Palimpsests of Sexuality and Intimate Violence: Turning-Points as Transformative Scripts for Intervention

Abstract

In this article, we explore transdisciplinary understandings of scripts as transformative interventions. Script refers, on the one hand, to cognitive, routinized behavioural patterns; on the other hand, it is a multilayered process of enacting, interpreting, and rewriting interaction within a specific context. The metaphor of the palimpsest, embodying and provoking interdisciplinary encounters, links the various layers of practised and narrated scripts. The interrelation of the scripts of the palimpsest is marked by inextricability as they use the same space and create an illusionary intimacy. We develop our ideas about script as intervention, reflecting on scripts of violence and sexual experience. We make use of the psychoanalytic term “cryptic incorporation”. Cryptic incorporation entails the idea of an experience psychically “swallowed whole” by the subject and therefore not accessible to conscious reflection, once incorporated.

Our methodological readings are both empirical and fictional. The empirical example is based on an interview with one respondent, who has experienced intimate violence during the course of her life. The autobiographical text of Shedding, written in 1975 by the Swiss author Verena Stefan, is an example of fiction. Both texts engage in the inextricability of vulnerability and intimacy. Analysing these narratives, we pay special attention to “turning-points”. As turning-points represent decisive changes within evolving life-stories, they are read as palimpsestuous scripts of a transformative process. Thus, we focus on the human ability to change scripts, to rewrite biographical events. We look for a productive entanglement of our scientific writing, understanding the writing process itself as a palimpsestuous layer of script as intervention.

Notes

¹ The three authors met as GEXcel (Centre of Gender Excellence) research fellows at the University of Linköping (2009). We would like to thank GEXcel for providing the opportunity to engage in a scientific trialogue; with special thanks to Nina Lykke for initiating our discussion on “script as intervention” and Cecilia Åsberg for encouraging us with our ideas. Furthermore, many thanks to Margaret Bridges for her comments.

² In a discussion on Freud, Dillon (2007) points to the fact that even if Freud did refer to the palimpsest as a model (he was using it in order to describe the superimposed structure of the meanings of dreams), his model of the Mystic Writing-Pad has much more in common with the palimpsest (see Dillon 2007: 30–33).

³ The interview study was funded a research grant from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (FAS).

⁴ The German women's movement apparently placed more emphasis on women's differences from men than its Anglo-American counterpart. See a detailed discussion on this topic by Tobe Levin with regard to Shedding (Levin 1994: 156–158).

⁵ At the same time she makes it clear in the afterword that the text is a product of collective reflection: she was an active member of a women's circle, which wrote Brot & Rosen: Frauenhandbuch Nr. 1, the German equivalent to Our Bodies, Ourselves. These women discussed and corrected the text and supported its publication. In that sense, the authenticity articulated within Shedding is the product of a collective story (see Richardson 1990: 25).