The instruction is to tell someone: uses of disclosures of gender-based violence post #metoo

Since its emergence, the #metoo movement has elicited countless narratives. People with experiences of gender-based violence are encouraged to perform their stories for the public or realms of networked publics or counterpublics. This research-creation project is a collaborative investigation into the process of disclosure and how telling a story of violence varies across time and setting, impacting the formation of subjectivity and cultural positions of victim or survivor.

The project was installed in an empty city lot as a silent moving-image of the spectrographic data of two voices in dialogue. The artwork displays only visual sonic information like rhythm, timbre, pitch, and harmonics, as well as the space of silence and listening while the narrative content is muted. The piece’s silence enacts a melancholic resistance to the prevalence of survivor narratives that uphold neoliberal ideals of personal expression and effort as avenues for healing and wholeness. It also attends to the importance of dynamic dialogue and to the necessity of an engaged listening partner to a person’s telling. This accompanying project-paper summarizes the project’s methodology, creation, and installation. It engages with theories of sound and listening, trauma, resilience, melancholy, and commitments to ethical engagement with non-violence. This project paper investigates the varied uses of disclosures of gender-based violence under neoliberal white supremacist hetero-patriarchy and how the spectacle of overcoming is utilized to uphold systems of gendered power relations and socio-economic inequality.