I Break

This article uses narrative autoethnography to explicate a feminist analysis of a female-perpetrated sexual assault against a male. In particular, this paper uses a review of autoethnographic literature to try and understand the “meaning” of the sexual assault, interspersed with the author’s personal narratives of the assault itself as well as the months following. In doing so, the author uses “reading” as a method, understanding the act of reading as an encounter between a reader and the text, one which the reader reads themself into the text and comes to identify with—not AS, but WITH—the experiences professed within the text. Through this method, the author connects his experience as a male victim of female perpetration with larger discourses of hegemonic masculinity, patriarchy, and violence. A poststructuralist critique of the paper is offered, and conclusions are drawn concerning the nature of statistically unlikely encounters with sexual assault.