as illiterate, easily dismissed or denied. Although a woman's body is the site upon which sexual violence occurs, a woman and her culture are denied access to its experience and knowledge; rather, a woman's body is coopted by a language system which (re)presents the assaulted female body as illiterate and powerless. If knowledge is power, then those who define what knowledge is and where it is found are the power holders. In their chapter, "Presence of Mind in the Absence of Body," Linda Brodkey and Michelle Fine find further evidence of women separating their self from their body for the purpose of being viewed as literate and competent. Brodkey and Fine surveyed female graduate students about sexual harassment in academe. They concentrate specifically on the ways in which the women positioned themselves as narrators of the harassing events. Brodkey and Fine write, "The narrative positions women assign themselves suggests that they understand their own survival to depend on the ability to cleave their minds from their bodies. This mind/body split reproduces in each of them the very cultural ideology that has historically been used to distinguish men from women and justify gender oppression" (81). In seeking to conceptualize themselves as intelligent, competent agents, the women spoke rarely of the pain and anguish related to their harassed bodies and instead concentrated on explaining the supposed motivations of the perpetrators. Again, the narrative focus, the primary experiential focus is on the male perpetrator, what he did and why he did it. Certainly the motivations of the perpetrator need processing, however it becomes problematic when these are the primary concerns at the expense of processing one's own experience. Here the master's linguistic tools emphasize and empathize the male experience of female oppression. "We see each woman student as offering to pay an exorbitant, not to mention impossible, price for the coherent self represented in her narrative. In exchange for her mind, she leaves her body to science" (Brodkey and Fine, 82). The linguistic constructs of victim and survivor in discursive acts of sexual assault not only separate her from, but pit a woman against her body as she tries to deny it in the hopes of being seen as competent and intelligent. However, the linguistic double bind is that woman is restricted to the dualistic pairings with the body, earth, nature, impure notions of sensuality. She is asked to deny her body when telling her experience, then told she is nothing more than her body. The concealment or representation of her body is used to tell a man's story and/or as a relagative social stratifying agent. How can a woman tell her story when her body is not present, presented in a phallocentric framework, or represented as illiterate? These discursive practices disallow a woman narrative agency, as well as denying and/or dismissing the intimacy and diversity of sexual violence experiences, thereby disallowing a complex and problemitized understanding of sexual violence to a woman and her culture. Liberatory Epistemology: (Re)locating Narrative Agency in the Body In response to a phallocentric dislocation of a woman's body and story, I offer the concept of a liberatory epistemology. I would define this term as a liberation of ways of knowing, of exploring how we know what we know, the discovery of a "room [body] of one's own," a site where a woman might tell a story of sexual violence where she - her body - is the locus of meaning for her experience. A liberatory epistemology is similar to bell hooks' concept of a liberatory pedagogy where as teachers and learners we seek to decolonize our minds from western white male normative methods of the nature of knowledge and knowledge construction (hooks 1990). We explore the decolonized body and cultures as sites of knowledge. These are places where difference is expected and explored, where linguistic categories and frames of reference are mutable. When addressing liberatory ways of knowing, Bettina Aptheker writes: It is to recognize a woman's strategies for coping, surviving, shaping, and changing the parameters of their existence on their own terms, and not in contrast to predominantly male strategies as if these were the natural, normative, or correct models. To do this is to begin to designate the categories of analysis that mark women's knowledge of the world, women's interpretation of events, women's standpoint. If this designation can be achieved it will allow for a different kind of philosophical space, for an ordering of woman's experience as knowledge, for an emancipatory vision rooted in our own grounds (1989; 14-15) Aptheker locates women as the prime narrators of their experience and views that narrative as knowledge. "A different kind of philosophical space" can allow for the intimacy and diversity of experience so desperately absent in restrictive discursive categories like victim and survivor. In decolonizing our minds from normative ways of knowing and "universal" discursive acts, literacy can be (re)located within the body. This (re)location could assist a woman in thinking and speaking from a bodily locus of meaning where her thoughts are liberated from phallocentric dualistic notions of cultural truths. The complexities of experience and identity are revealed through bodily dialogic engagement with self and culture. The culturally symbolic form of the body is motile and dynamic and seen as an expression rather than repression of knowledge and identity. This body is not dislocated or erased from her thoughts; rather it is seen as a site where diverse and intimate truths are inscribed within, upon, and around it. Within the (re)location of a woman's body as meaning making agent, a liberatory epistemology includes the actual telling of the experience as a performative liberatory act. The telling of her own story from a perspective that represents her body as the locus of meaning for her own reality empowers the teller by allowing her to hear and see herself as constative and "literate," possessing agency and authority in the defining and telling of her experience. Theorists in performance studies and oral narrative theory have clearly argued the self-reflexive and self-definitional power of the performance of personal oral narratives (Corey 1993; Langellier 1989, 1986; The Personal Narratives Group 1989; Peterson 1987; Minister 1987). In their article, "(En)Gendered (and Endangered) Subjects: Writing, Reading, Performing, and Theorizing Feminist Criticism," Kay Ellen Capo and Darlene M. Hantzis write: Feminist criticism is itself a performance which resituates self and world. Using performance to understand the culturally regulated "self," feminist critical theory reveals and challenges that regulation and becomes an instrument of transformation. . . .The feminist method of shattering language and making space opens up a rich site for articulating oppression (252-253). Judith Butler's theory of gender construction through performance has done much to articulate and advance theories of identity as a gendered performance. Conceptualizing women as victim or survivor of sexual violence also contributes to what Butler refers to as the "reified