TY - JOUR

T1 - Missed Feelings

T2 - Sexual Violence and the Affective Mediation of Harm

AU - Kohpeiß, Henrike

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - ‘Missed Feelings’ addresses the complex repercussions of traumatic experience Lauren Berlant lays out in their article “Structures of Unfeeling” (2015). The article helps to trace the unexpected mediations of injury into affect and discusses the role of victimhood from sexual assault in patriarchal societies. With regard to a case of systemic sexual abuse in Germany, I argue that unfeeling is an essential element of sexual violence. Berlant’s theoretical account of life-sustaining attachments and affect as mediation makes the dialectic of harm and lack of feeling understandable. Unfeeling in the form of social indifference enables gendered violence to occur and to continue uninterrupted, while at the same time, unfeeling is a tool used by survivors in order to be able to live with their experience of assault while often it remains legally and socially unacknowledged. This dynamic of unfeeling explains sexual violence’s subjectifying power: the expectation of not being seen as a credible victim forces survivors to search for other affective mediations of their reality. Therefore, self-protection in a patriarchal world might look risky, idiosyncratic and often unexpected.

AB - ‘Missed Feelings’ addresses the complex repercussions of traumatic experience Lauren Berlant lays out in their article “Structures of Unfeeling” (2015). The article helps to trace the unexpected mediations of injury into affect and discusses the role of victimhood from sexual assault in patriarchal societies. With regard to a case of systemic sexual abuse in Germany, I argue that unfeeling is an essential element of sexual violence. Berlant’s theoretical account of life-sustaining attachments and affect as mediation makes the dialectic of harm and lack of feeling understandable. Unfeeling in the form of social indifference enables gendered violence to occur and to continue uninterrupted, while at the same time, unfeeling is a tool used by survivors in order to be able to live with their experience of assault while often it remains legally and socially unacknowledged. This dynamic of unfeeling explains sexual violence’s subjectifying power: the expectation of not being seen as a credible victim forces survivors to search for other affective mediations of their reality. Therefore, self-protection in a patriarchal world might look risky, idiosyncratic and often unexpected.

U2 - 10.70064/mt.v7i2.579

DO - 10.70064/mt.v7i2.579

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 7

SP - 225

EP - 244

JO - Media Theory

JF - Media Theory

SN - 2557-826X

IS - 2

ER -