A Just Hearing for Survivors: Feminist Activism and Political Listening
Green square with stylised light grey writing & graphics that says Tanya on Political Listening
by Tanya Serisier
When we think of feminist activism around sexual violence, we often think of heroic, individual survivors who have spoken out (like Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford or Gisèle Pelicot). We recognise the bravery of speaking the truth when power institutions like the law, medicine and media have denied the reality of sexual violence, portraying survivors as liars and fantasists, or, as one Conservative columnist described Hill, ‘a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty’. This denial of survivor speech helps to maintain a cultural system where the ‘truth’ of rape is based on a set of rape ‘myths’ that deny the reality of women’s experiences. For this reason, much feminist practice has been dedicated to ‘speaking out’, encouraging survivors to speak truth to power.
The understandable focus on the courage of survivors who speak, however, draws attention away from the importance of public and political listening in feminist politics. Survivor speech becomes politically meaningful because feminists and others come together to constitute ‘listening publics’, insisting survivors be given a just hearing, and that sexual violence be responded to with justice. So, when Anita Hill spoke to American law-makers who largely dismissed her testimony, black feminists led by Kimberlé Crenshaw took out a full page ad in the New York Times asserting their belief in Hill, their refusal to let her go unheard, and their awareness that the refusal to listen to her harmed all black women. As the phrase ‘I believe Anita Hill’ became a rallying cry the act of listening allowed her speech to resonate in new ways. Hill Large collectives similarly gathered to assert their belief in Blasey Ford and Pelicot decades later, insisting that their speech be made meaningful.
Focusing political attention on the politics of listening helps to avoid an individualist politics that leaves survivors isolated and vulnerable in an ‘economy of believability’ that is stacked against them, and leaves them open to excessive scrutiny, including from feminists. Instead, it asks about our collective responsibility to shift politics around sexual violence. In a parallel discussion of the need to shift from individual to collective political responsibility, the feminist abolitionist group Incite! warn against judging individual survivors for calling on the police: ‘The question is not, should she call the police. The questions are, why is that her only option, and can we provide other options that keep her truly safe’. In thinking about survivor speech, the question is not if individual survivor speech is commodified or co-opted, but how we create other options by building listening publics that elicit other kinds of speech and possibilities for justice.
We see this in spaces like consciousness-raising groups where women came together to speak about their experience. But participation in these groups meant spending most of your time listening deeply and using that listening to draw political connections and make collective meaning. We see the same thing in social media movements like #MeToo. While we speak of #MeToo as an outpouring of speech, you can only say ‘me too’ on the basis of listening to others, relating that to your own experience and offering your own voice as also an amplification of listening. As Alison Phipps points out, without collective practices of listening to others, ‘me too’ very quickly becomes ‘me not you’.
If we begin to think of listening as a key political task in fighting sexual violence, then we can also think more critically about what it means. Exhortations to listen to survivors are important, but on their own, leave the practice of listening taken for granted, as if there were only one way of listening and everyone knows what it is and how to do it. Like speech, however, practices of listening must be developed and cultivated. Kate Lacey describes two broad categories of public listening, ‘listening out’ and ‘listening in’. While both are essential for practices of political listening, Lacey argues that the former is often overlooked. While ‘listening in’ is a form of attentiveness to what is already familiar, we need to also listen ‘out for otherness, challenge and discomfort, for those voices that generally do not meet the conditions of audibility or that might challenge what we think we already know’.
We can see both modes of listening in feminist activism. Activism in the 1960s and 1970s engaged in listening out for stories and perspectives of women on sexual violence that had previously been inaudible. However, this listening out was often limited to speech occurring within a white-dominated movement so that many white feminists did not, for instance, listen out for the history of political interventions about sexual violence made by African-American women such as Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells and Recy Taylor who had spoken about the sexual violence as a tool in the racial terror of slavery, Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South respectively. In other words, while feminists learnt to listen out for previously ignored stories of rape, they learnt to listen in to particular types of narratives of sexual violence rather than others.
Exhortations to ‘listen to survivors’ recognise that listening can elicit stories and speech. But we often presume that we know who is and is not a survivor rather than thinking about how our practices of listening shape who we recognise as a survivor to be listened to. We still it easier to listen to and recognise stories that emphasise the binary between an innocent victim and criminal perpetrator and that operate within a logic of exceptionality, where rape is a hideous event that shatters a perfectly good life, and where the solution appears to be simple – to punish the rapist and protect the victim. Our listening practices, feminist or otherwise, do not as readily listen out for narratives of institutional sexual violence or narratives which frame sexual violence as inseparable from the structural violence of colonialism, racism, poverty, or austerity. The lack of listening out for these stories helps to ensure their relative absence from the politics of sexual violence.
Listening in a way that is oriented to justice is a form of political work that is largely unrecognised and under-theorised. Instead of grappling with the complexity of this work, we often think in terms of short-cuts. In recent years, listening has tended to be summarised in the hashtag and political slogan, ‘Believe Women’. While belief is a crucial step, however, it is not sufficient on its own to do the work of listening. It neither reflects the scale of the labour required, nor the relinquishment of power that is part of listening as political practice. It is entirely possible to believe someone without fully engaging the ethical work of listening.
We can see this in a story told by Tarana Burke, founder of the ‘Me Too Movement’, the community organising initiative that preceded the viral hashtag of 2017. She describes the impetus for the organisation as arising from her experience as a youth worker at a camp where young girls were asked to share intimate experiences of their lives, a sharing that almost inevitably included disclosures around sexual violence. At one camp, Burke had become close to a girl named Heaven who approached her following one of the sharing sessions: ‘She had a deep sadness and a yearning for confession that I read immediately. And I wanted no part of it.’ While Burke at first attempted to avoid Heaven, the girl was finally able to talk to her, and began to tell her about being sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend:
I listened until I literally could not take it anymore — which turned out to be less than five minutes. Then, right in the middle of Heaven sharing her pain with me, I cut off this little girl’s story and directed her to another female counselor who I believed could “help her better”.
Burke writes that she ‘will never forget the look on Heaven’s face’ as she ‘tried to tell me what she had endured.’ Burke’s response to Heaven had nothing to do with disbelief. Rather, it highlights the labour, pain and burden that listening can entail, which can simply be too much for an individual listener.
While Burke was unable to respond in the moment, her larger response was to turn this unbearable individual burden into a new collective listening public. Burke’s ‘Me Too’ organisation prioritises ‘empowerment through empathy’, a collective ethos based in the two words, ‘me too’, that she was unable to utter in that moment, but which have gone on to become central to contemporary efforts to build listening publics around sexual violence oriented to justice.
The political work of listening also means recognising listening as a terrain of power. There is, in white-dominated public spheres, what Stoever describes as a ‘sonic color line’ that normalises white practices of listening and limits the cultural space and authority granted to non-white voices and perspectives. This colonial structuring of listening practices exists within feminism as has been pointed to repeatedly by women of colour. Writing about the lack of public attention in Australia to the hundreds of murdered and missing Australian Aboriginal women, Amy McQuire analyses a set of listening practices that rely upon and reinforce the sonic colour line, through blaming Aboriginal women for white Australia’s refusal to hear them: ‘For so long, Aboriginal women have been accused of being complicit in a ‘silence’ surrounding violence against Aboriginal women, while simultaneously being tasked with the responsibility of ‘breaking’ it’. She notes that a failure to listen to Indigenous women as experts about their own situation, is recast as the failure of Indigenous women to overcome their own silencing. Here, McQuire might be seen as engaging in what Stoever describes as ‘decolonial listening’, both enacting and demanding a practice of listening out for and to the perspectives and knowledge of Australia’s First Nations women on their experiences and understandings of the structural violence they face. This kind of listening means, as Rana Jaleel argues, abandoning an understanding of women of colour and other marginalised subjects as essentially the same as white subjects, but simply ‘more’ vulnerable to violence and harm. Instead, it accepts that we need to do work to hear and understand the complex and differential ways sexual and other forms of structural violence affect individuals and communities.
Feminism and sexual violence politics is a space marked by conflicts and disagreements, including among survivors. This commitment to listening becomes more difficult, but more productive, when people do not offer the stories or interpretation of experience that we feel that they should. We often presume that ‘listening to survivors’ as a generic act means supporting certain things like rape law reform or custodial sentences or certain definitions and understandings of the traumatic effects of rape. But there are many people who experience harmful or unwanted sex that they choose not to label as rape or sexual violence, others who believe that their experiences were not traumatic and survivors of violence who do not support solutions focused on the criminal law or punitive forms of justice. If we believe we know the outcomes or consequences of listening before we do it, then we are no longer really listening. As Leigh Gilmore reminds us, genuine listening requires that we recognise something as ‘true without assuming the form it will take or where it will lead’.
I think of this work as a ‘precondition for justice’. That means that political and public listening is a vital part of the practice of building justice. But it is not sufficient. Part of the work of listening is the recognition that it opens up other work: the political work of building justice in response to sexual violence. It is only through a politics of listening that grapples with its complexities and labour that the question of justice can be adequately posed. And the work of political listening will be part of the process of answering that question collectively.
Tanya Serisier is a Professor of Feminist Theory in the School of Social Sciences and Director of BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the cultural politics of sex, sexuality and sexual violence with a particular focus on the impacts of feminist and queer theory and activism. Her book Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics published was published in 201Her next book project arises from her 2023 Leverhulme Fellowship, ‘Surviving Rape in Public: The Affects and Effects of Public Survivors’.