status" of gender (1990:271). If gender is indeed constituted through cultural performances of normalized gender, then framing women's personal narratives as stories of victimization or survival contributes to a stagnant view of gender, one which erases or phallocentrically displays women's bodies, perpetuating rather than challenging patriarchal definitions of gender. Reconceptualizing a woman as narrator of her own bodily experience is evident in viewing the body as an inscribed text of experience. When articulating the politics of "writing (the) body" Dallory applies ecriture feminine, which she defines as a deconstmction of phallic organizations of sexuality. Ecriture feminine views the body as a text upon and within which a woman constructs a discourse of "multiple otherness," an alternate way to view bodily knowledge which displaces dualistic oppositional structures of western thought and patriarchy. Dallory argues, "Writing the body, then, is both constative and performative. It signifies those bodily territories that have been kept under seal; it figures the body" (59). In this sense, the narrating of rape becomes a performed bodily inscribed text, an autobiographical text written on and in the soft, strong, moist and colorful folds and recesses of her body. Here, a woman is the doer, the writer, the focus of the experience. Her body is the diary, the journal recording the intimacy and particularity of her experience. Dallory continues, The characteristics of women's writing are, therefore, based on the significations of a woman's body: the otherness within the self in pregnancy; the two lips of the labia, both one yet another, signify woman's openness to otherness in writing. . . . Writing the body is writing a new text - not with a phallic pen - new inscriptions of woman's body separate from and undermining the phallocentric coding of women's body that produces the censure, erasure, repression of woman's . . . alterite (59). This relocated bodily agency in writing/telling/performing allows the narrative to change, move, clarify as the woman continues to construct more meaning of the experience by internally dialoging with her body. This performative view of liberating epistemology by (re)locating and (re)presenting sexual violence narratives frees the experiences from the shackles of phallocentric linguistic limitations, positioning women as the writers/narrators of their own bodily texts, texts that go far beyond survival or victimization. It foregrounds differences, intimacy, agency, the multivocality of women, women's bodies, and their complex diverse experiences with sexual violence. Performing/telling one's story from that room (body) of one's own provides the opportunity for epistemological understanding for the teller. It provides cultures with a problemitized dynamic understanding of sexual violence. Moreover, we cannot have the body without the word; we cannot construct a (re)located body without a (dis)placed language. When I (re)member my body being dragged down the riverbank I can only know and feel what happened to my body, not in relation to his, but in relation to my own selfhood. As performance theorist Elizabeth Bell argues, this kind of performance process truly is "women's work." Bell writes, "Locating the power of performance in the performer is an historically, culturally, and aesthetically frightening strategy, for the excesses of performer as/is woman are abundant, dangerous, and subversive" (370). I look forward to a time and space where women with differing experiences of sexual assault can speak to one another from beyond a language that does not ask them to be divisive with one another and dismissive or exclusionary of their bodily knowledge. It is a space and time where circles of women can speak an intimate miread of diverse experiences originating from their own bodies and resulting in a remaking of our own languages. It is a reconceptualization of the form and function of a woman's body, her story, her reality bell hooks speaks to "those of us who dare to desire differently." She writes: It is also about transforming the image, creating alternatives, asking ourselves questions about what types of images subvert, pose critical alternatives, and transform our worldviews and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad. Making a space for the transgressive image, the outlaw rebel vision, is essential to any effort to create a context for transformation (4). References Aptheker, Bettina. Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Everyday Experience. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Bell, Elizabeth. "Performance Studies as Women's Work: Historical Sights/Sites/Citations from the Margin." Text and Performance Quarterly 13 (1993): 350-374. Brodkey, Linda and Michelle Fine. "Presence of Mind in the Absence of Body." Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research. ed. Michelle Fine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Butler, Judith. "Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia." Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising. ed. Robert Gooding-Williams. New York: Routledge, 1993. Cameron, Deborah. The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1990. Capo, Kay Ellen and Darlene M. Hantzis. "(En)Gendered (and Endangered) Subjects: Writing, Reading, Performing, and Theorizing Feminist Criticism." Text and Performance Quarterly 11 (1991): 249-266. Carlin, Phylis Scott. "Performance of Verbal Art: Expanding Conceptual and Curricular Territory." Renewal and Revision: The Future Of Interpretation. ed Ted Colson. Denton: NB Omega, 1986. Corey, Fredrick C., ed. HIV EDUCATION: Performing Personal Narratives. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1993. Dallery, Arleen B. "The Politics of Writing (the) Body: Ecriture Feminine." Gender/ Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. eds. Alison M. Jaggat and Susan R. Bordo. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End, 1992. -----, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End, 1990. Langellier, Kristin M. "Personal Narratives and Performance." Renewal and Revision: The Future of Interpretation. ed. Ted Colson. Denton: NB Omega, 1986. -----, Kristin M. "Personal Narratives: Perspectives on Theory and Research." Text and Performance Quarterly 9 (1989). Marvin, Carolyn. "The Body of the Text: Literacy's Corporeal Constant." Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 129-149. Minister, Kristina. "The Scheherazade Solotion: Dialogic Self-Empowerment and Cultural Interrogation." Paper presented at the Speech Communication Association Convention, 1987. Personal Narratives Group, The Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Peterson, Eric E. "The Stories of Pregnancy: On Interpretation of Small Group Cultures." Communication Quarterly 35 (1987). Phelen, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Wilshire, Donna. "The Uses of Myth, Image, and the Female Body in Revisioning Knowledge." Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, eds Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. Tami Spry is an assistant professor in the Department of Speech Communication at St. Cloud State U. in St. Cloud, MN.