The Promise of Understanding: Sex, Violence, Trauma and the Body

Abstract

Throughout her autobiographically informed article ‘Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-establishing the Self, the anthropologist Roberta Culbertson makes clear the trauma and suffering caused by violence. ‘Violence’, she argues, ‘is always and necessarily about wounding’, ‘pain’ and ‘dissolution’, and it is always about ‘physical harm which is often permanent — even when this is only implied or threatened’ (Culbertson, 1995, pp. 172, 173). Violence, it seems, cannot be lived through or thought about without referencing the body: it is, she argues, ‘the reference point, of all violence, and of all power relationships sustained by violence’ (ibid., p. 172). Indeed, according to Culbertson, violence is only ever really known by and via the body, even if there is a tendency ‘to lose sight of the body’s own recall, its response to threat and pain, and of the ways in which it speaks this pain’ (ibid., p. 170). In a critical sense, then, violence figures as speaking directly to and through the body: a brutal yet intimate language, the truth of which is always understood by the body. Indeed, for Culbertson it is because the victim is forced to experience her body in the way dictated by the perpetrator that she will endure ‘an abiding horror’ (ibid., p. 172). This is a compelling and deeply entrenched way of thinking about violence — for how else might we think about the experience of violence, if not in terms of the body? For surely violence and survival is always ‘about the body’ in someway or another (ibid., p. 178).