Speaking from the black hole: representing the experiences of survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in cultural pedagogies of meaning-making

ABSTRACT

As with any manifestation of intersectional marginalization and oppression impacted by institutionally and culturally complicit mechanisms of silencing, there are many approaches to providing space and conscious awareness building for childhood sexual abuse (CSA) representation. In this article, my approach is to advocate for what I consider affective cultural pedagogies of aesthetic interventions that are able to establish a more effective cultural trauma praxis within western culture’s silencing of CSA. I focus on the modality of poetic inquiry as capable of enhancing embodied awareness through one’s development of a practice that creates and posits meaning through poetry. Applying a feminist and autoethnographic lens of my own positionality as a theorist-survivor-poet and facilitator of expressive arts groups for survivors of trauma and gendered violence, I show how the integration of poetry into normalized modes of knowledge-making and inquiry cultivates individual and collective poetic interventions within established structures of traditionally cognitively dominant, meaning-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma
• childhood sexual abuse
• poetry
• feminism
• autoethnography

Disclosure Statement

The author declares no conflict of interests.

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Iris J. Gildea

Dr. Iris J. Gildea is an Associate Professor in the Teaching Stream at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. Teaching primarily in the Book and Media Studies Program, her research interests include trauma theory, arts-based pedagogy and research, media studies, hermeneutics and feminism. She is also an Expressive Arts Therapy Facilitator and offers community workshops for survivors of trauma. E-mail: [email protected]