Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing 9780823285518

Citation preview

Witnessing Girlhood

Witnessing Girlhood Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing

Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall

fordham university press New York 2019

Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

for Maisie Kathryn Meneer William Gilmore Pounds Finn Gilmore Pounds

contents

Introduction: Witnessing Girlhood 1. 2.

3. 4.

Girls in Crisis: Feminist Resistance in Life Writing by Women of Color Gender Pessimism and Survivor Storytelling in the Memoir Boom: Girl, Interrupted, Autobiography of a Face, and Nanette Visualizing Sexual Violence and Feminist Child Witness: A Child’s Life and Other Stories and Becoming Unbecoming Teaching Dissent through Picture Books: Girlhood Activism and Graphic Life Writing for the Child

1

13

38 63 86

Epilogue. Twenty-First-Century Formations: Child Witness, Trans Life Writing, and Futurity

101

Acknowledgments Notes Index

113 115 141

Witnessing Girlhood

introduction

Witnessing Girlhood So, I ask, how much is a little girl worth? —rachael denhollander, victim impact statement, Larry Nassar sentencing—January 24, 2018

Rachael Denhollander1 was the first former athlete to publicly accuse Dr. Larry Nassar of sexually assaulting her when he served as a team physician at Michigan State University, USA Gymnastics, and the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team.2 Under the guise of offering medical treatment for sports injuries, Nassar used his access and position of trust to sexually abuse hundreds of girls over three decades, misrepresenting molestation as “special treatment” and “pelvic massage.” Despite the efforts of numerous athletes to report sexual abuse, adults—from local police to members of the Michigan State athletic department and even parents— dismissed their complaints and believed Nassar.3 Over several years and multiple reports of Nassar’s wrongdoing, none of the girls or young women could overcome skepticism and even outright hostility to their claims of abuse. Denhollander’s allegations broke through this culture of dismissiveness and formed the through line of Nassar’s prosecution for criminal sexual abuse in 2017.4 As an adult and an attorney, Denhollander returned to her childhood experience to narrate Nassar’s manipulation and abuse, the trauma he inflicted on hundreds of girls and young women, and the culture of enablement that extended from local police to the highest levels of university 1

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administration and athletics. Her public testimony magnetized hundreds of previously isolated young athletes to assemble as a collective witness. In so doing, they exposed how practices of discrediting girls and young women coincide with a narrative of protecting, even caring for, children that shielded a sexual predator from exposure and prosecution. Rachael Denhollander’s victim impact statement was the last word before Nassar was sentenced to 40 –175 years for seven counts of first-degree sexual misconduct, to which he pled guilty. Denhollander’s testimony changed the context in which Nassar’s abuse could be witnessed by centering the victims as truth-tellers and stripping Nassar of authority and institutional cover. A new forum of judgment emerged from this shift as Judge Rosemarie Aquilina allowed over 150 women and members of their families to offer accounts of how Nassar abused his role as respected physician to sexually assault young female athletes who came to him for treatment. The entire course of Denhollander’s public testimony unfolded in jurisdictions ranging from newspapers and online media to legal courts. She represented an emblem of courage and a source of strength for other victims.5 She enabled others to come forward and share their stories not only because they, too, had been victimized by Nassar, but because she had succeeded in accessing a space of justice, a space that had been denied the numerous young women who had previously sought to report Nassar. Their numbers became clear as the victim impact statements were delivered over seven days. What changed from the routine dismissal and successful cover-up and enablement of Nassar by numerous authorities? How did Denhollander’s testimony dislodge the silencing and shaming of those who report sexual abuse and catalyze in its place a collective forum of witness? What conditions are required for women who experienced abuse in their girlhoods to tell their stories and have those stories witnessed? When those conditions are prevented from assembling, when justice from authorities and institutions is denied, and when the impossibility and necessity of bearing witness coincide, how do women use the figure of the child in life writing, or other allied testimonial performances, to seek justice? The testimony of the 156 women represents a visible, contemporary enactment of a long tradition we trace in this book. In it, adult women return to the experience of their own girlhoods to offer fine-grained and strategically shaped accounts of childhood that allow new audiences to understand their vulnerability and suffering, but also the role that authorities played in enabling violence, replacing the rationalizations offered by those inflicting abuse with their own interpretation of harm. Emerging within these accounts are key scenes and figures that link a range of texts

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and forms from the mid-nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Chief among these are self-representations of the child witness as offered by the adult author in autobiographical representations of childhood to address diverse audiences, and the centrality of the author’s analysis of injury and justice. New testimonial performances, as diverse as the collective witness in the Nassar case or the use of the child witness in comics and picture books, reveal and refer to significant aspects of earlier self-representational acts. In Witnessing Girlhood we trace reverberations across timelines, selfrepresentational acts, and jurisdictions of the child witness in life writing. In the aftermath of their testimony in court, several of the gymnasts continued to tell their stories as part of a range of actions. Some are pursuing legal action against those who enabled Nassar at Michigan State and USA Gymnastics, as well as in a range of local jurisdictions where the girls’ and young women’s claims were dismissed without adequate investigation or met with hostility and shaming.6 Olympic medalist Aly Raisman, one of several Olympians who spoke out, used her body as a visual form of protest in a photographic portrait in Sports Illustrated.7 Appearing in the February 2018 swimsuit issue as more young women were coming forward with allegations of abuse against Nassar and with the #MeToo movement providing a forum of solidarity and amplification for the voices of survivors, Raisman posed without a swimsuit and was covered, instead, with words of empowerment like “survivor,” “fierce,” and “women do not have to be modest to be respected.”8 In so doing, Raisman visualized the temporalities of witness we trace here. She returned to the scene of childhood trauma with a difference: Her adult self provided the language denied to her younger self and, in a sense, accompanied the child witness, doubling back to seek justice, amplifying her own voice, and standing in the place of the victim as a survivor. Accompaniment enacts the survivor positionality theorized by Sharon Marcus in “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words” of a self that “could differ from itself over time.”9 Although Marcus is primarily concerned with rape prevention in that essay, and Nassar’s crimes were established at trial, survivor identity is informed, as Marcus argues, by a view of rape as a language rather than, existentially, as that which is always imminent in women’s lives. One may have been a victim in a particular situation, but that arises as violence often does: from chronic structural conditions that permit and excuse harm and not due to intrinsic female vulnerability. The women who testified insisted that Nassar could have been prevented from sexually assaulting hundreds of girls if adults in authority had not enabled him. They did not view themselves as rapeable per force. They were victimized

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by Nassar and revictimized by those who silenced them in order to protect him. By testifying they took on the identity of survivor, a temporally and politically distinct identity from victim.10 They also embodied it as a collective witness.

