“Comme un trou noir”. Testimonies of Sexual Abuse and the Challenge of the Inexpressible. Linguistic Strategies and Resources
This paper analyzes the phenomenon of the inexpressible in testimonies from victims of sexual abuse committed by members of the Catholic Church in France. Based on a corpus of four transcripts published by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), we explore the linguistic st...
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| Formato: | Artículo revista |
| Lenguaje: | Español |
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Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires
2025
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| Acceso en línea: | http://revistascientificas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/filologia/article/view/16777 |
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| Sumario: | This paper analyzes the phenomenon of the inexpressible in testimonies from victims of sexual abuse committed by members of the Catholic Church in France. Based on a corpus of four transcripts published by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), we explore the linguistic strategies used by the subjects to verbalize traumatic experiences suffered during childhood. Drawing on discourse analysis and studies on the description of traumatic experiences, our study shows that the inexpressible does not equate to absolute silence, but rather reveals a discursive struggle in which language proves insufficient when faced with the horror experienced. Among the linguistic markers identified, we highlight reformulations, explanatory glosses, deictic ambiguities, enunciative shifts, and analogies, all of which disclose an intense enunciative effort. These strategies, far from representing communicative failures, underscore the tension between the desire to testify and the structural limits of language. We conclude that testimony is not only an act of memory or denunciation but also a process of symbolic negotiation, in which the subject attempts to (re)construct their experience through words. |
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