Attending to vulnerability in sexual violence research

Abstract

Within research on sexual violence, womxn who have been raped are positioned as “vulnerable” participants, while researchers tend to occupy positions of “invulnerability”. Drawing on vulnerable moments from a research project which explored womxn's experiences of rape in South Africa, this paper proposes a (more) vulnerable engagement with narratives of rape. Through attending to how vulnerability is implicated in issues of silence and agency, shame, and my own failures to witness the experiences of my participants with care, I explore the epistemic and ethical possibilities of an affective approach to researching rape. This approach asks us, as researchers, to attend to the moments during our research in which we are affected, moved and disrupted.

As I read the interviews I conducted with 16 womxn ¹ in South Africa about their experiences of having been raped, I am immersed in narratives of pain, shame and rage. As I pore over the accounts of violation, violence and fear I become increasingly unsettled. The innocent noises from outside and next door begin to sound threatening, as if someone is in the empty house with me. I feel my own body as intensely vulnerable. Here I am powerfully reminded of the centrality of vulnerability to research on rape and how attending to this vulnerability involves being affected, moved and shaken by narratives of violation. In this paper, I engage with multiple moments of vulnerability from my research about rape. Through attending to how vulnerability is implicated in issues of silence and agency, shame, and my own failures to witness the experiences of my participants with care, I explore the epistemic and ethical possibilities of an affective approach to researching rape. I begin by highlighting how vulnerability is conceptualised in research about rape. I then outline my approach to vulnerability within the context of exploring womxn's experiences of rape in South Africa. I then present three vulnerable moments from this research project to exemplify my affective approach. But firstly, a note on language.

Defining rape

Within this paper, I articulate rape as first-person experiences (Alcoff, 2018), embedded within and constituted by symbolic, structural and interpersonal contexts, which permeate both “private” and “public” spaces (van Niekerk & Boonzaier, 2019). These symbolic, structural and interpersonal contexts include those in which womxn's bodies are constructed as accessible for control and consumption through “touching, raping, kidnapping, commenting on, grabbing, twisting, beating, burning, maiming” (Gqola, 2007, p. 120). Within this context, rape operates not as a number of isolated, inexplicable horrors but as a systematic violation of womxn's right to autonomy, safety and freedom (Brownmiller, 1975; Gavey, 2005). I define rape in line with the multiple ways that it was constructed by the womxn I interviewed. These constructions are rooted in their (and my own) experiences of rape. This approach allows for an investigation into the ways that meaning is made of rape, enabling womxn to articulate how rape has affected them, and evoking an affective understanding of rape which is absent from much quantitative work on rape (Haugen et al., 2018).

However, the boundaries of what “counts” as rape are contested, in womxn's own narratives as well as in broader legal-cultural-social discourses. Thus, while in some moments womxn describe what happened to them as “rape”, in other moments they call it “weird”, “bad sex”, “someone else had sex with me”, “being taken advantage of” and “not really rape”.

Contextualising vulnerability in research about rape

One of the central ways in which vulnerability surfaces in research about rape is through the construction of those who have been raped as more “at risk” for harm or more “vulnerable” than others. Here vulnerability tends to be conceptualised as a susceptibility to wounding and equated with weakness, injury, powerlessness, deficiency, passivity, incapacity, and victimhood (Gilson, 2016; Mackenzie et al., 2013). Within social science research, those who have been raped are constructed as vulnerable (Davison, 2004; Downes et al., 2014). Both in South Africa and globally, womxn are regarded as disproportionately vulnerable to rape. ² This disproportionate vulnerability is reflected in alarmingly high rates of sexual violence perpetrated against womxn and girls, both locally and globally (South African Police Service [SAPS], 2020; World Health Organisation [WHO], 2021). Conceptions of womxn as vulnerable to rape can be understood in relation to systems of patriarchy which have constructed womxn's bodies as uniquely vulnerable to rape by virtue of their “physical weakness” and “sexually stimulating” nature (Bergoffen, 2003; Gilson, 2016). The construction of womxn's vulnerability as rooted in their physical bodies serves to disguise the ways in which vulnerability is produced by unequal power relations which afford mxn greater access to symbolic, relational and material resources in many contexts (Michau et al., 2015).

