{"title":"Confession, psychology and the shaping of subjectivity through interviews with victims of female-perpetrated sexual violence.","authors":"Sherianne Kramer, Brett Bowman","doi":"10.1057/s41286-021-00117-0","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Female-perpetrated sexual abuse (FSA) is often seen as rare and of little consequence. Confessing to being a victim of FSA is infrequent and often met with incredulity. Identifying as such a victim is thus often a response to an incitement to speak in the mode of confession. Interviews producing the possibility for such confessions were conducted with ten self-identified South African FSA victims and then analysed using a Foucauldian approach. In identifying as victims of FSA the participants drew on psychologised, gendered accounts of damage reflected in trauma, revictimisation, memory loss, the cycle of abuse and deviance. An analysis of these accounts demonstrates how confessional sites, such as the (psychological) interview, anchor victim worthiness in damage so that 'non-normative' victims of violence are able to see themselves in sexual violence discourse as forever compromised subjects whose healing requires rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality, and violence in contemporary South Africa.</p>","PeriodicalId":46273,"journal":{"name":"Subjectivity","volume":"14 1-2","pages":"73-93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8200379/pdf/","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Subjectivity","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-021-00117-0","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Female-perpetrated sexual abuse (FSA) is often seen as rare and of little consequence. Confessing to being a victim of FSA is infrequent and often met with incredulity. Identifying as such a victim is thus often a response to an incitement to speak in the mode of confession. Interviews producing the possibility for such confessions were conducted with ten self-identified South African FSA victims and then analysed using a Foucauldian approach. In identifying as victims of FSA the participants drew on psychologised, gendered accounts of damage reflected in trauma, revictimisation, memory loss, the cycle of abuse and deviance. An analysis of these accounts demonstrates how confessional sites, such as the (psychological) interview, anchor victim worthiness in damage so that 'non-normative' victims of violence are able to see themselves in sexual violence discourse as forever compromised subjects whose healing requires rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality, and violence in contemporary South Africa.
期刊介绍:
Subjectivity is an international, transdisciplinary journal examining the social, cultural, historical and material processes, dynamics and structures of human experience. As topic, problem and resource, notions of subjectivity are relevant to many disciplines, including cultural studies, sociology, social theory, geography, anthropology and psychology. The journal brings together scholars from across the social sciences and the humanities, publishing high-quality theoretical and empirical papers that address the processes by which subjectivities are produced, explore subjectivity as a locus of social change, and examine how emerging subjectivities remake our social worlds.