Sexual Violations and the Question of Experience

This paper explores the complications of naming and interpreting experiences of sexual violation that arise from the complexity of experience and the possibility of a discursive relativism. If our experiences are discursively and historically constituted, even in part, by the happenstance of the cultures we are born into, by what Foucault wonderfully called our historical a priori, how does this alter the epistemic status, and fruitfulness, of experience claims, and the epistemic authority of survivors? I argue that interpretive processes are usefully understood as occurring within a phenomenological context and as a practice of enacting affordances: in this way variability can be explained without obviating the special epistemic status of survivors.