Within research, the construction of womxn who have been raped ³ as “vulnerable” acknowledges the potential for sharing experiences of rape to be distressing or to produce secondary trauma (Campbell, 2008). As much research has demonstrated, unsupportive responses to disclosures of rape contribute to distress (Abrahams & Jewkes, 2010; Campbell et al., 2001; Muganyizi et al., 2011). Thus, conceptualising womxn who have been raped as vulnerable may promote increased sensitivity and care within the research context, including encouraging researchers to employ methods which allow participants greater control over their narratives, and to provide participants with access to support services (Aroussi, 2020; Shirmohammadi et al., 2018).

Simultaneously, however, constructing womxn who have been raped as vulnerable can also position them as powerless and lacking capacity to assess the risks of participating in research (Barker & Macleod, 2018; Molobela, 2017). Disregarding participants’ agency may be particularly problematic within the context of sexual violence research, given that the act of rape itself may be experienced as a violation of agency (Cahill, 2001). Similarly, constructing participants as lacking agency may contribute to cultures of shame and silence that limit opportunities for womxn to talk about their experiences of rape (Clark, 2017; Strauss, 2009).

In contrast to the construction of participants as “vulnerable”, researchers are assumed to occupy positions of “invulnerability”. This invulnerability is produced by the “myth of dispassionate investigation” (Jaggar, 1989, p. 161) which has established “objectivity”, “validity” and “authority” as key principles of scientific research (Harding, 1987; Richardson, 2000). Within mainstream psychology, the denial of researchers’ vulnerability is achieved through refraining from engaging with the researcher's own vulnerable emotions in academic writing (Law, 2016). This can be understood as a process of actively “unknowing”, through which certain emotional experiences and knowledges are suppressed (Geissler, 2013). In this way, vulnerabilities are projected onto the bodies of “Others”, as researchers examine the lives of participants from a safe distance (Emerald & Carpenter, 2015; Law, 2016). The denial of researchers’ vulnerability can be understood in relation to the continued dominance of Western, individualist aspirations of autonomy, self-sufficiency, independence, self-sovereignty, an “imperviousness to being affected” and the social devaluation and even exclusion of those who are constructed as vulnerable (Gilson, 2014, p. 7; Rice et al., 2021).

Feminist and other critical scholars have long critiqued the devaluation of emotionally engaged ways of knowing and the position of the invulnerable researcher, highlighting the constructed and socially situated nature of knowledge (Behar, 1996; Harding, 1987; Rosaldo, 1984). Through paying attention to power relations within the research setting and process, practising reflexivity, and producing partial and socially situated knowledges, critical feminist scholarship has advanced different, and more vulnerable, ways of knowing (Edwards & Mauthner, 2002; Hesse-Biber, 2014). It is on these approaches that I drew for my own research on rape.

Method: Centring vulnerability in research about rape

In this article I present a vulnerability-centred analysis of interviews with 16 womxn in South Africa who had been raped. I consider three vulnerable moments in depth, to demonstrate some of the ways in which vulnerability is implicated in research on rape. I argue for the ethical and epistemic importance of feelings of vulnerability within research encounters with womxn who have been raped (Boden et al., 2016). I attend to “ethically important moments” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004, p. 273), through exploring how these moments feel.

