Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

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СКАЧАТЬ a secondary position to women, it creates a hierarchy, in which human value is determined by gender, race, class, position, religion, age, appearance, ethnic background, and physical ability.¹⁵ Thus it promotes the death of jouissance (where the pleasure of one is the pleasure of the other), because diversity is lost and people are rendered as objects.¹⁶ And an object is easier to abuse. Most of all, patriarchy has maintained the subordination of women for five thousand years, through manipulation, violence, exclusion from decision-making groups, and economic deprivation. Patriarchy is an ideology and a practice that is invested in keeping women and minorities immersed in self-hatred and apathy. As great numbers of women have bonded together to assume self-determination and equal rights in the past three decades, there has been a terrible backlash¹⁷—a virtual guerrilla war on women, including higher incidents than ever of rape, incest, battering, control of reproductive rights, pornography,¹⁸ and the feminization of poverty.¹⁹

       Paternalism

      Paternalism is a benign mask worn to keep patriarchal powers in place. When I use this term I mean the patriarchal (religious, psychological, and social) forces that in their micropractices condition women to doubt, distrust, even fear their own and other women’s power. Such conditioning seduces women (and even some men) to be reliant on the direction, support, and authority of men deemed “in charge.”

       Incest

      Almost without realizing what I was doing, I began to use my particular creativity to explore the incest of which (some would say) I was victim, from which (some would say) I survived. ... At this point on my journey, I would say we are much more than victims. Survivors, yes, but always damaged, always scarred, most often with wounds forever raw.²⁰

      Incest is the sexual seduction, molestation, and/or rape of a child by any relative (blood, step, adoptive), trusted care-giver, or friend of the family.²¹ The term victim is used to identify the one who was sexually abused. The term survivor is used by those who prefer to see themselves as having survived sexual victimization. The term I use for parents who were conscious of the abuse but remained silent witnesses is co-offenders.

       Eating Disorders

      I use the term eating disorder to describe what seems to be a universal preoccupation among the nine survivors of incest whom I interviewed—whether they are affected by anorexia, bulimia, extensive dieting, or chronic overeating. When I use the term I am referring to the process whereby a woman develops a distorted relationship to food, her body consciousness, and her weight because of living in a sex-exploitive family and culture where her power and worth are defined along a bodily plane. I see these behaviors as gendered tools used to manage and express the trauma of sexual abuse. I do not use the term eating disorder in the traditional sense (referring to an individual disease) because it categorizes food and weight problems as individual pathologies and deflects attention away from social and traumatic contexts that underlie them.

      I use the term relentless pursuit of thinness interchangeably with eating disorder. When I do so I do not wish to imply that the survivor’s emphasis on slenderness reflects a vain “obsession” with appearance. In fact, throughout I argue that the eating strategies that women develop begin as adaptive solutions to, as well as disguised expressions of, sexual trauma.

       Trauma

      By trauma, I mean a violating experience that has long-term emotional, physical, and/or spiritual consequences that may have immediate or delayed effects. One reason the term trauma is useful conceptually is its association with the diagnostic label Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).²² PTSD is one of the few clinical diagnostic categories that recognizes social problems (such as war or the Holocaust) as partially responsible for the symptoms identified.²³ One perspective on PTSD is that it “adapts well to the feminist assertion that a woman’s symptoms cannot be understood as solely individual, considered outside of her social context, or prevented without significant changes in social conditions.”²⁴ For any woman who develops a distorted relationship to food, to her body, and to weight, introjecting cultural expectations and gender-degrading experiences (including the plethora of media images of women as sexual objects) set the tone for how she relates to her self. Sexual abuse in the family further imprints these cultural messages.

      Psychohistorian Robert Lifton has delineated five key characteristics of trauma:

      1. Trauma leaves an indelible imprint in the form of intense, sometimes repressed, memories that are often death-related. There is no time limit on trauma, and its pain can endure with fresh intensity for a lifetime. There are always residual feelings around the trauma, including anxiety. Sometimes, paradoxically, the behavioral and emotional response to trauma is a mask of invulnerability.

      2. Trauma can generate death guilt or other forms of self-condemnation. The victim tends to blame himself or herself for not having done enough to prevent the trauma or the events leading up to the trauma. There is a sense of failed enactment.

      3. Trauma creates psychic numbing, the diminished capacity to feel, in its victims. Numbing begins as a necessary form of adaptation. Feelings must be closed out as a way to survive the traumatic experience. Later, however, the numbing itself tends to continue and endure as an inappropriate and self-constricting defensive posture.

      4. Trauma profoundly affects human relationships which can become infused with suspicion and vulnerable to disruption. Help or friendship may be perceived as counterfeit nurturance, as insincere and unreliable. Trust in people and one’s general community can be impaired and difficult to recover.

      5. Trauma brings on a struggle with meaning at various levels of existence. One seeks to give inner form to one’s experience. One’s sense of personal continuity—indeed one’s lifeline—has been interrupted, and there is an effort to find new grounding and connectedness for the self.²⁵

      Most survivors feel pursued by a chronic sense of loss, what Lifton calls the survivor’s life of grief.²⁶ A survivor mourns for lost family, lost faith, lost hope, and her former self—who she was prior to the violations. What has been “taken” from her cannot be returned and will not be acknowledged in a culture that refuses to recognize the atrocity. The concept of PTSD has helped bring the inner reality and the outer reality of the survivor together. It is my intention to draw out the gendered nature of PTSD as it manifests itself in the form of food, body, and weight preoccupations for the survivor of incest. I will also expose the religious roots that often give meaning to such traumatic experiences and symptoms among the women interviewed.

       Recovery

      Usually when the term recovery is employed, it is done so in reference to a chemical-addiction therapy based on a disease (medical) model. One who is “recovering” or “in recovery” is thought to be refraining from using her former addictive substance or habit. Such concepts have been psycho-spiritualized and popularized by the human potential movement and, in particular, by Twelve-Step groups of Alcoholics Anonymous and their offspring—Overeaters Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Incest Survivors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and the like.²⁷ By actively using such spirituality groups and “working” the steps, one is said to be “on her way to recovery.” Since incest is not a disease or an addiction one might wonder why the term “recovery” would be used at all. The women interviewed frequently referred to their “healing journey” as their “recovery.” For the sake of this СКАЧАТЬ