Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics

3. Emotional and Spiritual Consequences

Emotional and Spiritual Consequences The way women feel about themselves and their environment is permanently altered by the incidence of intimate assault in their lives. Deciphering the complex nature of this trauma involves naming and analyzing the emotional and spiritual repercussions of intimate violence. Naming the effects helps to break down the perception that the male violence experienced by black women is shameful and should be kept secret. Analysis of the problem signals a refusal to dismiss the anguish caused by male violence as an incomprehensible and irreducible part of women’s ordeal. Since the entire community is morally culpable for the deleterious consequences of male sexual and physical assault on women, women’s anguish is a communal problem. The traumatizing impact of the violence must not be considered the isolated burden of the victim-survivor to deal with, nor seen as a merely private matter between a victim-survivor and her counselor. We all share the responsibility of comprehending the emotional torment of women. By assuming this responsibility we can grasp how we participate in socially constructing this painful phenomenon, and equip ourselves to dismantle its societal reinforcement. There has been considerable critical discussion of the link between gender oppression and the emotional and spiritual impact of intimate violence. In the following chapters, contributions to this discussion by feminists Judith Herman, Lenore Walker, and Marie Fortune will be utilized . These three have created pioneering feminist approaches, offering some of the most comprehensively theorized and relevant material for unraveling the emotional and spiritual impact of intimate violence. Herman has provided an extensive psychological analysis of the problem of father-daughter incest and the trauma of violent assault for its victimsurvivors . Walker is a groundbreaking theorist on the psychological 3 55 impact of battering on women. She developed the Walker Cycle Theory of Violence now commonly used as a model to explain how battering relationships are perpetuated. In brief, the stages are 1) tension building; 2) the acute battering incident; and 3) loving contrition by the batterer. Fortune has been at the forefront in seeking recognition of a myriad issues related to Christian religious faith that arise for women victim-survivors of sexual violence. For black women, racial and gender oppression combine to help shape the emotional and spiritual repercussions of intimate violence. Herman, Walker, and Fortune, along with many white feminist theorists working in the area of violence against women, insufficiently investigate how racial oppression influences the emotional and spiritual consequences of intimate violence. Included in the next chapter is a more specific methodological discussion of how these feminist theorists neglect the issue of racial oppression in their work (even when their stated purpose is to incorporate the social context of women’s lives in their studies of intimate violence). Hence my engagement here of some of this relevant feminist scholarship necessarily involves additional analytical steps, including a critique of their silences and directing attention toward considerations related to racial subjugation. In this way I hope to contribute to the underdeveloped task of theorizing racial dynamics interactively with gendered ones when interpreting the imprint of intimate violence upon the lives of women. Another dimension of this process of racial/gender theorizing is offered in the final section. Using sources that concertedly focus on black women and intimate violence, the method of inquiry in this part of the chapter concentrates on the peculiarly amalgamated nexus of racial/gender dynamics that African-American victim-survivors encounter . As with any life experience, women coping with male sexual and physical assault do not experience racial and gender oppression in an additive or sequential fashion. It is fallacious to suppose that one experiences abuse first as a human being, then as a woman, then as a black person, then as a black woman, then as a lesbian, and so forth. A woman’s responses cannot be correlated to aspects of her social identity on a neat flowchart. Similarly, racial and gender oppression do not shape every instance of abuse with the same degree of intensity. Subjugating social norms infiltrate an individual’s reality in anything but an orderly or standardized manner. To glimpse some portion of this complicated process 56 | Emotional and Spiritual Consequences for victim-survivors, my analysis focuses thematically on invisibility and shame as dominant features of women’s experiences. Layers of Consequences That Converge on Women Invisibility The struggle for visibility occurs in the community’s response to the problem...