I explore feelings of vulnerability as intersubjective, multi-layered and embodied, focusing on how these feelings provide knowledge about the complexities and nuances of meanings of rape (Boden et al., 2016). This approach recognises knowledge that is sensed by or through feelings (Emerald & Carpenter, 2015). Here I understand feelings as sensations that resonate in the body, as well as permeate the bodies of other people, objects and events, and recognise “the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences” (Boden, 2018; Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 80). Through this approach I pay attention to the ways in which feelings shape my analysis, and the ways in which I represent my participants (Jackson et al., 2013). Simultaneously, I attend to how the feelings that are produced in my encounters with my participants are shaped by the broader sociopolitical context in which this research is embedded (Ahmed, 2015; Thomson et al., 2021).

This approach draws on Pillow’s (2003) notion of “reflexivities of discomfort”, through which I render the knowing of myself and my participants as both “uncomfortable and uncontainable” (p. 188). I produce a layered and messy text, which is part reflection, part description and part argument (Jaworski, 2022; Marcus, 1994; Markham, 2012). I employ writing as a method of inquiry to write with/through/alongside vulnerability (Richardson, 2000). I am calling this approach an affective analysis, as it focuses on “processes of affecting and being affected” (Ahmed, 2015, p. 208).

Below I present three examples of vulnerable moments from my research project. I draw on extracts from my interviews with participants, as well as extracts from the research diary I kept during the research process. I explore what kinds of understandings are enabled when vulnerabilities are centred, rather than glossed over, dismissed or hidden.

Below I outline the details of the research project within which these vulnerable moments occurred.

Participants

The research project sought to explore womxn's experiences of rape within the South African context. I recruited participants via the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust (RCCTT) Facebook page. ⁴ As I wanted to address a range of different experiences, the inclusion criteria for the study were intentionally broad: anyone who identified as a womxn and who identified their experience as rape ⁵ was eligible for inclusion in the study. I included the first 16 womxn who contacted me.

Participants were aged between 19 and 50, with most of them in their late 20 s. Nine of them identified as White, ⁶ six as Black and one as “mixed heritage”. Nine participants identified as heterosexual, five as queer, one as bi-sexual and one as lesbian. Most participants had university level education (13) and lived in middle-class neighbourhoods (12). Six of the participants identified their first language as English, two as Afrikaans, two as both English and Afrikaans, two as isi-Xhosa, two as Shona, one as Sotho and one as Venda. Ten of the participants lived in Cape Town, two in Johannesburg, two in Pretoria, one in a town in the North West province and one in township in the south of Gauteng. ⁷ I provide specific details below for each of the participants whose narratives I share in this paper. Pseudonyms have been used to protect all participants’ identities.

Interviews

I interviewed each womxn on two different occasions to build trust, as well as to make participants feel more comfortable sharing their experiences of rape (Ellis, 2017). All the interviews were audio-recorded and then transcribed. The interviews were semi-structured in nature, guided by open-ended questions about participants’ experiences of rape, as well as rape within the South African context more broadly. For example, I asked participants about when they had first heard or learnt about rape; to share, in as much or as little details as they were comfortable with, about their own experience(s) of rape; how they were affected by the rape; how those around them responded to the rape; and about rape within the South African context. In the follow-up interviews, I asked about their experience of the first interview and about the process of naming and coming to understand what had happened to them as “rape”.

In asking womxn to share their experiences of rape, I was aware that I was asking them to share details of an extremely intimate and potentially distressing nature – to make themselves vulnerable. I recognised that participants’ disclosures occurred within a broader context characterised by both silence/secrecy and spectacle (Boonzaier, 2017; Judge, 2015). Much feminist and trauma studies work has demonstrated how “testimony” can operate as a counter-narrative to dominant and dehumanising constructions of those deemed Other, as well as an opportunity to work through and refigure painful experiences (Behar, 1996; Gobodo-Madikizela, 2012; Tullis Owen et al., 2009). I wanted to hold open the possibility that the interview could potentially operate as a space for womxn to “unsilence” themselves (Alcoff, 2018) and to construct their own narratives about what had happened to them. However, I was also aware of the potential for narratives of rape to re-inscribe pain, shame, and victim-blaming. As I will explore below, I was not always successful in creating a “safe” space for my participants to share their stories.

