Breeders for Satan: Toward a Sociology of Sexual Trauma Tales

What we are going to talk about today will sound unbelievable, unbelievable, to most of you. It will sound like the plot of an incredible horror story. ("Satanism" 1) During her years of imprisonment in a downtown Los Angeles breeder warehouse, Lauren Stratford said she was forcibly impregnated so that the satanic cult that was holding her captive could ritually sacrifice the baby she bore. This was the same satanic cult, of which her own parents were devotees, that she also insisted had sexually abused and tortured her since she was a young child; the same satanic cult she had to escape from so that she could tell her tale of being a breeder for Satan. In the few years immediately following the 1988 publication of her autobiography, Satan's Underground: The Extraordinary Story of One Woman's Escape, the pseudonymous Stratford took advantage of both a growing cultural concern about a satanic menace to children' and a deeply rooted cultural fascination with tales of sexual trauma, and guested on television talk shows and religious radio programs, addressed child abuse conferences, and was featured prominently on the Geraldo Rivera special, "Devil Worship," one of the most widely watched prime time specials in the history of television. The details of her story varied remarkably from one public appearance to the next,2 but in each of its iterations she encouraged other women who shared her secret of being a breeder for Satan to come forward and tell their tales. And for a few years after her own was completely discredited ("Satanism Book Withdrawn" 81), come forward is exactly what they did. That some of these women told their tales on television talk shows should be of no surprise. These shows have replaced the confessional of old as places where tales of sexual suffering, secrecy, shame and surviving are told. But as Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray point out, bringing sexual trauma tales into the realm of discourse, whether within the privacy of the confessional or upon a public stage, "is not always or even generally a progressive or liberatory strategy; indeed, it can contribute to... subordination" (260). That assertion holds a contradiction. On the one hand, it suggests that sexual trauma tales can challenge the dominant cultural discourse about sex and gender, and the power relations that support it, and thus can prefigure significant social change. Rape tales are prototypic. Until recently, the story of rape was told by men through the psychological and medical theories they developed, the laws and policies they put into place, and the literature, art and film they produced. When the feminist movement encouraged survivors of rape to speak out, bear witness, and break their silence, a women's tale of rape finally entered public discourse. Its emplotment was, and is, profoundly political. It describes rape as an act of violence so common to the everyday lives of women that the pervasive fear it creates affirms those cultural ideologies that historically have functioned to keep women in their place (Plummer 63-78). In making manifest the relationship between biography and history, the personal and the political, this women's rape tale set the agenda for a whole generation of sexual politics. It was, and though now oft-told, continues to be, remarkably subversive. On the other hand, sexual trauma tales can sustain the status quo by simply reiterating, without critique, the dominant cultural discourse about sex and gender. In her engrossing book, Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics, Louise Armstrong holds up incest tales as an exemplar. When first publicly told, they were even more political, more strikingly subversive, than rape tales. They not only upended conventional speaking arrangements by giving women and children an authoritative voice, but in doing so attacked the most idealized of cultural institutions, the patriarchal family, and the most reified of cultural ideologies, the incest taboo. …