Child Witness, Testimony, Life Writing From Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to contemporary comics such as Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories or picture book memoirs such as Junko Morimoto’s My Hiroshima, authors return to, rework, and repicture childhood trauma.11 These examples of life writing present the child as a testimonial figure and childhood trauma as a central site through which authors seek to represent violence and elicit ethical witness from diverse publics. The child witness documents the author’s early life in ways that invite readers to understand violence and survival as a complex and profound problem with which they ought to grapple. These are not stories that merely recall scenes from girlhood or relegate childhood experience and memory to the past as if they stood outside history. Instead, autobiographical narratives of childhood by adults mark a site where the values associated with autobiography—truth telling, the authority of experience, and credibility—attach to the child and permit adult readers to ratify authors’ demands for justice. Despite the myth that the vulnerability of children can reliably generate the forms of protection children need, child witnesses cannot magically compel readers to care about them. They can, however, amplify the implicitly affiliative affects of life writing through which authors and audiences forge connection. They can also expose how such connection fails to emerge or is supplanted by the aversive affects of bias, distrust, ignorance, aversion, disinterest, and voyeurism that attend the representation of trauma. Witness texts hope to stir empathy in audiences, but they do not assume that readers are aligned with their purposes, politics, or theories of history, whether that is the history of a nation, a revolution, an institution, or a crime. The child is a protean figure. Childhood is not limited temporally to the first decade of life, nor does it afford all children the same protections, as Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography underscores. Age is used instrumentally to limit access to full personhood through age of consent laws and to prolong vulnerability to state violence and control. Yet life writing, especially by women of color, has historically offered a vehicle for intervening in those limitations. In a genealogy that traverses space and form, authors such as

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Jacobs and Morimoto employ the child as a witness to the horrors of slavery and war in their life writing. The child in these texts is positioned to testify to experience rather than to suffer it passively. The adult author recounts what the child experienced: not by ascribing naïve authenticity to the child’s voice, but by centering childhood experience and knowledge as the base on which the authority of the adult autobiographer builds. Our focus on the emergence of the child witness as a testimonial figure and site reveals how authors leverage the affective power of childhood to connect with diverse audiences. Life writing texts that use the child witness in this way are often pedagogical; they educate about injustice and call for ethical witness. Narratives of childhood offer a gateway for new relations to emerge between authors and audiences through which previously silenced histories of personal and collective trauma might be revealed and addressed. Witnessing Girlhood offers a genealogy of the child’s centrality to struggles for justice, especially antiracist, feminist, labor, and human rights movements, and the significance within these movements of life writing as a means to spur activism through the representation of childhood. We begin by centering women of color as experts on the complex traumatic and institutional inequalities they experience starting in childhood. More frequently, women of color are bypassed as experts in favor of other authorities (usually white male elites), even as girls of color are frequently described as targets of rescue for humanitarian intervention and white savior politics. The interlocking marginalization of gender and race has the effect of preventing an adequate politicization of the value and vulnerability of girls and women from emerging. Moreover, centering women of color as analysts of oppression and injustice casts a new light on the fiction of childhood innocence and the myth of protecting children. The innocence of childhood is a racialized construct. To place girls of color, and, by extension, mothers of color, as the agents of an autobiographical tradition invested in testimony and justice is to recast the mutual construction of childhood and innocence as a function of whiteness.12 Girls of color in the American context of slavery have never been seen as innocent— either sexually or politically. Cast as simultaneously more knowing than their white counterparts, and less protected by this knowledge, their attempted navigation from victim to survivor shows how distant the category of childhood lies from simple chronology. Women of color may strategically use accounts of their own childhoods as a way to invite identification with cross-racial audiences, presenting

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a threshold of identification before writing about experiences of sexual violence.13 The significance of childhood narratives in life writing about trauma arises in relation to the racialization of femininity. Following Saidiya Hartman, we would say the persistence of childhood narratives in life writing by women of color from slave narratives to contemporary memoir and the reactions of cross-racial audiences to this body of work demonstrate the importance of reading the legacy of slavery as continuity rather than break.14 The dynamics of white female patronage for Black writers, for example, and the network of helping hands within literary markets and political networks shaped the publication and reception of Jacobs’s Incidents and are embedded in long histories of whose lives and stories matter, how they circulate, and who is remembered or forgotten. As testimonial accounts travel across time, they pick up references but also shed context as they move. To elaborate the historical transit of self-representation, we draw on studies of life writing, trauma, and witnessing to theorize the centrality of the child (as witness and activist, as testimonial site and figure) in a tradition of auto/biographical work that seeks to make visible and/or remedy inequity. Witnessing Girlhood takes up the child in order to place it in a new critical context and to pull visual and verbal forms—from autobiography, biography, and memoir to comics, picture books, and feminist scholarship—into new proximities through feminist interdisciplinary analysis. Our focus on the child within the history of feminist life writing reveals new examples of how to bear witness to trauma. It is important to trace this figure and its history across form because self-representation exceeds genre. It is sometimes literary, sometimes visual, sometimes both, and sometimes something else altogether when the author is grappling with trauma.15 For this reason, we define self-representational acts as examples of what Leigh Gilmore calls “autobiographics.” Autobiographics include self-representational practices that incorporate elements of multiple genres. The preference for such innovation may be both creative and strategic, and is often motivated by the desire to disclose knowledge on one’s own terms, to challenge the rule of legitimacy that attaches to some forms and persons, and to reframe whose story and whose life matters.16

Chronic Trauma and Intersectionality Trauma may refer to harm that is unique, episodic, or chronic. It may be visibly present and undeniable or hidden in plain sight, permitted by social norms of violence against children, especially children of color. Wit-

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nessing Girlhood engages directly with how trauma structures testimony by attending to a range of dynamic and sometimes controversial strategies for representing knowledge about trauma, survival, and justice. For theorists of trauma, Freud offers an ambiguous legacy. Whether Freud came to understand girls’ accounts of sexual abuse as part of his seduction theory—that is, as repressed desire rather than memories of actual sexual violation—as a result of an unresolved aspect of his theory of drives or because he was ambivalent about offending male elites is a matter of debate.17 A strain of feminist psychology, often grounded in clinical practice, offers a more resonant analytic for a study of gender, race, injustice, and self-representation because it, too, centers on lived experience and takes the relationship between experiences of sexual assault, abuse, and rape in childhood and memory as reliably coordinated—that is, as motivated by actual experiences of violation and powerlessness. Memories of abuse may be repressed, fragmented, or difficult to narrate, but none of those factors means the survivor was not abused. Judith Herman argues that for the trauma experienced by any nondominant group to become culturally visible, those who suffer must rise in value. For traumatized women to be seen as telling terrible truths rather than as hysterics suffering from repressed memories of forbidden desire required a long-term (and ongoing) women’s movement and critique of patriarchy.18 Laura S. Brown looks at systems of inequality in these shifting historical contexts in order to understand how chronic exposure to physical vulnerability and economic instability produces trauma in women and people of color.19 Because it is rooted in the experience of oppression and the feminist analysis of it by Black feminists, intersectionality as a critical framework expands the event-centric focus of trauma theory to exemplify a practice that centers both the “interlocking oppressions” theorized by the Combahee River Collective and the “synthesis” of them made by women of color.20 Extending this work to the study of life writing, Witnessing Girlhood elaborates a feminist intersectional analysis of the chronic, pervasive, and everyday quality of trauma in the lives of those who experience a range of material forms of insecurity and risk.21 This approach is especially attentive to the self-representation of trauma as a testimonial discourse attuned to the audiences it addresses. The critical term “witness” bears considerable weight. It refers to the eyewitness, her account, and to the audience who receives it. It is a verb form: One witnesses (sees, experiences, knows, perceives), and one bears witness (tells the story, but also receives the telling). It is a noun that represents a person who can act as a witness in court or elsewhere, as well as the

