Screaming the silence: Experience, agency and transformation in the lives of American women childhood sexual abuse survivors

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of a support group for women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The study examines childhood sexual abuse and its treatment as culturally situated and historically located. Through the recording, transcription, and analysis of narratives and group interaction, this research explores the processes by which women survivors individually and collectively (within groups) shape their traumatic experience into meaning. I worked collaboratively with a feminist therapist and six women survivors who theorized their experiences and reflected on their healing processes in the group setting. This transdisciplinary study brings together theories and approaches of phenomenological medical anthropology, reflexive ethnography, applied folklore and feminist theory. Clinical case studies have dominated past scholarly literature on childhood sexual abuse yet these studies have seldom accounted for culture, agency, or power difference in the research setting. The goal of this ethnographic study is to assert a new authoritative knowledge of childhood sexual abuse based on survivors' accounts of their own experience.; This research explores the support group as an empowering discursive setting. By participating in the group process, survivors may transcend an oppressing and dominating traumatic experience, transform their identities, and individually and collectively empower themselves. The silence surrounding child sexual abuse affects not only individual survivors but also research in the field, cultural attitudes, and representations of survivors. Thus, when survivors speak of what happened to them, even in the safety of a support group, they challenge and transgress against societal norms and the authoritative injunctions of their perpetrators. In the women's expressions of their experience they formulate and negotiate an identity that they themselves have chosen---one that is contingent on survival rather than on victimization. Their narratives describe transforming suffering into unique self-hood.; This dissertation explores the intellectual history of research on the subject of child sexual abuse, the psychological and cultural implications of telling abuse narratives in a support group context, the relationship between narrative telling and psychological healing, and survivors' own definitions of health and perspectives on treatment.