post-traumatic narratives

February 20, 2020 11:25 AM

"One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different temporalities: it seems we are interested in perpetrators’ futures and victims’ pasts. One result is that we don’t have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim’s life after the painful past has been excavated, even when our shared language gestures toward the future, as the term “survivor” does. What I have found myself hungering for, in short, is literature that stretches past legal testimonies and sentimental appeals toward what, for lack of a better phrase, I’m calling post-traumatic futurity. What is the situation of survivors who saw the injury proven and exposed—and maybe even punished—and saw, also, that nothing much changed? I am curious about their vision of things. I want to know how they think things should be." Lili Loofbourow writes for the New York Review of Books on fiction, non-fiction and sexual assault.

Lili Loofbourow in Slate: "Journalism Won’t Solve #MeToo. Neither Will the Courts. Enter: Fiction."

To the extent that Farrow, Twohey, and Kantor’s books function as victory laps, the catharsis they offer seems premature. Weinstein has been apprehended, a jury is deliberating on two allegations of rape against him, but he has not been formally pronounced guilty. That distinction matters. There’s a strong perception that if even he gets off, then the failure of Me Too to curb malfeasance of this kind will have been absolute. The perception is understandable, but it’s not the only way to measure progress. Yes, we should keep tabs on what happens to Harvey Weinstein. But if we are striving for a better shared understanding of how power dynamics and norms brought us to this sorry point (or simply wondering whether Me Too has moved us closer together or further apart), there’s terrain outside the courtroom that’s worth exploring.

posted by ChuraChura (4 comments total)

Fantastic insights, as always from Loofbourow. From the Slate piece:

We all have the potential to be any one of the characters in this story (victim, perpetrator, enabler, interjector), and therefore, we need to understand it better. We’re in a remedial stage when it comes to this stuff. Weinstein isn’t a monster; he’s an entirely predictable product of the culture we share with him. We were taught for so long that egregious misconduct was normal that we have no tools with which to really process the fact that it isn’t and wasn’t, and that society’s failure to recognize that is a failure we might share. How much have we excused and enabled? How much have we flinched at but hand-waved away as “company culture”? These aren’t easy questions! What we need right now, above all, is practice: practice talking and thinking through these problems together without troubling actual human beings with our messy, intemperate, and uninformed verdicts.

posted by PhineasGage at 11:48 AM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm right now reading You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South in the New Yorker. (cw: plenty). It's fiction. It's about a woman dealing with being raped on a date and working as a content moderator for a Facebook-like company. I see her collection of short stories is coming out or is already out and I've put it on hold at the library.
posted by stevil at 12:13 PM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

I wrote this exact novel last year, and it came out to silence. People always say thus and so doesn't exist. It exists. It's just that voices like these don't get the big marketing budgets and promotion and attention in the NYT as the Established Pain Narratives do.

And yes. I'm bitter.
posted by headspace at 12:19 PM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Weinstein isn’t a monster; he’s an entirely predictable product of the culture we share with him.

You can both be a monster and also enabled by your shitty monster-enabling culture. If our culture somehow "made" monsters, we would have far more Weinsteins. We have many abusers, so I'm not arguing that we don't. I'm just saying, we're all exposed to this culture and the majority of us don't become a Weinstein.
posted by erattacorrige at 4:16 PM on February 20, 2020 [5 favorites]