There are a lot of big subjects that our culture has trouble talking about: wealth, death, addiction, religion. But one of the toughest has to be sexual assault and rape. For how common sexual violence is – it affects over half of women and almost one in three men – it can be extremely painful and even stigmatizing to discuss. But in Jamie Hood's new book Trauma Plot, which contextualizes rape in her own life and in our culture, Jamie looks for new ways to speak the "unspeakable." It tells her story in experimental fragments and finds a unique way to discuss one of the most common violences we face. Brittany sits down with Jamie to discuss Trauma Plot, the contours of rape narratives in our culture, and how we can move beyond them to tell stories about sexual violence in new ways.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the main subject of the episode?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. A warning, this segment contains extensive discussion about rape and sexual assault, along with some explicit language. There are a lot of big subjects that I think our culture has trouble talking about.
Chapter 2: Why is discussing sexual assault so challenging?
Death, addiction, wealth, politics. But one of the toughest, I think, has to be sexual assault and rape. For how common sexual violence is, it affects over half of women and almost one in three men. It understandably can be extremely painful and even stigmatizing to discuss.
And in our culture, we see narratives about sexual violence play out in Law & Order SVU, in personal essays, or in the headlines. And there aren't a ton of other scripts out there.
You know, I did feel constrained. And what I wanted to do was to, like, fight against that and to sort of challenge myself to not prettify the story in order to fit accepted form. That's Jamie Hood.
She's the author of the new book, Trauma Plot.
How do we loosen the constraints? One way is for people to imagine that the stories don't have to be always super conventional.
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Chapter 3: What is the 'trauma plot' and why is it important?
And Trauma Plot, which contextualizes rape in her own life and in our culture, is very unconventional. It takes her story to different points of view in separate fragments, but put together, she finds a unique way to tell both her experience and to think about one of the most common violences we face.
I sat down with Jamie to discuss trauma plot, the contours of rape narratives in our culture, and how we can move beyond them. So to jump right in, your book is titled Trauma Plot. And it starts with the defense of the trauma plot, which is something of a literary term. Maybe not everybody knows it. And so I wonder if you could tell us what is the trauma plot and what are you defending it from?
Yeah.
There was an article in The New Yorker in 2021 that December. Harold Stuggle had written a piece called The Case Against the Trauma Plot. I remember. Yeah. The idea was sort of that narrative has become bogged down by backstory, by traumatic pasts and histories, and that characters are made sort of flattened or entirely explicable on the basis of some horrible thing that happened to them. Mm-hmm.
You know, I think a lot of critics took up A Little Life as kind of the urtext of this problem.
Yes. For those who don't know, that's a book by Hanya Yanagihara that came out in like 2015, but it's also hugely popular on TikTok. Very, very sad book, but very popular.
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Chapter 4: How does literature shape our understanding of trauma?
Like a lot of people really loved it. It sold well. Everyone was reading it. It was everywhere. It felt as if that was kind of like the bizarre nucleus of this argument among literary critics against traumatic testimony within art. For me, the dispute was not necessarily so much,
with that particular essay, although I had disagreements with it, and more what it seemed to foment among literary critics. In the sort of wake of that essay, there was a kind of a backlash, like an anti-trauma backlash that felt intelligent in some sectors and quite reactionary in others and contrarian. And that felt to me sort of very much part of the ecosystem of the backlash against Me Too.
When I read the trauma plot essay, well, I'll be honest, I didn't like A Little Life. But I also remember having a similar feeling actually reading that essay where I was like, well, hold on now. Like, why are we going to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Reading your book, you share a lot about your own life. But you get so deep into literature, I mean, you go back, okay?
You discuss some of the historical rape narratives and Greek myth. I mean, you know, you note that many end with the person who was raped losing their voice or their personhood. And relatedly, a lot of people use the euphemism that rape is unspeakable. But you disagree. Your book is speaking about it. And you take care to avoid euphemism.
In this conversation, I'll sometimes use the phrase sexual assault when I'm talking more broadly. But throughout your book, you deliberately use the word rape. What went behind that choice?
I think part of it was I was unable to use that language for a really, really long time. And I think that that's part of how rape culture operates. Like, rape culture creates a scenario in which it's actually quite difficult to define the things that happen to you, right? Like, we sort of rationalize a lot of these things, right?
