"What to do when you're raped": Indigenous women critiquing and coping through a rhetoric of survivance

Abstract

Native women and girls suffer sexual violence at the highest rate of any demographic in the United States—primarily perpetrated by non-Native assailants. In this essay, we explore how dominant Euro-American discourses regarding trauma, sexual violence, and indigenous peoples complicate this epidemic. These discourses individualize trauma, assign it an unrealistic linear timeline that presupposes a stable subject position, and ignore the experiences of women of color. Such rhetoric renders Native bodies as disposable and disguises structural oppression by blaming women for the sexual violence committed against them. Ultimately, we argue that rhetoric of survivance, which combines survival, endurance, and resistance to assert Native presence over historical absence and perceived oblivion, creates a space in which communities disproportionately affected by violence can simultaneously practice collective coping methods while also challenging dominant discourses. To advance this argument we conduct a rhetorical analysis of the illustrated handbook, What to Do When You’re Raped: An ABC Handbook for Native Girls, which was produced by a Native American women’s organization to address sexual violence. We explore how four central characteristics of survivance—infinitive temporality, storytelling, collective agency, and structural critique—assert Native presence and make visible the problem of sexual violence against Native women.

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Publication Date

1-3-2020

Publication Title

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Department

Creative Writing

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1706189

Keywords

Native American, Sexual violence, Trauma, Survivance, Settler colonialism

Language

English

Format

text

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS