Graduation Year
2010
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.A.
Degree Granting Department
Women’s Studies
Major Professor
Gurleen Grewal, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Marilyn Myerson, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Laura Runge, Ph.D.
Keywords
Disidentification, Sexual trauma, Rape recovery, Autoethnography, Community
Abstract
This work explores: liberatory possibilities and limitations of narrative in healing from rape; the work and meanings of forgiveness, specifically seeking a complex definition of forgiveness drawing on spiritual, feminist, complexity, and phenomenological philosophies; and the relationships between narrative processes and forgiveness. I use an autoethnographic approach, offering my story of rape and healing in the aftermath. I attend to the physicality of the narrative, and to the way in which memory resides in the body, thus creating an embodied text. I examine current models of rape recovery, and the terms used by organizations, practitioners, and authors of rape narratives to frame the recovery process, contending that current models and the language of recovery fails to recognize the dynamic and non-linear trajectory of healing. I return to my own process of forgiveness, which is illustrative of the unpredictable event of forgiveness, which grows from the dissolution of self and other.
Scholar Commons Citation
Curry, Heather, "Beyond Survival: An Exploration of Narrative Healing and Forgiveness in Healing from Rape" (2010). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/3559
