The Survivor as the Impossible Subject: Tracing Risk and Empowerment Discourse in Self-Defense Education

Content warning: Sexual violence and victim blaming. In this study, I engage my experiences conducting fieldwork as a survivor of sexual violence across two locations of an international self-defense organization. By tracing risk and empowerment discourses across fieldwork, informant interviews, and...

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Published inWomen's studies in communication Vol. 48; no. 2; pp. 266 - 282
Main Author Mulholland, Kaylee
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 03.04.2025
Subjects
discourse
gendered violence
self-defense
Sexual violence
subjectivity
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ISSN0749-1409
2152-999X
DOI10.1080/07491409.2025.2486236

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Summary:Content warning: Sexual violence and victim blaming. In this study, I engage my experiences conducting fieldwork as a survivor of sexual violence across two locations of an international self-defense organization. By tracing risk and empowerment discourses across fieldwork, informant interviews, and organizational documents, this study outlines a discursive slippage between risk prevention and victim blaming discourse. These discursive tensions highlight how the affective and temporal distancing associated with empowerment rhetorics is denied to survivors in self-defense education and constructs survivors as impossible subjects. As impossible subjects, survivors' experiences of violence form the very foundations of self-defense education while also being neglected within the space to control the distribution of risk and distance participants from violence.
ISSN:0749-1409
2152-999X
DOI:10.1080/07491409.2025.2486236