We say, like, I was drunk or maybe it wasn't that bad or maybe I misunderstood what was happening. And I think because of the shame around having endured sexual violence, you end up sort of hemming and hawing about the kind of language that you use about it, right?
Yeah.
And so for me, you know, particularly because I was not a model victim, you know, like I just wasn't. And that I think I had to make peace with that in order to get to a place where I was able to understand that what had happened to me was bad and was wrong and I didn't deserve it, you know? And so like coming to language,
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Chapter 5: What are the limitations of the current narratives around sexual violence?
Like being able to narrativize the experiences that I went through and specifically being able to say like what happened to me was rape, you know, unequivocally. That was like one of the biggest hurdles to cross. Being able to put a name to it unlocked something for me.
And, you know, when I started reading from the book or like reading early iterations of it like years ago, people would come up to me and say like they had never thought about their experiences in that way before. And like that was something that felt so beautiful and like was one of the reasons why it felt important to actually write this book.
Because for many, many years I thought I was just sort of writing and I didn't think I was going to publish it. Right. But I think seeing responses from audiences, you know, when I was like performing it, it made me feel like actually I was doing something important that wasn't only about naming my own experience, but that was opening a space for other people to find a language for theirs as well.
One of the things that you talk about is feeling like your story, it has some special significance, even though what you're describing is something that's very common. So I find it really poignant and interesting to hear you say how once you started speaking the words, other people came back to you and felt a connection where maybe you were afraid that that wasn't going to happen.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is another thing that I struggled with for a long time, which is like a feeling of exceptionalism. And it's funny to use that word because I think we tend to imagine it as having like a positive connotation. But actually, what I felt was that I was singular somehow in like the suffering that I had endured. And that was part of the reason I felt so ashamed of it.
You know, I was like, because I had never really heard people talk about these things before. And I don't know if that's just my upbringing or like the circles that I moved through, but I didn't really feel like there were other people who were sharing those experiences.
And so I kind of thought, you know, it consolidated that feeling that I had somehow earned it or that I was just the sort of person who was going to keep getting raped, you know. So that sense of singularity or exceptionalism was part of what kept me silent in a way because I thought that, you know, these weren't experiences that would be recognizable to anyone else or sympathetic to anyone else.
Rationally speaking, it's not like I thought I was the only person who had ever been raped.
You know what I mean?
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Chapter 6: How does the Me Too movement influence the conversation about sexual violence?
Chapter 7: What does Jamie Hood's book reveal about personal narratives and trauma?
Or like Epstein, who becomes this like larger than life. There's all this sort of, you know, dark glamour around it, frankly, where it's like billionaires on private jets who are like flying people out to this secret island for like their rape cabal. Allegedly.
Mm-hmm.
And I think that a lot of the narratives calibrate around those things because they're easy to understand. And now we can lock them up and we've gotten rid of the problem. Like it enables the way of thinking that you don't look at it as the status quo. You don't think about it as a sort of structural problem, sort of implicit to our sex, like our relations between men and women.
And I think like recognizing the ordinariness requires that we kind of have to like radically restructure everything about our sexual politics, our sexual experience.
Now, I'm also interested in the idea that you raise about the onus of talking about sexual assault being on the victim as an extra burden because they turn into scrutinized spectacles. It makes sense that rapists might not come out and talk frankly about rape, but how do we balance the pressure of the storytelling?
It's a question I raise in the book that I still feel like I struggle with a lot. You know, someone like the French novelist Virginie Despont writes about this kind of in the context of sex work. And she's like, you know, sex workers are always having to account for ourselves. We... have sex work narratives, but you rarely have testimony from Johns, right?
Like, clients aren't running around saying, like, I pay for sex and here's why I do it. But, you know, sex workers are constantly asked to, you know, justify why they do the work, what that work looks like, etc., And so I was sort of, I guess, extrapolating from there where the idea is that the story of rape also has to sort of emerge from the person who has been raped.
And like the entire onus of testimony is on that person. And it does feel like an imbalance. But, you know, I think the thing that I struggled with that I write about is like, well, do we really need to be platforming rapists at this particular political moment? It feels weird.
quite frightening to be at the dawn of this administration and to see the ways in which someone like Nick Fuentes saying, your body, my choice, like this is something that is very bald. It feels unfair to demand that victims constantly account for ourselves and constantly offer our stories to the world.
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