Paper short abstract:

Starting from the anthropological relationship, this presentation focuses on the ways that the expression of emotions related to experiences of sexual violence, repeatedly presented as 'too intimate' to be manifested publicly, challenge political and social norms of privacy in creative means.

Paper long abstract:

Persons who have experienced sexual violence often find it hard to express emotions, hiding their feelings deep inside because the pain is too hurtful to carry or feeling too afraid or guilty to manifest sentiments like anger publicly. Moreover, the social norm prescribes that these emotions are too intimate to enter the public realm and therefore should remain concealed. In this presentation it is asked how these underground emotions find ways to break the surface and come out into the open to challenge the historical, political and social context of privacy.

Starting from the anthropological relationship between a Dutch anthropologist and Guadeloupian interlocutors who lived through incest and rape, this presentation specifically pays attention to the ethnographer's emotional response to and the emotional interaction with interlocutors throughout and after the fieldwork on sexual violence (Lutz and White 1986). It is reflected upon the ways that different cultural contexts have impact on the means to articulate and heal emotional trauma - both personal and cultural - in creative ways.

In combining both insights and illustrations from anthropology and creative therapy, it is argued that in the study of emotions and violence, scholars in anthropology and psychology should work hand in hand to show the interrelatedness of the social and individual body, to question the 'casualness' of what emotions actually entail, and to confront cultural biases regarding the public expression of emotional trauma caused by sexual violence.