Informed by feminist research “ethics of care” (Gilligan, 1982), my approach centres on connection, context and particularity, as well as the development of more reciprocal and engaged relationships with my participants (Browning Cole & Coultrap-McQuin, 1988; Dutt & Kohfeldt, 2018). This meant exposing my own vulnerability within the context of the interviews. I made it clear, both in my call for participants and at the beginning of each of the interviews, that my own experience of having been raped was the starting point for my research. This disclosure was intended to facilitate a more reciprocal and caring environment for the interviews and to disrupt my position as the “invulnerable” researcher (Oakley, 1981). Despite making myself more vulnerable within the context of the research interview, I maintained a position of power both within the interviews and beyond (Harrison & Lyon, 1993; Sikes, 2010). My position as the “researcher” enabled me to interpret, analyse and validate participants’ experiences. In this paper, I engage with my own vulnerability as a researcher in order to unsettle my invulnerable position.

Sharing and validation

I sent participants the transcripts of both of their interviews, so that they could confirm that they were happy with how I had transcribed the interviews. I also sent participants my analysis and offered them an opportunity to check and contest the ways in which I had represented them and their experiences. In this way, I made my analysis of participants’ interviews vulnerable to critique. This was in line with my ethical commitments to informed consent, accountability and care towards my participants (Naidu & Prose, 2018). In light of the deeply personal nature of the interviews, I felt it was particularly important to allow participants to review what I had written about them. None of the participants raised any issues with either the transcripts or the analysis, and a few of them responded with gratitude for the opportunity to review both.

Analysis

In what follows, I explore vulnerability in relation to three key themes that were present in my encounters with womxn who had been raped. I have chosen one example to illustrate each of these specific themes. First, I explore how vulnerability is implicated in how womxn share their experiences of having been raped, focusing on issues of silence and agency. Second, I explore the relationship between vulnerability and shame. Third, I reflect on the vulnerability of my failure to witness, with care, the experience of one of my participants.

Avoiding vulnerability: Re-narrating experiences of rape

As I have highlighted above, womxn who have been raped are often cast as vulnerable within the research encounter. This construction may position them as victims, thus stripping them of agency. In contrast, my encounters with my participants demonstrate that they are by no means unaware of the potential dangers of disclosing their experiences of violation within the research interview. All of the womxn I interviewed discussed experiencing dismissal, denial and shaming when disclosing their experiences to others, and they entered into this research encounter with a deep understanding of the potential risks of participating in the study. For example, Nomvula ⁸ explained in her interview how she had altered the story of how the rape had taken place, to avoid being shamed and to ensure she was not denied medical treatment when visiting a clinic:

Nomvula: I lied to [the staff at the clinic] the whole time about what really happened to me because … I didn’t want to feel judged about… putting myself in such a position. I didn’t know if I was gonna get help. I didn’t know how … they were gonna react towards me so I just said I met someone and we went home and they forced themself on me. (First interview, park, Cape Town, 23 November 2018) ⁹

Nomvula's narrative highlights her painful awareness of the potential costs of disclosing her experience of rape, as well as how she (re)constructs different narratives of rape in different situations in order to minimise harm to herself. She is both vulnerable to the responses of others and agentively controlling the narratives she shares, to avoid or minimise this vulnerability. In the above extract, Nomvula explains how she alters the story of her rape. Rather than telling the hospital staff that she had been raped by a man who had agreed to pay her for sex, she told them that “I met someone and we went home and they forced themself on me”. Here Nomvula highlights how certain forms of sexual violence are more likely to be seen as “rapes” and how certain womxn are more likely to be believed when they say they have been raped (Estrich, 1987; Gqola, 2015). I explore this point further, in relation to Nomvula's experience, below. Other participants also discussed how they often chose not to disclose certain details of their experiences of rape to others, particularly in instances where they perceived that others would not respond with care, compassion and empathy or where their experiences would not be regarded as “real rape”.

