Abstract

Disruptions in our routines often give rise to self-reflection. When events unfold in ways that are contrary to our expectations, we may find ourselves facing the task of reconsidering what we value, how we got here, and who we are. Frequently, we attempt to address this need for reevaluation by telling stories about ourselves. When our storytelling goes well, our narrative self-explanations afford us both epistemic and practical goods: self-understanding, justification, and facility with planning for the future. Conversely, when our storytelling efforts are interrupted, poorly received, or founded on false views about ourselves, our access to those same goods may be severely undermined. This is because narrative explanations are integral tools for making sense of changes in our circumstances and attitudes. My dissertation vindicates these claims about the function and significance of narrative explanation by revealing its connection to self-understanding. I argue both that a suitably multifarious set of self-stories can contribute to achievements in self-understanding, and that self-understanding can be impaired by iniquities in the creation and dissemination of our collective cultural narratives. The dissertation begins by motivating an account of self-understanding according to which understanding oneself is the activity of producing and sharpening increasingly adequate self-descriptions. The more adequate a given self-description is, the better it will: (a) accurately reflect how one is; (b) make interpretive sense of one’s past, and of how one’s past relates to one’s present & future; and (c) afford one reliability in predicting how one will react to future experiences. Much of what we seek to understand about ourselves is trajectory dependent. Self-understanding, unlike knowledge, is not an epistemic state achieved once and then maintained unless undermined or rebutted by defeating evidence. The dissertation then proceeds to establish the central role that narrative explanation plays in both the loss and subsequent reclamation of self-understanding in cases of sexual assault. Disruptions in survivors’ self-understandings operate via the wide-spread acceptance of cultural rape narratives. These narratives establish norms of sentiment and conduct, which set expectations for how 'genuine' survivors should feel and behave. When survivors deviate from these normative expectations it becomes difficult for them (and others) to make sense of either the experience, or of their responses to that experience. Subsequent achievements in self-understanding are often realized by formulating alternative narrative explanations. The constraints on this process reveal the ways in which self-understanding is socially mediated. Self-understanding will be socially mediated insofar as one’s self-descriptions involve our publicly available lexicons of meaning. Further, how we represent ourselves (even when we are just attempting to do so for ourselves) depends on how others—actual or imagined—will receive that representation. Achieving self-understanding ineliminably involves trying oneself out before others. The dissertation concludes by advocating in favor of MacKinnon's account of rape as forced sex over alternative conceptions of rape that centrally rely on consent. I argue that jettisoning consent as the concept integral to distinguishing permissible from impermissible sexual interactions allows us to: (1) better understand the variety of wrongs beyond violations of autonomy that can occur in sexual contexts and (2) characterize a regulative ideal for social-sexual interactions: ongoing responsiveness to one’s partner(s). Ongoing responsiveness requires more robust inquiry into the context surrounding the sexual interaction than does permission-seeking.