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testimony she produces. It also names a dynamic: ethical, transactional, and fraught. To be a witness and to bear witness means to always be conscious of how an account might be or is being received. A witness experiences, observes, and testifies. She bears witness in her body and in her community; in words and images she creates and inherits, in isolation and sometimes in conditions of unspeakability, as survivor and sometime spokesperson. Given the doubt that women’s testimony encounters, life writers adapt a range of rhetorical approaches to their experience and their audiences in order to gain a hearing. There are many ways to tell a life story. Yet life writers who choose to represent trauma often find themselves supplied with ready-made scripts, as well as assurances by courts, clinicians, and scholars that having a coherent life story is achievable and desirable, and that credibility results from adherence to standardized scripts, whatever those scripts might be. The power of life writing to writers and readers alike, however, does not rest in its predictability or generalizability. Indeed, the promotion of a unified and coherent life narrative for a trauma survivor as a mental health norm or marker of integrated identity, as it is in some social psychology, represents a form of ethical and epistemic violence. If we require the life writer to agree from the outset to reproduce a particular script in order to appear coherent and trustworthy, we disregard the considerable power of self-representation as a form of becoming and transformation. There is no single form of crisis or child witness in the history we chart; rather, life writers return to their childhoods and use the child as a site of testimony in a range of ways that we seek to name in each chapter. The origins and locations of meanings of childhood shift within and among historical periods: There is no child witness, per se, who might transhistorically stand as an emblem for the problem of narrating experiences of violence. Focusing on histories of race, gender, and trauma, however, entails seeking continuities from slavery and colonialism to the present rather than faltering before the breaks and interruptions they impose within the production of knowledge about trauma. The first chapter of this book, “Girls in Crisis: Feminist Resistance in Life Writing by Women of Color,” examines three linked cases of how adult women of color use girlhood as a category to motivate readers toward ethical witness and activism: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood.22 In each text, the authors represent the child not only as a participant and eyewitness, but also as a figure whom distant audiences are invited to see as worthy of protection, recognizably

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vulnerable, and even, strategically, innocent. That is, as a child like they imagine they were. And this construction— open to empathy, but also risking aversion or apathy—is central to how they establish the ground from which witness may emerge: as arising from sensory experience, embedded in history, and compelled by suffering to bear witness. Girls emerge in these narratives as figures of sympathy represented by politically active women autobiographers. Chapter 2, “Gender Pessimism and Survivor Storytelling in the Memoir Boom: Girl, Interrupted, Autobiography of a Face, and Nanette,” situates the self-representation of white privilege and fragile girlhood in the memoir boom as part of a cultural preoccupation in the 1990s with white girls as endangered figures, a legacy of what we call “gender pessimism.” We read Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, and Hannah Gadsby’s autobiographical stand-up performance Nanette as offering an alternative theorization of both gender pessimism and trauma.23 Through life writing, Kaysen and Grealy make visible how gender pessimism sentenced them to understand themselves in particular ways and be understood through that limitation. Yet they also experienced privilege associated with white femininity and class status. We offer the critical term “accompaniment” to describe how Kaysen, Grealy, and Gadsby insert their adult authorial selves into their autobiographical work as a way to accompany their younger selves through traumatic experience, disrupt the story written for them, and occupy life narrative in an interventionist mode. Viewed through our analysis of gender pessimism and white femininity, the recurring cultural fascination with both girlhood passivity and aggression folds into larger histories of trauma. Kaysen, Grealy, and Gadsby demonstrate how new forms of witness and knowledge become visible through traumatized histories retold as stories of resilience, even as they recycle notions about whiteness and the generational transmission of privilege. Chapter 3, “Visualizing Sexual Violence and Feminist Child Witness: A Child’s Life and Other Stories and Becoming Unbecoming,” builds on the previous chapter’s focus on survivor storytelling to consider how dominant practices in visual culture work to hide representations of rape and how the comics form offers a feminist visual vocabulary for representing what has been rendered unrepresentable, not only through trauma, but through practices of invisibilization. This chapter focuses on two graphic memoirs about childhood sexual abuse, Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories and Una’s Becoming Unbecoming.24 Gloeckner and Una reconfigure the girl from victim to feminist child witness by using the comics form

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to counter familiar images and scripts for defining rape. Gloeckner intervenes in the epistemology of children’s sexual precarity within the white middle-class family by illustrating explicit sex acts and violence, and Una embeds the figure of the child in a visual history of a serial rapist and in so doing constructs sexual violence as ordinary rather than rare. Extending the work on comics in chapter 4, “Teaching Dissent through Picture Books: Girlhood Activism and Graphic Life Writing for the Child,” we locate the child witness in texts not only about, but authored and pictured for, children as a site of pedagogical testimony. In Junko Morimoto’s graphic memoir My Hiroshima and Michelle Markel and Melissa Sweet’s biography of Jewish labor activist Clara Lemlich, Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909, the child functions as both witness and activist in relation to which authors and illustrators craft scenes of ethical witnessing.25 These two examples of graphic life writing reclaim histories of social violence, broadening the networks through which testimony travels to include children as subjects of and witnesses to violence. Picture books seek out a dual audience of child and adult pedagogue, and foreground collective activism as a viable behavior for youth. In our epilogue, “Twenty-First-Century Formations: Child Witness, Trans Life Writing, and Futurity,” we turn to current events and movements in which the child witness is central to an intersectional tradition of life writing. Here we argue that life writing by and about the childhoods of trans women of color incorporates feminist scholarship as part of a critical practice centering the lives of trans-of-color childhoods from the perspective of adulthood. Memoirist Janet Mock incorporates gender studies scholarship as a means to educate readers, and philosopher Gayle Salamon writes a critical phenomenology of transphobia to remember the life of Latisha King, a trans teen of color who was murdered in 2008. The social and political context of these works includes the feminist and antiracist movements of #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName. Both movements protest the expendability of Black boys and girls, which includes how state entities and their proxies routinely and lethally deny their status as children. Police officers typically see Black children and adolescents as older than they are and link imputed age to the risk they pose to officers. Black girls are consistently read as older in educational settings and exposed to judgment and punishment reserved for adults.26 Under these conditions, children of color are at heightened risk of violence in multiple locations. Mock’s Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More and Salamon’s The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia bear witness to the ways in which life stories

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of trans youth of color can be told in relation to the category of childhood.27 They raise questions about trans childhood: when it can be said to begin and end, who can access protections in its name, how the category itself can be manipulated to harm trans youth, and how knowledge and even hope can arise through self-representation. Trans lives represent an intense site of competing demands for life narrative. Trans life writing offers a way to push back against the abuse to which trans youth are exposed through the trope of accompaniment. Witnessing Girlhood confounds common assumptions about the temporality of childhood and forges new directions for theorizing the child witness and testimony. Through the visual and verbal forms included in this book, the adult employs the child in life writing to foreground previously silenced narratives and obscured images that rely on complex and compelling interplay among adult authors, childhood experience, and audiences. Testimony is evidence capable of conjuring new publics, and the child witness is at the center of this justice-seeking project.

chapter 1

Girls in Crisis: Feminist Resistance in Life Writing by Women of Color What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death? —saidiya hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”

Humanitarian campaigns often feature girls in crisis. Vulnerable girls, especially in the global south, appear in campaigns that address trafficking and other harms that span borders and populations. Yet an unintended negative consequence of such campaigns is the valorization of a white savior model and its attendant rescue narrative woven into the representation of girls of color as endangered, with crisis as their endemic lot. Such appeals have both a lengthy history and a contemporary currency. This humanitarian agenda hides neoliberal opportunism within the guise of raising awareness. These rogue rescue missions exemplify what Teju Cole has dubbed the “white savior industrial complex.”1 Actual girls in crisis make an ethical claim upon our attention, and they should; but the permanently vulnerable girl is a deceptively apolitical and amoral figure that blots out representations of gendered autonomy (political, ethical, and personal) and histories of resistance. The figure of the vulnerable girl is tied to the absent figuration of women as fully human and political agents. A focus on girls as perennially imperiled and helpless prevents seeing women as moral and political agents who, while lodged in material conditions of harm, are capable of analyzing these conditions and proposing means of remediation.2 13

