Season 2, Episode 6: Danielle Tumminio-Hansen - Part 1

Hagar's Voice

Thank you so much Danielle, for your time, insight, expertise, and generosity in today’s episode. We join you in your commitment to increase knowledge about rape and sexual violation and provide language so people can name sexual violation for what it is.

This is the link to Danielle’s website which has a link to her book, “Speaking About Rape: The Limits of Language in Sexual Violations.”

https://www.danielletumminiohansen.com/

Listed below are the quotes from Danielle’s book which were read and discussed in this episode:

"What does it take to keep a person from naming her own sexual violation for what it is?"

"I recall a session with my own therapist where I was going to tell her about what had happened to me, but when it came time for me to actually explain, I found that I didn't have words to do it. I verbally froze, unable to speak, unable to say words like "rape" or "sexual assault" or even to offer a description of what had occurred. What I could do, though, was turn to music, the vocabulary of my childhood. I took out a compact disc player and turned on Samuel Barber's Agnus Dei, a devastating choral composition that begins as quietly as it is possible for singers to perform - pianissimo - and then escalates in tone and tension into a kind of collective vocal suffering. And what a singer seems to communicate in the performance of it is the same thing I was feeling: a profound sense of aloneness, of hopelessness, of fear. It said what I needed to say better than any narrative could have. My therapist seemed to understand, and after that, I found that I was able to talk about my experiences a little more freely."

"If you don't see yourself included in the language, then what is there to say? Because those who survived harm live within linguistic discourses, they may also self-gaslight, becoming unable to categorize harm that they might have named had they been exposed to different epistemic constructions of it, by which I mean that they might have thought differently about their own experiences if they had been exposed to different ways of constructing the knowledge related to it."

"Victimized individuals may, therefore, first imagine themselves as co-writers or, at least, ghost writers who had at least some agency or subjectivity in the encounter to maintain a sense of control or a sense of protection, or because they genuinely believe that's the most accurate representation of the event. Put more colloquially, they are prone to blame themselves. And while psychologists often label this as denial, I'm not sure it's always as simple as that - sometimes people are wrestling with the significance of events using competing ways of knowing (or epistemologies), which resolves into cognitive dissonance and the feeling that one is assembling a puzzle, the but the events that make up the pieces do not fit together to create a coherent picture. That's not denial. That's turmoil."