ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the emergence of the “public survivor” as a key figure in cultural debates and politics around sexual violence. It suggests a definition of a public survivor as someone who uses their experience of sexual violence to claim the authority to speak publicly and traces this figure in relation to histories of mediatisation and co-optation of feminism since the 1980s. I argue that, particularly from the 1980s onwards, these public interventions, largely from otherwise unknown women, have played a significant role in shaping public discourses around survivors and sexual violence more generally.
I argue that while, overall, these narratives have helped to construct more overtly “pro-survivor” or less “victim-blaming” public responses, these attitudes have not extended to all survivors or all narratives.
Individual public narratives that achieve recognition tend to feature white women able to mobilise narratives of blamelessness in response to stranger rape. In considering the absences within this genre I ask how and why some narratives continue to be less tellable within the public sphere. Additionally, survivor memoirs, and the survivors who author them, have a complicated relationship with feminist politics more broadly. There are questions about the individual, mediatised or even neoliberal framework engaged in by public survivors, while many do not explicitly align themselves with feminist politics as they understand it. Overall, public survivors offer insight into the complexity of media and cultural politics in relation to sexual violence.