Nomvula and other participants’ (re)constructions of their experiences of rape are particularly poignant post-#MeToo, when so many womxn (and others) came forward to articulate the harm that rape produces (Gallagher et al., 2019). While #MeToo and other local and global social movements against sexual violence have undoubtedly created important disruptions to the shaming of womxn who have been subjected to sexual violence, these movements have simultaneously reinforced normative expectations that womxn should “speak out” about their experiences of sexual violence. As Nomvula's story demonstrates, this pressure to speak out must be considered in relation to ongoing hostility, denial, dismissal and shame that womxn face when discussing their experiences of violation (Alcoff, 2018; Fleming & Kruger, 2013).

For Nomvula and many of the other womxn I interviewed, decisions to share their experiences of rape are entangled in complex dynamics of shame-vulnerability-silence-agency. Here, silence, refusing to talk, and re-narrating experiences of rape are some of the ways that womxn enact agency and resistance, and shield themselves from the vulnerability that is produced in the face of a hostile audience.

The vulnerability of shame

(Extract from research diary, 7 January 2019)

Tanya ¹⁰ arrives for our interview in shorts and a t-shirt and sits in the armchair in the corner of my kitchen. I sit at the kitchen table with my chair facing towards her. Without a formal beginning to the interview Tanya starts telling me about her life – her previous career in IT and her recent change to law, her daughter, a few years younger than me, who’s a musician. She begins to recount what happened to her nearly thirty years ago, when she was a teenager living in a small town about an hour outside of Cape Town. As she recounts the terrible events of that night, still painfully clear after so many years, her demeanour rapidly shifts. She no longer looks me in the eye as she talks, and her eyes fill with tears. Her voice gets quieter and quieter and begins to shake. She pauses frequently as she struggles to describe what happened. As she inhabits the shame and fear and violence of that night I do not know where to look. The shame is in the room with us, touching everything, causing me to look away from her.

As Tanya articulates her experience of rape, both she and I are deeply affected. This moment poignantly demonstrates the power of shame. The palpable change that happens in Tanya's speech as she describes the rape encapsulates the difficulty of talking about rape. Other womxn I spoke to also whispered, paused and struggled for words when describing having been raped. As Lara ¹¹ recounted in our interview: “I mean I’m still just it's just a mix of shame and … disgust [whispers] I think … Ja. It's like a dirty memory.”

Difficulties in articulating experiences of rape are entangled with the stickiness of shame, how shame gets stuck to womxn who have been raped (Ahmed, 2015). Because womxn are held responsible for “avoiding” rape (Gordon & Riger, 1989; Gqola, 2007), the shame of rape sticks to womxn through the assumption that they “allowed” themselves to be raped. For example, Tanya describes how she attempted to make sense of the rape through blaming herself:

because you were talking to him (inhales) […] Um it’s probably because you went into that bedroom and you did get into that bed (inhales) and you kissed him […] um it’s like you’re in a room with a prosecutor, who relentlessly cross-examines you for years to come afterwards.

All of the womxn I interviewed spoke about shame as a central component of their experience of having been raped, and how overcoming or moving beyond this shame was an ongoing battle. My encounter with Tanya was one of the moments in which the weight of this shame was tangibly heavy, almost too much to bare. It was a reminder for me of the affecting nature of shame, how it fills the body with a hot, squirming discomfort. This moment was also about the power of shame to make those who witness it want to turn away (Probyn, 2005). This experience of shame is as much about “cover and concealment, as it is [about] exposure, vulnerability and wounding” (Ahmed, 2015, p. 104). This experience demonstrates how I “catch” Tanya's shame as she re-tells her experience of violation (Probyn, 2005). Hearing (and feeling) her shame becomes a shaming experience for me. My shame at hearing Tanya's story exemplifies how the shame that others feel because of hearing about experiences of rape makes them want to turn away. I argue that my shame in the moment reflects how the shame of rape works to produce othering and separation, rather than inviting empathy. This othering and separation is powerfully evident within the broader context of sexual violence, in which womxn who have been raped are repeatedly met with hostility, denial, and the dismissal of their pain, as well as social responses which turn the public gaze away from rape as a pressing social issue (Gqola, 2015).

