Weekly Ethical Reflection |
8 March to 15 March
Telling stories of incest and abuse
As an anti-racist, anti-oppression feminist, I constantly advocate for the telling of seemingly unspeakable horrors, in an effort to identify, challenge and eradicate myriad forms of oppression. In my research I am striving to break silences, to hear and to tell, previously unspoken stories in the lives of women - stories that are often deemed too 'difficult' to share. As I work with the stories shared by women survivors of incest I constantly struggle to merge the 'difficult knowledge' provided by my participants with my own story as an incest survivor who recalled episodes of abuse through kinaesthetic 'body' memories.
It was in the moments of sheer terror when I began to recall the abuse I experienced, that I began literally and figuratively, to re-member my body, to gently gather my fragmented feelings; my scattered senses; my dissociated demons. As I continue to do so, I write for wholeness and health, bearing witness publicly and personally to the political power to be gained in presenting women's narratives - mine, theirs, ours. By sharing these narratives of abuse I want, psychologically, ethically and politically to challenge the power of perpetrators whose acts of violence render abused women scared, submissive and silent.
Brenda Blondeau, York University Toronto, Canada