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As such, this representation recalls colonial and orientalist histories and the representational politics of racialization. It is in this figuration that the vulnerable and racialized girl in crisis has become the focus of human rights campaigns, corporate philanthropy, and service learning projects based in the United States. Through an analysis of three life writing narratives—Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood—we seek to bring a historical context to the representational politics of girls in crisis.3 We choose Jacobs’s and Menchú’s works in order to plot two points indicating the historical and transnational scope of women’s interventions in the autobiographical production of girlhood. Jacobs’s slave narrative predates the development of neoliberalism in the West but has significant points of contact with its normative construction of gender and its expansionist view of property and capital, including persons held as slaves and their means for telling and circulating their stories. Menchú provides a resonant example of the Latin American testimonio’s address to a global public at the confluence of Guatemalan politics, the fallout of Western interventionist policy, and the prominence of Indigeneity in human rights discourse. We include Satrapi’s Persepolis as a complicating case that lies between the poles of fictive universal girlhood and a resistant tradition of representing transnational and anything-but-universal girlhood. The struggle between these poles is evident in the reception of Satrapi’s text and enables us to further clarify the stakes around a globally circulating discourse of girls in crisis, as well as to delve more deeply into the rhetorical strategies that are effective in challenging it. The iconography of the vulnerable girl represents a testimonial site within a politics of global neoliberalism and a practice of postcolonial critique. Although any text within this iconography has a specific history of critical and popular reception, reading them together— often across effaced relations of influence and reference— enables us to chart an understudied genealogy of feminist critique in autobiographical forms. The three texts analyzed in this chapter are first-person accounts prized for both aesthetic and political qualities. They reach across national and geopolitical divides to enlist audiences to take up the authors’ political and social objectives. They do not ask for an analysis of the political crises about which they testify; instead, they use a range of strategies, especially around sympathy, to create authoritative and gendered critiques for diverse audiences. They provide an opportunity to examine the figure of the child as capable of bearing witness. We recognize this figure within

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autobiographical narratives as both a specific girl and a representative one whose circumstances reveal the political construction of girlhood within a larger project of population control and state terror (of enslaved persons in the plantation economy of the American South and Indigenous Guatemalans, for example) to which the adult autobiographer calls attention. The figure also forms a testimonial site as the adult identifies structural conditions unknowable to her childhood self and draws readers into an ethical mode of engagement that asks them to bear witness rather than serve as a white savior. How women of color use life writing to talk back to the construction of the vulnerable girl marks an important practice of feminist resistance. Through their use of autobiographical forms including slave narrative, testimonio, and graphic memoir, women narrate a life from girlhood to adulthood in order to argue that political and moral autonomy develops from their lived responses to girlhood experience and trauma. In contrast to salvation narratives embedded in humanitarian campaigns that position the rescuer as the active protagonist in relation to the girl’s helpless suffering, Jacobs’s, Menchú’s, and Satrapi’s projects of self-representation re-center the narrator and displace the fictions on which the rescue paradigm depends. By doing this, they also reject the politics of rescue and its grounding in the insufficiencies and incapacities of vulnerable girls who never quite become women /citizens. No longer representative of static subaltern silence, girls emerge in these narratives as figures of sympathy represented by politically active women autobiographers. Sympathy here is not simply the achievement of new sentimental attachments that emerge through the gradual awakening in white audiences of the knowledge of shared humanity with girls and women in crisis; instead, it exposes feeling as a political realm in which the ugly and the exalted are unstable and intermingled. Our focus on female subjects, then, takes their autobiographical practices as exemplary of what Saidiya Hartman calls “resignification”: a generative practice through which women of color exercise symbolic power through centering the female body not only for evidence of violence and social death, but for signs of life.4 Resignification takes place on a shifting historical field. The life stories of girls in crisis are vulnerable to cooptation and can become proxies through which white male saviors advance their own stories.5 Their stories can be used to elicit empathy in ways that do little to further an understanding of the complexity of their lives. Moreover, the assignation of authority to the white male savior’s version of girls’ lives works primarily to amplify his role as interpreter of their experience. More problematically, empathy can as easily attach to heroic

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personalities who mediate for distant audiences an engagement with vulnerable and even unsympathetic girls. Life writing can resist campaigns that tug at the heartstrings by offering accounts that confront aversive affects, compromised subjects, and entrenched forms of oppression. As such, these texts belong to a discourse of feminist political representation of girlhood by women of color. Further, in complex and specific ways, autobiographical accounts by Jacobs, Menchú, and Satrapi interrogate a rescue politics of the permanently vulnerable girl that has obscured the economic, political, legal, and cultural formations, institutions, and crises that imperil specific communities. In her place, they present a girl as a site of testimony and a figure who testifies. In what follows, we cast new light on the ongoing dangers of a politics based on a universal girlhood and the appeal of rescue by centering the resistance strategies raised within women’s autobiographical accounts of girlhood.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 narrative is the first extant slave narrative by a woman, and it begins in girlhood. “I was born a slave,” the first words of the narrative, are separated by a balancing semicolon from the words that complete the sentence: “but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.”6 Jacobs was “so fondly shielded by a benevolent family” that “I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise.”7 The narrative does not present girlhood as an idyllic state in order to mourn its loss; rather, she describes happy childhood as illusory. Jacobs is protected from the consciousness of slavery by a family composed of “all slaves,”8 while her status follows the condition of the mother. Learning about her status means learning about the centrality of women, reproduction, and rape to enslavement. This knowledge marks the threshold white women readers must cross in order to enter her narrative and learn a form of identification for which they have no adequate model. Jacobs’s narrative provides that model by redefining childhood itself as radically conditioned by race and gender for the differently positioned white women and those who are subjected to enslavement. The “happy childhood” that “passed away” and the illusory category of freedom on which it rested are represented as dying a mutual death for Jacobs’s testimony to begin. The “incidents” she narrates from the “life of a slave girl” are as much about the pedagogy of white girlhood and white womanhood within the master’s household as they are about the enslavement of Black girls and women. Although Jacobs initially centers on the

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racial and gendered construction of childhood, she does so in order to examine the complex affiliations and antagonisms that arise among women within conditions of slavery. This strategy connects the betrayal of Jacobs’s mother, whose female owner promised her manumission, to Jacobs’s resistance later in life to having her freedom purchased by sympathetic white friends. Slavery, she argues, is enabled by white saviors. Although Jacobs has been read as offering an episodic narrative based on incidents within the temporality of enslaved girlhood, this reading effaces Jacobs as adult author, narrator, and subject of the majority of the text. The text is structured through direct address to white women readers, which emphasizes Jacobs’s status as an adult, and dispatches with a narrative of girlhood in the early chapters. Yet Jacobs’s status as adult abolitionist and author keeps getting re-forgotten.9 Self-representation in slave narratives is fraught. As Janet Neary explains, “Confronted by and actually acutely aware of the skepticism directed at black narrators, ex-slave narrators developed sophisticated and resourceful ways of satisfying the authenticating conventions of the genre while undermining the underlying racial implications and motivations of those conventions.”10At pains to present their authorship as legitimate at a time when their literacy was a crime, authors of slave narratives amplified the testimonial dimension of life writing—namely, its claim to tell the truth from the perspective of the eyewitness. Authentication of this genre has a perilous history for ex-slave narrators, including Jacobs. The black testimonial voice is vulnerable to the false accusation that its true speaker is the white abolitionist who appropriates it in order to propagandize.11 In an undated letter to the white abolitionist and Quaker Amy Post, Jacobs insists that her personal perspective is critical to the persuasive force of her text: “It must be the slave’s own story—which it truly is.”12 In addition to relying on the convention of the white sponsor to establish the veracity of the narrative, a role Lydia Maria Child played in Incidents, Jacobs drew from a wide range of literary and cultural forms, not only to lend her experience authority but also to demonstrate her literary fluency.13 Jean Fagan Yellin compounds what we consider mutually supportive but distinguishable objectives in her description of the narrative’s unprecedented characteristics: Incidents is, to my knowledge, the only slave narrative that takes as its subject the sexual exploitation of female slaves—thus centering on sexual oppression as well as on oppression of race and conditions; it is, to my knowledge, the only slave narrative that identifies its audience