Above, I have reflected on the relationship between vulnerability and shame, and particularly how the vulnerability of sharing an experience of rape may ignite a sense of shame. The potential for such shame (and shaming) demands extra care not only when responding to participants within the research encounter but also when analysing and writing about participants’ experiences, in order not to reinscribe the relationship between shame and rape. In an attempt to present a more nuanced and contextualised understanding of shame, I have focused on my own shame, as well as the broader context in which this shame is produced.

It is also important to note that Tanya shared with me what had happened to her, in spite of her shame (and my response to it). All of the womxn I spoke to acknowledged the weight of shame in light of having been raped, yet all of them chose to speak frankly and openly to me about their experiences. In these moments participants make themselves vulnerable to potential shame, yet simultaneously push through this shame, disrupting its power, by sharing their experiences of violation. This exemplifies a fierce vulnerability, constituted both by shame and resistance to this shame.

A failure to witness: Exposing researcher vulnerability

In my interview with Nomvula, she described her (most recent) experience of rape:

Nomvula: I’d just come out from a night of drinking with my friends. So (sighs) to be honest I don’t remember how I got into the car … he [taxi driver] was saying stuff to me (inhales): “You’re so beautiful. You’re so pretty can I just have one night with you?” Then I was like … “No. I just wanna go home.” Then he was like um “I’ll pay you if you want? I’ll give you x amount.”

Interviewer: Oh because (Nomvula laughs) that’ll make it ok.

Nomvula: (laughing) Then I was like … “Ok I can do that. If you’re gonna pay me I don’t mind because I’m very broke right now and I could use the extra cash and I was like this is consensual.” So we do what we do and then he refuses to pay me […] for me I felt like I was raped because I would have never ever … touched that man if … he was not gonna offer me money. And the fact that he … didn’t pay me at the end took away my consent. (First interview, 23 November 2018)

I immediately realised that I had made a deeply insensitive, damaging and potentially shaming comment, rooted in my own experience and privilege where the situation of providing sex for money was almost unimaginable. I apologise to Nomvula but my discomfort remains. This is an example of how my response to Nomvula's story prevented me from seeing and understanding her narrative, as well as how a focus on shared gender positioning (or in this case, shared experiences of rape) may ignore the differences that exist among womxn's experiences, because of intersecting positions of race, class, sexual orientation, age, politics, status, among others (Matutu, 2019; Phoenix, 1994; Warr, 2004).

However, my assumption about the story that Nomvula was going to tell me was not only rooted in my own privilege. It was also rooted in dominant narratives of what rape looks like. Despite the knowledge that rape assumes multiple forms, I was still expecting to hear a story about some kind of physical force. I anticipated that Nomvula was going to say that when she refused the taxi drivers’ advances, he became angry and resorted to violence.

Here my affective anticipation is produced by notions of “real rape” (Estrich, 1987), contoured by the spectacularisation of violence in the South African context. Notions of rape in South Africa are constituted by a “grammar of horror such as endemic baby rape, corrective lesbian and grand-mother rapes” perpetuated by the media (Hirschauer, 2014, p. 84). Media representations of only the most spectacular (meaning grotesquely violent and “morally horrifying”) instances of rape constitute a distorted picture of the practice and meaning of rape. The repeated representation of particularly physically violent instances of rape, including those that result in murder, reinforce a dominant understanding of rape as an act that involves an intense level of physical violence. Almost all the womxn I spoke to reflected on how they had come to understand rape in this way. As Hannah ¹² remarked sarcastically in our first interview, if you are murdered “then no one can argue with you […] but if you survive it, obviously it wasn’t that bad.”

