ABSTRACT
The chapter first reviews the traditional healing processes after rape, based on the psychological understanding of trauma, which stresses the importance of “speaking out” to allow successful recovery and breaking the social stigmas related to sexual violence. In this way, dealing with trauma relies mostly on survivors’ individual strength of “disclosure.” Bringing to the front the paradigms of stigma power that draws on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power instead of Goffman’s limited theoretical legacy on stigma, the author proposes to recognize how stigma is exercised today to deliberately keep certain historical events silenced, unpunished, and eventually denied. In the second part, the chapter connects the stigma with the concept of narrated silence to argue how supposedly unique survivors’ responses empowered the understanding of abusive sexuality. By giving examples of scholarly monographs, novels, and other cultural productions, the chapter illustrates the standardized formats of voicing, discussing, and thinking the silence after the war rape. Such continuum of narrated silences reduces survivors to speechless and voiceless spectacles of victimization for others. This contributes to the preservation of historic legacies and normalization of gender-based violence, abuse, and nonconsensual sexual intercourse also among postwar generations.