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as female; it is, to my knowledge, the only slave narrative written in the style of sentimental fiction; and my work suggests that it may be the first full-length slave narrative by a woman to be published in this country.14

Scholars have identified the many literary forms Jacobs adapted, as well as the specifically gendered quality of her revisions. Through her uses of Garrisonian abolitionism, the seduction novel, spiritual autobiography, and the sentimental novel, Jacobs develops an account of the gendered violence of slavery that distinguishes her text within the archive of primarily male slave narratives.15 Within this formal web of adaptation and mediated testimony, Jacobs balances the risks of the sentimental novel (with its incitement to rescue) against the sympathy necessary to her alternative political pedagogy by modeling some aspects of her narrative on the bildungsroman, the novel of development associated with a national framing of the education of the narrator and itself an autobiographical discourse allied in U.S. literature with the rags-to-riches plot. The traditional “I” of the bildungsroman confers the authority of experience central to Jacobs’s understanding of the power of her antislavery polemic, yet Jacobs does not turn this authority solely toward crafting an autonomous “I.” Instead, she insists on a “we” as the subject of cross-racial solidarity against brutal forms of subjection. Such a subject understands that “rescue” would at best offer partial and temporary relief for the “the two millions of women at the South, still in bondage.”16 Jacobs develops a “we” from the “I” through her use of direct address. Although her readership certainly included African Americans, women and men, and white men, Jacobs addresses her narrative to white women of the North and explicitly enlists their political sympathy. Her audience is called to witness and is thereby constituted as having a particular relation to the author: But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely! If slavery had been abolished, I, also, could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws; and I should have been spared the painful task of confessing what I am now about to relate.17

Jacobs acknowledges disidentification (“do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely!”) as she continues to invoke girlhood as both shared and

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wildly different. Jacobs’s use of direct address reminds readers of the adult woman narrating the “incidents” and not only the “slave girl.” Jacobs foregrounds the gendered dimensions of the struggle for freedom by claiming: “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”18 She details scenes of trauma familiar to slave narratives. However, Jacobs is distinctive in representing sexual violation and the inability to protect herself and her children as the grounds of an ethical appeal premised on the belief that her readers would sympathize as women, that this feeling would not only arise as second nature, but could also become political such that women would feel as women with her and act as citizens on behalf of those still enslaved. Thus, she offers her girlhood as a stage of female identification not to provoke a rescue sensibility but to incite antislavery activism. She does this by guiding the reader through direct address to identify with the girl’s vulnerability but not to become absorbed in the spectacle of her suffering. She does not await rescue in some textual locale removed from all possibility of change, permanently suffering in the reader’s imagination. Instead, the present tense voice of the adult Jacobs reminds readers to think of Jacobs and themselves as adult political actors. More subtly, Jacobs introduces another form of cross-racial kinship through her narrative of how the women in her family were owned by and passed down as gifts and inherited property to white girls by white women. The practice of white girls being given slave girls as gifts indoctrinated them early into practices of slave-owning and instilled sticky intimacies into exploitative relations. Jacobs pointedly refers to the white infants who nursed with their black counterparts at black mothers’ breasts not only as “foster” children, using a conventional term, but to those children so nursed as foster siblings. She uncovers the obvious generational connection between the children and their shared paternity. When Jacobs adopted the pseudonym Linda Brent, she acknowledged the ongoing danger to her and her family represented by the Fugitive Slave Law and the tenacity with which the slaveowner Flint (a pseudonym for Dr. James Norcom) pursued her. Flint began his sexual predation of Jacobs when she was fifteen. She describes her struggle against this particular assault as the “war of my life.”19 Although she makes use of conventional tropes of piety and morality to win sympathy for her entrapment by Flint, she is forthright about her sexual stratagem of accepting the sexual interest and protection of white neighbor and lawyer Mr. Sands (a pseudonym for Samuel Tredwell Sawyer), with whom she had two children: “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you,

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except that which he claims by kindness and attachment.”20 Jacobs reinforces her female audience’s views of marriage and propriety, but also asks them to admit enslaved women into those views while challenging the notion that white women in the South remained unaffected by the sexual violations that were the lot of enslaved women. Jacobs urges white women to consider the slave owner’s depravity as well as the fallacious footing on which the white wife’s claim to piety and Christian morality rests. Jacobs connects white men’s monstrous power in slavery to the limited power of Sands and the twisted jealousies of white wives to the entrapment and grit of enslaved women within the structures of law and culture that perpetuate these arrangements. Moreover, in her transactional choice of Sands, Jacobs shows that rescue is a failed paradigm for imagining intervention in slavery. Sands never purchased Jacobs’s freedom or that of their children. He did not rescue her, and rather than see this as a failure in the romance plot, Jacobs intensifies her political pedagogy by showing her readers that the nexus of shame, romance, and morality is part of a specifically racial formation that legalizes rape and forced childbearing and prevents any safety in the kinship ties and sexual relations of those in bondage. Direct address on this topic focuses white women readers on their identification with Jacobs as a woman (neither they nor she is married to a slave owner) and forestalls the disidentification with her as a “fallen woman” in need of salvation. Indeed, in her discussion of sex and violence, Jacobs invites white women readers to see her as a woman who is like them —not in spite of race, but because of it—through her representation of gendered violence. She shifts from eliciting connection through her self-representation of girlhood to her self-representation as a mother. Indeed, Jacobs offers a striking example of how the sympathy she seeks from northern white women fails spectacularly in the South in the person of Mrs. Flint. Jacobs presents Mrs. Flint not only as collateral damage of the sexual violence white slave owners direct toward enslaved women, but also as a functioning agent of violence. Certain that Mrs. Flint is aware of the steadily increasing number of children born to enslaved women, Jacobs describes how Mrs. Flint accuses Jacobs and other women of seducing the men. Jacobs attributes to Mrs. Flint questions she anticipated from her white female readership. Mrs. Flint’s presence in the narrative is admonitory. Too vivid and lurid to be spectral, even in a striking scene of gothic haunting, Mrs. Flint is an emissary to the readerly conscience of white women, a warning to resist their (potential) identification and complicity with her.

