Linette Lim

Introduction Propagandists face a dilemma. They want to discredit political ideas that rival their own, but to do so they often must invoke those very ideas for their readers. This entails a risk: perhaps the reader/listener will become curious and wish to learn more. After all, consumers of authoritarian propaganda can sometimes “read between the lines” to glean information or meanings that the propagandists did not intend to disseminate (Weiss and Dafoe Reference Weiss and Dafoe2019, 964).

As a survivor of sexual assault, I’ve learned that trauma, healing, and the memories of violence don’t operate within neat paradigms or conform to any intuitive, linear structure. I was raped a few years ago by a person I’ll call Sami, a software developer now based in Seattle. But I’d somehow been able to find some semblance of closure a lot more straightforwardly than the single time I got molested, almost a year after my encounter with Sami.

“I don’t remember when it happened to me. I don’t know the details either—of who did it, where they did it, or what they used.