Abstract:
This thesis explores and critiques the ways in which testimonies of genocidal
rape, incest and stranger rape, affect and are affected by community surviving practices.
This thesis is written to continue discussions of subjectivity and feminism. This includes
issues of sexual violence and the ethics involved in bearing witness for the individual
survivor and her/his community. Within these critiques I begin to explore what it will
take to create a safe space within practices of surviving. Testimony is a discourse that
helps us better understand sexual violence and practices of surviving sexual violence.
Testimonies confront and challenge what it means to survive and what it means to pick
up the pieces in the aftermath of sexual violence. An art of surviving must recognize a
fundamental need to share experience without suggesting what that shared experience
must be. We are all responsible for sexual violence. We are also responsible for the
burden survivors carry as we call upon her/him to bear witness to the experience of rape.