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Meanings of rescue shift in historical periods, to be sure, and across racial, ethnic, and social locations. In the case of Harriet Jacobs, rescue was illegal. The Fugitive Slave Law (1850) required citizens in the North not to attempt or permit rescue. Further, they were enjoined to abort any attempt to deliver her from the harm of slavery. Thus, Jacobs cannot simply stir the sentiments of her white female audience; she must instruct them in how to “rescue” her. Jacobs was assisted in introducing her narrative to a wide audience by Lydia Maria Child, as we mentioned above, and was supported in bringing her trauma narrative to language by the witness of Amy Post, but their support was material and effective within specific circumstances rather than a part of a simple rescue plot. No doubt an insidious aspect of the rescue plot is its power to rewrite history retrospectively into its ideological confines. Indeed, as Yellin showed, the support of Child and Post was distorted, including the false view that Child had written the narrative. But there is another dimension of Jacobs’s testimonial narrative and abolitionist pedagogy centered on gendered childhood. Not only are enslaved girls taught who they are and what they will be forced to do within the domestic sphere of the plantation economy, white children are taught to be enslavers through the practice of white mothers giving their daughters girls as slaves. Rather than marking out the freedom of childhood as damaged, even violated, by race, as if the imposition of such crude categories lay outside the state of innocence attributed to childhood, Jacobs demonstrates that all freedom is illusory in conditions of enslavement. Those human gifts become a legacy enabling the generational transmission of wealth for the Norcom family. They inherit Jacobs’s mother’s children, they distribute them among themselves, and they seek to rape them in order to increase their wealth. To all of this, Jacobs bears witness. Not only to incidents or to scenes of sexual predation and violation, but to how racial capitalism fueled over generations by slavery operates through the most intimate relational bonds and actions of which girlhood is a part. Never the best seller that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass were, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl lies between the poles of Stowe’s sentimental fiction and Douglass’s slave narrative.21 Jacobs’s critique of racial capitalism, in particular its reproduction through rape, gifts, and inheritance, inaugurates a form of feminist testimonial autobiography and an intersectional tradition of life writing grounded in the representation of girlhood as a means to

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make an ethical claim on readers. As her insistent interruption of narrated scenes demonstrates, Jacobs does not trust her readers to take her point. Instead, she exhorts and guides them, not only because she seeks a sympathetic response, but also because she is more ambivalent about the reliability of sentiment than Stowe. Stowe uses sentimental fiction to make the white reader “feel right” and focuses on the white subject’s change of heart. Jacobs is willing to leave far less to sentiment than Stowe. Her strategies travel through sentiment, even risk it, but do not end at the heart. Lauren Berlant observes that compassion “implies a social relation between spectators and sufferers.”22 Given the unpredictability and inadequacy of emotional response, Jacobs bolsters the social relation she sought to create with her readers by offering a raced and gendered parallel story to the rags-to-riches narrative of “the rise” in U.S. literature. No less central to a national ideology of classlessness than the rise, the tale of rescue genders citizenship, heroism, harm, and agency. Refocused by Jacobs to tell a life story, it also highlights the testimonial dimension of autobiography that women of color will adapt and extend into an influential and broad tradition stretching into the twenty-first century, as we will show. The extent to which white and black women in the United States came to understand their lived reality—politically, legally, and intimately—in relation to each other is part of a complex history of race and feminism. In her strategic use of an autobiographical narrative of her own girlhood, a dynamic of racialized direct address, and the eliciting of affect not just to “feel right” but to act right, Jacobs insisted that black and white women did not occupy static roles vis-à-vis each other. White women were educated by black women about abolition and issues of citizenship through a moral and political prism, but the pedagogy was broader socially and deeper personally. Not only did white women learn how to think about the yoke of slavery, they were also given hard lessons about marriage and masculinity, whiteness and the family. The status of the personal story is central to this pedagogy, and at its core it is a story about girlhood and the politics of rescue. Unlike the tale of a temporarily disadvantaged, atomistic white male subject who rises to cross class boundaries, the revised feminist of color rescue narrative depends on articulating how race and gender create suffering and how they might be harnessed to create change. The “rise” is about the absorption of particularity; success is about joining rather than reinforcing the ideology of individual achievement. In contrast, Jacobs places cross-racial female solidarity and institutional change at the center of her project, fraught as that potential alliance must be. In this way, Jacobs enjoins the figure of the child in a political project that differs from the one

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that Stowe imagines, but more closely aligns with Frederick Douglass’s representation of childhood as less sentimental than civic.23 Jacobs’s rhetorical decisions to interject direct address and to control how she narrates scenes of sexual violation exemplify her characteristic contribution to life writing as a form of political analysis. First, she connects the legality of slavery to the laws of inheritance in order to demonstrate how racial capitalism consolidates the lives, bodies, and labor (including reproduction) of those racially designated as black into the wealth of those racially designated as white.24 The injustice and arbitrariness of racialization is underscored every time Jacobs writes “white women” when she describes shared female vulnerability and virtue and her exposure to extreme and ongoing harm. Second, she connects her narrative of enslavement and escape to the illusory nature of freedom, including sexual freedom. When agents of Flint pursue her, her white friends offer to purchase her. For them, this expedient is demanded by circumstance. They are abolitionists and support emancipation, but feel compelled to offer freedom to their friend as an individual directly in harm’s way. They are surprised that Jacobs would continue to choose flight because they mistake that securing her purchase equals freedom. It does not. The tension between confession and testimony in the long history of self-representation pits the subject who must abase herself before authority, admit error, do penance, and seek atonement against the subject who bears witness to harm and seeks justice. Confession is saturated in sin, shame, and secrecy, but it is also the discourse of victims who have been blamed so effectively that they blame themselves, confirming Foucault’s analysis of the relations among sex, discipline, and power.25 Testimony, in contrast, aims to shift shame and the responsibility for suffering from victims to perpetrators. Confession and testimony are interwoven and sometimes coincide, as when Jacobs embeds a chapter titled “Confession” in her testimonial narrative. In “Confession,” Jacobs returns to the shameful residue of her relationship with Sands, a transactional arrangement in which she exercised agency within constraint and agreed to a sexual relationship with him to protect her from a worse arrangement with Flint. After the adult Jacobs has accepted her brother William’s offer to help send her daughter Ellen, with whom she has been happily reunited for two years in Boston, to boarding school, Jacobs says she has something to tell Ellen. The scene recalls a revelation in a previous chapter in which Jacobs briefly reunites with her children after hiding for seven years in her grandmother’s attic. Jacobs insists that Ellen keep the secret that she has seen her mother as Jacobs prepares to flee.

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Ellen solemnly makes this vow, and keeps her word. Her identity becomes the one who can keep her mother’s secret, the one who can exercise some agency through her strategic silence. In “Confession,” Jacobs intends to reveal to Ellen the secret of her father’s identity. But Ellen already knows and narrates an autobiographical scene of her own girlhood from the perspective of young adulthood in order to allay her mother’s pain. Rather than enter into the scene of childhood knowledge as a child, she represents the difference between what she felt at the time and what she knows now. Such a flexible understanding of what Sharon Marcus has called “a self that could differ from itself over time”26 demonstrates a reorientation toward trauma rather than its repetition as the subject’s identity. Moreover, in this narrative Jacobs embeds the scene of her daughter as a tutorial within abolitionist pedagogy. Ellen’s child self was pained when she lived with Sands, a man she knew was her father because Sands’s white daughter’s nurse told Ellen. Sands never showed Ellen the love that the daughter designated as white received: “I used to wish he would take me in his arms and kiss me, as he did Fanny. . . . I thought if he was my own father, he ought to love me.”27 As wounded as young Ellen was by this knowledge and experience, Jacobs has older Ellen mark the temporality of her changed perspective: “I was a little girl then, and didn’t know any better. But now I never think anything about my father. All my love is for you.”28 Jacobs is quoting Ellen, marking her as a testimonial subject within a chapter titled “Confession,” and a subject who uses memory and self-representation flexibly to indicate change rather than simply narrate external events in which she is trapped. Jacobs places a model of the generational transmission of life writing about girlhood within her narrative as another pedagogical moment linking testimony to racial justice.