The exchange between Nomvula and me is therefore not only about how my own positionality limits my ability to hear my participants, but also about how the power of hegemonic rape narratives and the spectacularisation of violence silence alternative experiences. In this moment, my assumptions are shaped by and resonate with broader social feelings of indifference toward certain experiences of violation. In attending to my discomfort at having failed to bear witness to Nomvula's experience, I expose my research “secrets”, the uncomfortable, difficult, shameful moments, that often remain hidden to protect researchers’ invulnerability (Wolf, 1996). This exposure is not only necessary for my ethical practice as a researcher, but also for the development of a more affective knowledge of rape.

Attending to vulnerability

As I have demonstrated above, narratives of rape are “particularly fraught, fragile, perilous, and promising” (Cahill, 2021, p. 4). To ask participants to share their experiences of violation in research interviews is to ask them to make themselves vulnerable. In hearing these narratives, researchers are also invited to engage with vulnerability – to witness and be moved by the stories which we hear. By reflecting on three vulnerable moments from my own research project about rape, I have explored how, through attending to this vulnerability, I am able to develop a nuanced account of participants’ experiences of rape, which highlights the affective context in which these experiences are embedded. As I have demonstrated above, this is an affective context characterised by blame, shame, spectacular violence and the dismissal of particular experiences of violation. Such an affective approach can produce both epistemic and ethically important felt knowledge about rape (Boden et al., 2016). This felt knowledge provides important information about the context of the research encounter, as well as the broader social context that frames this encounter in significant ways.

These moments of vulnerability are powerfully affective and affecting – they are deeply uncomfortable and troubling moments. These moments are reminders of the power of dominant narratives to shape research interactions, even in instances where we, as researchers, seek to challenge and disrupt these narratives. This exposure of my research “failings’ is intended not only to disrupt my position as “all knowing” (Rice, 2018) but to show how I am undone, moved, shaken by my research on rape. In attending to vulnerability, I disrupt an “unaffected” knowing about rape, which glosses over the difficult, painful and discomforting moments.

In deconstructing my own experiences of shame, I wrestle with and seek to undo some of its power, while remaining attentive to my own complicity in reproducing it. In this way I hope to more effectively (and affectively) show that disrupting the attachment between rape and shame is an ongoing personal-political project.

Concluding thoughts (and feelings)

Through engaging with vulnerable moments from a research project about rape in South Africa, I have attempted to attend to vulnerability in various ways. I have engaged both with the vulnerability of participants as they narrate their experiences of rape, as well as my own vulnerability as a researcher. This is an example of how practices of self-reflexivity require us, as researchers, to make ourselves vulnerable through sharing and analysing the difficult and discomforting moments in our research to deepen the knowledge we produce (Rice, 2018). This kind of vulnerable engagement is particularly critical when working on issues related to social injustice as this vulnerability and discomfort may allow us, as researchers, to get closer to the positions and experiences of our participants (Law, 2016).

As I have demonstrated, engaging with vulnerability is both necessary and complex within the context of researching rape. Here, vulnerability works in ambivalent ways (Gilson, 2021). A recognition of participants’ vulnerability has the potential both to acknowledge the painful nature of their experiences, as well as position them in problematically passive and un-agentic ways. To disrupt these problematic constructions, it is necessary to engage with participants’ vulnerabilities in relation to the complex social contexts in which their experiences are embedded (Sabsay, 2016). This includes troubling simple dichotomies between silence and agency.

Critical engagements with vulnerability disrupt academic practices of invulnerability through which various intersecting hierarchies of power are maintained (Law, 2016). As Clare Hemmings (2012) has argued, “in order to know differently we have to feel differently” (p. 150). I would add that we need to use this feeling differently to write differently; more affectively, more vulnerably, attending to the moments in which we, as researchers, are affected, moved and disrupted.