Pivoting to a new blog with a new purpose
So hey, the following is another repost from Facebook (with some minor edits and links added in), and I’m using it to sorta kinda announce that I won’t be updating tomemyxmen.tumblr.com anymore. Instead, all new posts will go on my new blog, sertan-saral.tumblr.com. I haven’t really been updating tomemyxmen with original posts for a while, and the purpose of my new blog is to guide my research as I complete my PhD (I’m 8 months in as of this month). Expect a lot of posts on feminism, militarism and representation (political, pop culture, etc.). I won’t refrain from opening up about personal subjects in the new blog as I have here before, and below; the only difference is that what I put up will be more focussed.
Thanks for following. :)
Some of you may recall that I published a post about something personal last November; that I’m a survivor of child sexual abuse and have PTSD. I hate recaps, but quickly, my intention then was to write publicly about my experiences in recovery (something ongoing) and the takeaway was meant to be positive as well as a personal acknowledgement that this trauma no longer defined my life.
NB: Ideally, anyone in my circumstance should (if they choose) be able to be upfront about these things regardless of how far along they’ve come in their recovery, even if it’s their first step in that direction.
In that post, I mentioned a number of things which helped me in my journey but today I want expand on one of those: feminism. To illustrate the impact of feminist writing, I need to first describe for you what it’s like for me to experience a trigger nowadays. You know, as a point of reference and because I just don’t think there’s enough horrible shit to read out there (I kid).
As in my previous post on this subject, please consider the above a content/trigger warning. But also as before, this is ultimately a positive story.
There’s an episode of Outlander devoted almost entirely (at least it felt like it was entirely) to a rape scene between two men. The details don’t matter, suffice to say that the show doesn’t hold back, visually, psychologically or emotionally. It’s devastating to watch. Not gratuitous, though, I don’t think (could be wrong). I felt it very effectively and clearly demonstrated that rape is about power, not sexual pleasure or desire (a simple enough test most depictions of rape fail to pass, including this show in instances where the target of a rapist is female).
The scene was intensely triggering but I saw an opportunity to observe what I had experienced watching it:
The first thing I notice is my heavy, loud breathing, a weight being pressed against my chest. Then, maybe at the same time but hard to tell, three things: tension in my forearms, usually because my hands are squeezing something, in this case the armrests of my chair; a burning sensation like lactic acid all across my shoulders, shoulder blades and back of my neck; slight nausea; and a dampness on my forehead and along my arms. I’m actually feeling a mild version of all of that as I write this! (Hooray!)
It’s cool, it didn’t last; I’m okay. :)
Once that initial intense phase is over, and it lasts about 1 or 2 hours at the most now, the next thing I feel is a deep melancholy and sense of hopelessness. The hopelessness in particular is compounded by my own inability to rouse myself out of it. (The brain is truly a fucked thing sometimes.) This lasts about 24 to 48 hours, longer if I don’t talk to anyone about it and just ride it out on my own, which I’d strongly advise against and which I don’t do anymore. Then things settle back into place and I’m my current usual self.
There was a time, however, where another symptom of my trauma stretched out all of what I described above across days, weeks, often months, not helped at all obviously by the occurrence of additional triggers like some bloody torch relay horror show: shame.
Intellectually, I knew I had nothing to be ashamed of. Shame implies action. For a person to feel shame, conventional wisdom says they did something they’re ashamed of. But I did nothing wrong! This knowledge was exactly zero per cent helpful.
Maybe even negative per cent helpful.
I’m sure I’m generalising but shame for sexual abuse survivors doesn’t come from action, but from being. In my example, it was the feeling and self-perception of being weak and vulnerable (pretty common). My perpetrator was an older kid, someone I looked up to and respected and thought of as a shield against other bullies at school (this was number 4 in a total of 8 schools I attended). Bullying already made me feel weak and my acceptance that my place in the schoolyard status quo was immutable made that feeling worse. My sole defensive strategy was to make friends with the popular kid at school to obscure the target on my back, so the shame I felt was in having that turned into a vulnerability and used against me. I felt like my trauma violently underlined something I had already tacitly accepted to a degree from years of being bullied: that there was something intrinsically wrong with me, like there was a quality about me that invited abuse. And so in a roundabout way, I was to blame. Not for doing, but for being. This is a pretty fucked up thing for anyone to believe and I believed it right up until I was well into my mid-20s.