I, Rigoberta Menchú Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio, first published in 1983, took shape in interviews with Elisabeth Burgos-Debray in Paris in January 1982. The boundaries of their collaboration would become part of a scandal over truth telling and authorship that blew up after the narrative had already achieved a broad readership and secured a place in college curricula.29 For many social justice syllabi and pedagogies, Menchú’s testimonio enabled a rich focus on Latin American political histories, feminist Indigeneity projects, liberation theology, Marxist politics, and transnational humanitarianism.30 BurgosDebray as the Venezuelan anthropologist who delivers the brown woman’s

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story was always an ambiguous helper. Burgos-Debray’s academic training, political bona fides, and social prestige credentialed her to authenticate the “Other” woman’s story. However, the presence of a presumably more educated assistant enabled hostile audiences to discredit Menchú by attributing authorship to Burgos-Debray and characterizing the published work as propaganda. At issue here is the ease with which women’s political narratives can be absorbed into colonial discourses that hold minoritized women, no matter their age, in the familiar role of vulnerable girls. In her introduction to the book, Burgos-Debray notes that she initially tried to offer Menchú a “schematic outline, a chronology: childhood, adolescence, family, involvement in the struggle. . . . As we continued, Rigoberta made more and more digressions, introduced descriptions of cultural practices into her story and generally upset my chronology.”31 Burgos-Debray defaults to a Western model for organizing a political autobiography, but Menchú effectively resists and in turn adapts the story of an individual girlhood to stand as a gateway to the narrative of a people. When Menchú arrives in Paris to record her life story, Burgos-Debray notes that she is dressed in traditional clothing, which makes her appear to Burgos-Debray as younger than she is. Yet it is clear Menchú is no longer a girl: “I am twenty-three years old. This is my testimony. I didn’t learn it from a book and I didn’t learn it alone. I’d like to stress that it’s not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people.”32 As John Beverly’s definition of testimonio clarifies, Menchú did not dictate either a Western comingof-age story or the tidy ethnographic account Burgos-Debray sought. According to Beverly, Menchú was adapting a different genre: “Testimonio is a narrative . . . told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts.”33 This was not her only surprise. Not only did Menchú transform the testimonial and political expectations of her Parisian hosts, she also refused to become the target of the politics of rescue. Instead, Menchú rewrites their expectations in order to establish the position from which she speaks. Like Harriet Jacobs, she begins with the epistemology and temporality of childhood. At age five, she is tasked with caring for her younger brother, but observes that her mother cooks for the workers and picks coffee, too. “Watching her made me feel useless and weak because I couldn’t do anything to help her except look after my brother. That’s when my consciousness was born.”34 When she turns eight, she starts to earn money and the gendered lessons come into focus:

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This is when you see the situation of women in Guatemala very clearly. Most of the women who work picking cotton and coffee, or sometimes cane, have nine or ten children with them. Of these, three or four will be more or less healthy, and can survive, but most of them have bellies swollen from malnutrition and the mother knows that four or five of her children could die.35

At ten, Quiché girls become adults and the community holds a meeting to mark the transition: “Not the life of a young girl but adult life with all its responsibilities. I’m no longer a child, I become a woman. So in front of my parents, in front of my brothers and sisters, I promised to do many things for the community.”36 She chooses to forgo marriage and children for political speech on a global scale. When she meets with BurgosDebray, she is the adult who has made these decisions and shared them publicly within her cultural and activist networks. That Burgos-Debray prompts Menchú to narrate her life in ways that would turn her into a more familiar kind of brown girl— dependent, young, and in need of both material assistance and political strategy—is consistent with the politics of rescue that arise even within progressive movements. We should not miss how Menchú redirects the interview to narrate girlhood as an aspect of the cultural traditions she is politicizing. Both Jacobs and Menchú connect girlhood to adulthood for political purposes. Representing themselves as girls allows them to harness temporality—time passing, coming-of-age—to the project of representing political consciousness and, therefore, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s terms, to reconnect the two meanings of representation necessary for nondominant speech (both “speaking for” and presenting/staging). Jacobs and Menchú narrate their girlhoods in order to stage the dissonant knowledge that ideology naturalizes state violence. Jacobs refuses to structure childhood primarily as lost innocence; instead, she shifts within the particularities of her situation to represent her innocence as an illusion, to be sure, but one her family was able to create for her. As with Jacobs, the politicized representation of girlhood offers Menchú the grounds for critique rather than scenes conjuring nostalgic longing. Beyond this, the story of girlhood as told by Jacobs and Menchú uses racial address to resist the position of woman-as-victim seeking help from woman-as-rescuer. Jacobs and Menchú speak as adults; they possess experience and knowledge and therefore seek neither from dominant readers. Although the grounds of sympathy are created through the figure of the girl, the woman bearing witness is an adult. She asks neither for analysis nor explanation of her per-

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sonal misery nor rescue of her girlhood self, but rather for political support for a larger cause she articulates. For Menchú, however, the use of this narrative strategy risks other misreadings, including the capacity of neoliberalism to assimilate colonial and insurgent self-representation alike into a model of development. As María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo argues, “Menchú challenges revolutionary developmentalism and risks activating an ethnonationalist developmentalism of its own.”37 Following this important caution, the lack of a rhetorically or materially pure position suggests that both the coming-of-age narrative and the testimonio rely on a normative theory of human transformation for their identification and polemic appeal. If both readings are possible, then what leverage can Menchú exert on the politics of rescue? Following U.S. anthropologist David Stoll’s assertion, repeated in the New York Times, that Menchú was not the truthful eyewitness she had claimed to be—that she had not witnessed her brother’s immolation and that she had received more schooling than she described—scholars found embedded in the narrative of her girlhood rather a more forthright assertion by this nonnormative confessional subject: She did not intend to tell all or to produce a specifically Western and legal version of truth, and she did not wish to be an object of colonial voyeurism and rescue. Instead, she intended to exercise considerable discretion over the narrative, a choice largely overlooked in the rush of enthusiastic embrace and then disavowal, by a limited readership, of her narrative. In the meantime, it should be noted, Menchú had moved on and in 2015 her story was vindicated.38 Like Jacobs, the girl in the narrative had long ago become a woman. Neither the actual or available target of rescue or condemnation, the girl had incited a crisis in identification and judgment that could not precisely call her to account. The controversy around the book certainly demonstrated that a published autobiographical narrative could be judged by evidentiary standards of truth telling more legalistic than literary, but the specific events about which Menchú was said to have lied—the level of education she received as a girl, her eyewitness account of her brother’s murder—were experiences of childhood. Even when the adult Menchú spoke to clarify the controversy, it was as if the woman herself, a Nobel laureate no less, could not displace the preferred voice of the wounded girl. Just as transnational feminisms allow us to track the possibilities and limits of alliance and dissonance between and among adult women, this perspective underlies the insistence of Jacobs and Menchú that we think about girls’ experiences as equally complex and disparate. This complexity

