The purpose of this thesis is to emphasize the significance of narrative in giving voice to survivors of gender-based violence, and in breaking the silence surrounding this issue – matters that statistical reports tend to overlook. The voices of survivors of gender-based violence are often disregarded or not heard in statistical reports, despite their significance for understanding and addressing it. Therefore, I seek to deepen our understanding of the consequences of gender-based violence by reading survivors’ narratives alongside a number of philosophical thinkers who are not typically read together, but whose work can contribute to a better understanding of the violence itself and the narration that arises in its wake, namely Adriana Cavarero, Susan J. Brison, Kelly Oliver, and María Lugones.  By applying several philosophical concepts to listen to what the narratives of the victims express, I also intend to contextualize them within a larger societal framework, to better understand the impact of gender-based violence. I will be drawing from Susan Brison’s concept aftermath, Adriana Cavarero’s discussion of relating narratives, horrorism, and narrative against destruction, as well as María Lugones’s concept “world”-travelling. The narratives I engage tend to convey that gaslighting is a significant aspect of the abuse, which is why I choose to analyze it with reference to Kelly Oliver’s work.  My hope is that my thesis will complement and enrich the quantitative and statistical approach represented by the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions. I prioritize the voices of survivors, allowing their narratives to guide the discourse. This approach, influenced by Cavarero, emphasizes the importance of centering the experiences of those directly affected by violence, and by listening to their stories I want to increase awareness and understanding of the violence perpetrated against them. In the face of what Cavarero calls ontological violence, it becomes important to start listening to the voices of the survivors, as they need to be heard. I also aim to initiate societal debates and actions that can lead to change and support for those affected by gender-based violence.

This thesis seeks to understand how we read and understand the use of depictions of violence by examining its rhetorical presentation. Although the media gives us a mixed understanding of the way that experiencing violence secondarily (that is, through all types of media) affects us, scholarship in this area has proved clear connections between viewing/experiencing depictions of violence and raised levels of aggression. On the other hand, there is a clear difference between gratuitous depictions of violence and socially useful depictions of violence (i.e., the difference between a slasher movie and a holocaust movie) that that area of scholarship does not expressly take into account. I argue that the language of trauma studies has the ability to evaluate the impact of violent texts on audiences and that Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Pentad has the ability the examine depictions of violence to uncover explicit and hidden ideologies that affect the presentation of the violence and, thus, our reception and interpretation of that violence. Working in conjunction, these two theories can help audience's understand depictions of violence on an ideological level and help them to assess the violence's potential traumatic impact on themselves and others within certain contexts. To demonstrate this theory of understanding violence, I make two short analyses of Native Son and The Lovely Bones and demonstrate an in-depth analysis of Fight Club and Blood Meridian in order to give an example of the type of reading I am advocating and its potential for understanding and interpreting depictions of violence in ways that uncover both social benefit and harm. In the end, I hope that this theory of reading violence might extend beyond the sample readings I have done and into other types of media, so that we can all understand the ways that violence is used rhetorically for social and political purposes and be able to both use it and interpret it responsibly.