Dominant Discourse Doesn't Change; From Gotell to Alcoff

On Monday's class, someone said something that I found to be quite important; you don't have an illness unless and until an expert says you do.  This goes very well with what Linda Alcoff says in her paper "...the tactic of bringing things into the realm of discourse works also to inscribe them into hegemonic structures and to produce docile, self-monitoring bodies who willingly submit themselves to (and thus help to create and legitimate) authoritative experts".  We are a society who needs professionals to help us figure out what is wrong with us.  We need to talk to therapists so they can diagnose us and give us some sort of drug to cure us.  The key here is the "dominant discourse's code of normality"(Alcoff).  It is whatever the expert thinks that is normal is going to be normal.  This includes what your issue is; is that normal?  Is the way you to talk about your problem normal or are you not following the acceptable social norms when expressing your emotions?  The problem is in the lack of emotion to too much emotion.  This can be the problem with discourse, it has to follow a certain set of norms and thus can be structured that way.  You cannot fall outside this hegemonic structure otherwise you will have seen to have transgressed in some way.  Dominant discourse can be very dangerous that way; your discourse can called into question if you do not follow a set of acceptable norms.  As we have learned then, dominant discourse can silence speech.
"Survivor discourse has also been used, in some cases, by the psychiatric establishment to construct victim-blaming and woman-blaming explanatory theories e.g. the argument that some people have "victim personality."(Alcoff).  Well, this sounds familiar, Gotell talked about risk management with rape victims.  Rape victims who put themselves in unsafe situations or did not follow safety rules to keep themselves from getting raped.  "Victim personality" is such a distasteful term, it then implies that some people are victims because of something they've done; again taking away the blame from the perpetrator.  We seem to be constantly trying to find ways to not blame the person who should be blamed, but instead discuss topics such as "victim personality or "risk management" to somehow diminish the role of the abuser.  This is also when discussing the speech of incest survivors, Alcoff says "The speech of incest survivors has always been especially restricted on the grounds that it is too horrible to be heard and too disgusting to the listeners (whose constructed sensibilities were and are often still given deferential preference) to be uttered."  Again we come back to what discourse has been constructed as acceptable to hear and what isn't.  The discourse of incest victims is too much for the listeners so needs to be censored for them.  When the dominant discourse that a husband can't rape and a father can't commit incest as Alcoff says, then no one wants to listen to anything that will disrupt this established, dominant discourse.  This dominant discourse then can silence the speech of the victims because it does not fall under a dominant discourse of an accepted normality that has been socially constructed for certain people, but not all.