Palimpsests of Sexuality and Intimate Violence: Turning-Points as Transformative Scripts for Intervention

Abstract

In this article, we explore transdisciplinary understandings of scripts as transformative interventions. Script refers, on the one hand, to cognitive, routinized behavioural patterns; on the other hand, it is a multilayered process of enacting, interpreting, and rewriting interaction within a specific context. The metaphor of the palimpsest, embodying and provoking interdisciplinary encounters, links the various layers of practised and narrated scripts. The interrelation of the scripts of the palimpsest is marked by inextricability as they use the same space and create an illusionary intimacy. We develop our ideas about script as intervention, reflecting on scripts of violence and sexual experience. We make use of the psychoanalytic term “cryptic incorporation”. Cryptic incorporation entails the idea of an experience psychically “swallowed whole” by the subject and therefore not accessible to conscious reflection, once incorporated. Our methodological readings are both empirical and fictional. The empirical example is based on an interview with one respondent, who has experienced intimate violence during the course of her life. The autobiographical text of Shedding, written in 1975 by the Swiss author Verena Stefan, is an example of fiction. Both texts engage in the inextricability of vulnerability and intimacy. Analysing these narratives, we pay special attention to “turning-points”. As turning-points represent decisive changes within evolving life-stories, they are read as palimpsestuous scripts of a transformative process. Thus, we focus on the human ability to change scripts, to rewrite biographical events. We look for a productive entanglement of our scientific writing, understanding the writing process itself as a palimpsestuous layer of script as intervention.