The Survivor Uprising Podcast
Survivor Uprising Vision Statement
We are an emergent platform and community of practice for survivor(1) artists, activists, and spiritual warriors to share our stories and strategies for seeking, healing, and transforming the conditions of our lives. We affirm that every survivor’s story is inherently unique, sacred, and true. We affirm the existence of pain and resilience beyond representation in any form. We affirm the capacity of survivors to express ourselves with courage, complexity, and consent. We affirm the expression of needs and boundaries as they shift and change over time. We affirm the critical importance of survivor narratives and strategies in all movements for anti-violence, anti-oppression, and collective liberation in the U.S. and beyond. We affirm the necessity of uplifting survivor spiritualities in all religious and spiritual communities and systems of meaning-making. We believe that all survivors have the sovereignty and authority to make meaning out of their own experiences, and to locate and listen for the Divine where and when it speaks through their lives. We expect and embrace the questions.
We understand sexual violence and its traumatic aftermath as results of both individual acts and systemic oppressions including but not limited to anti-Blackness, racism, sexism, ablism, classism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, femme-phobia, and toxic masculinity. We acknowledge the realities of intersectional and intergenerational traumas resulting from extensive histories of slavery, genocide, displacement, environmental assault, and “body terrorism"(2). We acknowledge the important role that accomplices play in the work of creating safer conditions for survivors to cope, heal and thrive. We acknowledge the necessity of all community members in the sweeping cultural changes that are necessary to end sexual violence. We also center survivors by uplifting their narratives, resourcing their initiatives, and following their lead, every step of the way. We understand that their lived experiences, embodied knowledges, wisdoms and spiritualities anchor our movements in practices of truth, love, justice, and healing.
We acknowledge that “this space will not be perfect”. (3). We acknowledge the realities and impacts of power and privilege within survivor-led communities and movements and seek to identify patterns and expressions of white supremacy, patriarchy, and domination when they inevitably arise. We acknowledge the critical difference between intention and action. We recognize that even survivors can and do perpetrate individual and systemic acts of violence. We anchor our self-awareness and practice by seeking ongoing feedback, building and sustaining relationships of accountability within and beyond this collaboration, and expanding our sense of personal and organizational resource where and when it is available. We uplift our diverse ancestral roots and ways of being that most resonate with our values, and our unique callings. As survivors of sexual trauma, we know all too well the dangers of silence and inaction and choose to live into Audre’s Lorde’s unending wisdom:
And when we speak we are afraid
Our words will not be heard
Nor welcomed
But when we are silent
We are still afraid
So it is better to speak
Remembering
We were never meant to survive
We validate the reality of survivors of all identities, including all genders, and recognize the complexity of intersecting marginalization. We acknowledge the impossibility of a truly safe and equitable virtual container for this work. However, Survivor Uprising commits to withholding no resource in creating an increasingly safer and more accessible platform over time.
1-Survivor Uprising chose to use the word “survivor” as opposed to “victim” to reflect the strength, resilience, and power of surviving victimhood, and the ongoing labor of mapping out a positive social identity in a world of violence. However, many survivors may choose to identify themselves differently, as “thrivers,” or otherwise. What do you want to be called? What would you need to thrive?
2-Sonya Renee Taylor’s “The Body is Not an Apology”
3- Invitation to Brave Space, Beth Strano
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