BREAKING MY OWN TEXT: Surrendering into Writing that Works

Drawing on recent work in rhetorics of health and medicine, sexual violence, and long-established research on writing-as-healing, this chapter charts the creation of “Text Power Telling,” a non-profit I co-founded with my colleague, Jacqueline Regan, that offers writing workshops and a digital creative arts magazine for sexual trauma survivors. Using a semi-anonymous format, TPT workshops establish a space in which those who have experienced sexual trauma control expression, narrativity, chronology, and form in order to resist any notion that there is a predictable genre, rhetorical performance, or arc in the work of writing and responding to texts about sexual trauma. Threaded through this chapter will be my own long coming to terms with growing up in a sexually traumatic home and the ways in which a version of “self-destruction”-including of the rhetorical or textual performances we tend to rely on-is necessary to the work of radical change and honest identity formation. In an effort to raise questions about how and why we do our work in feminist rhetorical studies, I seek to disrupt my own attachments to form and traditional approaches to subjectivity, voice, and scholarship.