Figuring (Wounded) Detachment: Rape, Embodiment and Therapeutic Forgetting

Abstract

The discovery that propranolol, a very safe drug used for many years, also ‘dampens’ traumatic memory has been hailed as an ethical solution to all kinds of trauma, especially that experienced by soldiers and by rape survivors. This paper seeks to consider what it might mean to be able to forget the trauma associated with a gendered injustice such as rape. It explores first the current political and legal significance of rape, considering the way that this new treatment imagines the figure of the rape survivor in ways that sustain particular conceptions of injustice. It then turns to explore Wendy Brown's work on ressentiment, exploring whether the capacity to ‘therapeutically forget’ might avoid the tendency for trauma to cause a ‘wounded attachment’. It then turns to consider the role of embodiment in terms of these attachments. Furthering the exploration of the ways that dominant gendered modes of being-in-the-world shape and are shaped by rape, I turn to ask what the consequences of becoming ‘unaffected’ by trauma and injustice might have for our capacities to address them.