Danielle Tumminio Hansen was a college student when an experience of sexual violation altered the track of her life. She had no words for it then. She couldn't scream when it happened. She couldn't talk about it later. Was it rape? Who says what a rape is? How do they say it? Decades later, she has found the words. Tumminio Hansen, now an assistant professor of Practical Theology and Spiritual Care at Emory's Candler School of Theology, addresses the painful subject in all its dimensions. She looks at legal language, the diagnostic manual used by mental health physicians, the Bible, social media, and more to explore how victims who lack the vocabulary to express their experience suffer in their voicelessness.
PW talks with Hansen about why she has written Speaking of Rape: The Limits of Language in Sexual Violations (Fortress, Mar.) and her hopes for the book.
You weave your own story throughout the book along with deeply revealing stories of others' people's experiences. Why break the academic convention of avoiding first-person narrative?
We can never really make ourselves disappear from our work. I tried to show that there is a way to produce scholarship that is not only incisively argued but that takes actual embodied experience seriously. The book is powerful because authentic experience is powerful.
How has writing this book affected you?
My experience haunted me for a long time, hovering in different ways in my life, sometimes noisy, sometimes hidden. Trauma of any kind warps time. It makes the past slither into the present. I had already spent a lot of time in therapy and a lot of time reading, talking, and thinking about rape by the time I wrote the book, but there was something about the process of getting up every day and carefully putting words on a page that really did change my relationship to the event.
One section of the book is subtitled "Christianity's complicity in sexual harm." But you are, in your profession and personal faith, a Christian. How do you reconcile this?
A great deal depends on how someone reads the Bible. You can find in it passages of rape and very compelling examples of why these rapes should not have happened. Yes, there is patriarchal language used to talk about God and there are churches that keep women from speaking authoritatively or being in leadership. But these are not reasons to throw away Christianity as a whole. It is more than what any individual or institution claims. Faith in a loving God is helpful to people and religion has been a resource for me.
Your book turns the word "rape" into an umbrella term covering many kinds of violations— harms committed without consent—including the "rape" of the earth by human misuse or the legal attacks on abortion rights. Why do so?
Some violations are easy to name but there are so many that are insidious and not easy to name. But when things are not named, they can't be addressed. Enforcing a pregnancy without a woman's consent is a rape of someone's moral agency and a rape of their narrative agency — she cannot tell her own story.
You told PW you would like to see your book taught on college campuses. What are your hopes for the readers beyond academia?
There is a particular kind of horror when you’re struggling and can’t speak. I want readers to feel that there’s value in speaking and listening to however survivors tell their stories. I also want survivors to feel some hope that they aren’t alone—that there are ways of speaking and listening that can help.