Trauma-induced shame is a trap. It keeps you inert. That’s the effect of its power. Inertness. You can’t grow. It’s an invisible fortress you live in. You can’t comprehend its shape, how many rooms it has or the arrangement of its hallways. Somebody or something else (the perpetrator, society, culture, patriarchy, the relational in-between-ness of all these things) is the architect, not you. The other power of shame is in how it reinforces, and is reinforced by, every other negative feeling, especially the ones that come from triggers.
And then I encountered feminism.
I was inadvertently introduced to feminism in 2011 by a friend and one of the most brilliant people I know. That introduction produced many other introductions, initially on Tumblr (the user-base of which remains mostly excellent), and then in academia. My research passions were burgeoning. I was interested in leadership and people’s obsession with leaders. I realised later that this was an interest in representation. Later still, representation as studied by intersectional feminist scholars, crystallised almost indirectly by a guest lecturer (A/Prof Megan Mackenzie) for a security studies unit I was doing in my masters degree.
I read Cynthia Enloe and how she connected myth-making to patriarchal nation building. I read Jean Bethke Elshtain, who talked about the “strategic voice”, a deliberately constructed, performative and affective mode of speaking generally embodied by middle aged-to-elderly heterosexual white men, and designed to invite public trust in matters concerning national security (and which, by extension, enabled and reinforced their pathway to power). I read Ayşe Gül Altınay, a Turkish feminist scholar who took these ideas and played with them in the Turkish-militarist context.
I learned about all the work that goes into the mythologising of war and nation-building along gender lines and how much of this was justified by wrongheaded notions of biological sex. I wondered about how much I internalised these justifications over the course of my own life, and how they obscured my sense of where biological sex ended and gendered constructs began.
I learned there was nothing in my being to feel ashamed of.
My research transformed into an endless well of self-reflection I could draw from, though I’ve had to take care in recent months to remind myself not to over-identify with it. The Enloes, Elshtains and Altınays of the world were later joined by the Butlers, Ahmeds and Mackenzies, and in the near future will be joined by the Anzalduas, hookses and Lordeses. These scholars and activists are legion and the fact that their ideas are in constant conversation with one another is incredibly appealing to my sensibilities and sense of growth. They are key to my own survival. They made the fortress visible; every little nook and cranny, even the steel beams behind the brickwork. I realised I could dismantle this thing and build whatever the fuck I wanted out of it. So I did and here we are.
I still have blindspots, and working through these is a matter of seeing my life as a constant work in progress, but feminism gave me clarity. It gave me hope. It gave me possibilities. From feminism, I learned that there were other ways of being. The shame is gone and in its place I feel inspired. Those are pretty big gifts.
Selected further reading:
Books (before you say it, I realise this list is overrepresented by white women; it’s something I’m going to address):
- Bananas, Beaches, and Bases by Cynthia Enloe
- Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth that Women Can’t Fight by Megan Mackenzie
- Bodies that Matter by Judith Butler
- Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone: Sex, Security and Post-Conflict Development by Megan Mackenzie
- Militarism versus Feminism: Writings on Women and War edited by Margaret Kamester and Jo Vellacott
- The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War by Cynthia Enloe
- The Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey by Ayşe Gül Altınay
- Poststructuralism & International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In by Jenny Edkins
- Strange Encounters by Sara Ahmed
- Trauma and the Memory of Politics by Jenny Edkins
- Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory by Clare Hemmings
- Women and War by Jean Bethke Elshtain
Some books I’m going to read in the near future:
- Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua
- Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution by Mona Eltahawy
- Masculinities by Raewyn Connell
- Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
- This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour
- The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love by bell hooks
- … and many more.
And finally, just some Tumblrs for your Tumblrin’:
My name's Sertan. I'm a PhD candidate and a big ol' nerd.