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is often overshadowed by understandings of girlhood as a developmental stage, where, as Saldaña-Portillo acutely observes, such understandings are readily assimilable to a discourse of development. In these theorizations, the girl exists with neither political investments nor agency of her own. They produce a girlhood cleaved off from political and social contexts and the lived experiences of the traumas of war, genocide, and displacement that truncate putative trajectories from innocent girlhood to knowledgeable adulthood. For Jacobs in the nineteenth century, Menchú in the twentieth, and Satrapi in the twenty-first, however, girlhood is a complex discursive, material, and social location that provides dynamic, if volatile, material for engaging with the politics of rescue. Ultimately, they turn the dynamics of racialized address toward a counterpedagogy of girlhood that, as we demonstrate in the following section on Marjane Satrapi’s graphic narrative Persepolis, has multiple and sometimes competing effects.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood Originally published in France to wide acclaim, Persepolis arrived in the United States in 2003 and like Menchú’s testimonio and Jacobs’s autobiography, Satrapi’s memoir in comics form exceeds classification as an individual account as it bears witness to a violent history. Satrapi’s best-selling graphic memoir was a popular success, lauded as a New York Times Notable Book, a Time magazine Best Comix of the Year, and a San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times Best Seller. Persepolis continues to elicit scholarly attention and like Incidents and I, Rigoberta is a canonical text in a larger antiracist, feminist curriculum.39 A sequel, Persepolis 2, was released in the U.S. in 2005 and focuses on an older, more complicated protagonist who serves as a counterpoint to the vulnerable girl offered in Persepolis.40 An animated film version of the two graphic memoirs was released in 2007. The movie focuses more on part 1 than part 2 of the memoir and restructures Satrapi’s story line to fit with narratives of fictive universal girlhood in which a young persecuted girl finds freedom in the West. Persepolis is one of many autobiographical projects produced by diasporic Iranian women, including Azar Nafisi’s 2003 best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.41 Most of the popular reviews and scholarly critiques of Persepolis focus on the figure of the child as genderless subject. Satrapi herself refers to her story as one about childhood rather than girlhood. As our analysis of Jacobs and Menchú makes clear, it is crucial to tease out the particularity of girlhood as a form of gendered childhood

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that adult women use for political purposes in life writing because representations of the girl within narratives of rescue are intimately tied to how we think about adult women’s political agency, especially as those arise in particular places and times. Satrapi’s use of the girl as a vehicle through which to narrate a personal story of social violence extends the intersectional tradition of life writing we lay out in this chapter. Uninterested in positing a universal girlhood contingent on a facile sisterhood that often positions brown girls as subjects in need of rescue by the West, Satrapi joins the resistant tradition that Jacobs and Menchú represent by crafting rhetorical and visual pedagogies that seek to educate. Jacobs and Menchú actively resist playing into the cooptation of their girlhoods because they position themselves as experts who use the figure of the girl as a way to appeal to their audience in the name of political action. They do so from the position of an adult who refracts her girlhood through her experiences as a woman in unjust contexts. The girl offers a subject that warrants sympathy, and the adult narrator plays on the adult readers’ emotions in order to politicize affect. Satrapi, too, relies on the girl to elicit compassion; however, the popularity of Satrapi’s text is due in part to its potential to support the imaginary link between the vulnerable girl and the disempowered adult female political subject. Satrapi reorients this neoliberal pedagogical apparatus toward educating the West about the complexities of a region largely represented in journalism and popular media through stereotype. Satrapi seeks to educate Western readers about Iran and Islam; however, the West is difficult to de-center as a privileged site of knowledge. In her preface, she asserts that “an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.”42 Satrapi both widens her frame beyond extremism in order to reshape popular opinion and narrows it to focus on her family. This is consequential, for those privileged Western readers to whom the book is addressed have the tools to interrupt monolithic discourses about all Muslim girls as subjects in need of rescue. Yet Satrapi’s strategy differs from the political interventions sought by Jacobs and Menchú when they took the risk of writing about their experiences. Unlike Menchú who is brought up to “suffer” and Jacobs who is born into slavery, Satrapi must dampen rather than incite her readers’ propensity to engage. As a daughter of educated, professional parents, she enjoyed a privileged childhood until 1979. Moreover, because she grows up in a “progressive” family, Satrapi complicates stereotypes of Muslim men as violent and representations of life in Iran as exclusively repressive. Her parents

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have the resources to save her, and the end of the memoir depicts Marji’s departure to Vienna. Satrapi’s own aims to memorialize her martyred family and compatriots who resisted the Cultural Revolution in Iran, as well as the Iran she lost, trump the girls-in-crisis discourse that seeks to erase her experience. Persepolis landed in the United States amid a post-9/11 rescue discourse, exemplified by Laura Bush’s November 17, 2001, radio address about terrorism’s toll on the women and girls of Afghanistan. Bush justified military aggression and human rights violations on behalf of the “veiled” brown girl in need of saving. Islam was conflated with fundamentalism, and all Muslim women and girls were seen as equally subject to male violence, a stereotype that continues into the present moment.43 Satrapi’s work makes explicit the stakes of an unexamined politics of rescue in which a universalized girl is simultaneously central and superfluous to her own survival. Thus, Satrapi’s Persepolis draws attention to and critiques a larger context of popular and humanitarian discourses in which the girl circulates. Satrapi juxtaposes her everyday coming-of-age experiences—playing with friends, fighting with her parents, smoking her first cigarette, and reveling in Western popular cultural icons, such as Iron Maiden, Kim Wilde, and Michael Jackson—with remembrances of the political turmoil around her (Figure 1). Satrapi uses her access to and enjoyment of Western pop culture to distinguish herself from the “fundamentalists” that surround her. In a chapter titled “Kim Wilde,” Marji’s parents go to Istanbul, Turkey, where they buy their daughter things banned during the Islamic Revolution, including a denim jacket, chocolate, Nike sneakers, and posters of Kim Wilde and Iron Maiden.44 When thirteen-year-old Marji goes for a walk in her new clothes, she is stopped by the members of the women’s branch of the Guardians of the Revolution. The women harass Marji for wearing sneakers, tight jeans, a denim jacket, and a Michael Jackson pin that one of the women calls a “symbol of decadence.”45 The chapter ends with a graphic of an unveiled Marji, long hair swinging wildly, singing and dancing defiantly to her forbidden tape “We’re the Kids in America.” In her drawing of bodily movement in the protected space of a teenager’s bedroom, Satrapi affirms benefits touted by Western neoliberalism, such as an individual’s right to freedom of expression and choice. Satrapi, however, is protesting the recent imposition of restriction, but the extent to which she can be read as a rebellious teen (hence, abstracted from her actual conditions of constraint and universalized) explains in part the popularity of the text and its use by conservatives and liberals alike.

Figure 1. Thirteen-year-old Marji enjoys clothes, music, and posters that her parents bring back from Turkey. Illustrations from PERSEPOLIS: THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD by Marjane Satrapi, translation copyright © 2003 by L’Association, Paris, France. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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As Satrapi separates herself from “fundamentalists,” she risks being read, at least in a North American context, as a universal subject. Most reviews of Persepolis in mainstream outlets categorize Satrapi’s story as a universal one that embraces an easy and uncomplicated multiculturalism in which everyone comes of age: “Marjane Satrapi is a typical headstrong girl on the cusp of adolescence: She questions her teachers, her parents and her society”; “Satrapi’s autobiography is a timely and timeless story of a young girl’s life under the Islamic Revolution”; and, “Satrapi could be any 10- to 14-year old, except that she lived in what might be called an exotic place—Iran.”46 Such reviews fail to mention Satrapi’s critiques of gendered violence or any other contradictions she faces as she comes of age in a globalized world. These reviews suggest that Satrapi’s work elicits a range of readings, including more normative ones that either ignore or reiterate the theme of girlhood rescue. Yet she resists the saving-girls paradigm represented in best-selling books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran. Whereas Nafisi speaks for and about the young women to whom she teaches the classics of Western literature, Satrapi dislodges the Muslim girl from her static role to tell her own story. In contrast to the students in Nafisi’s memoir who blur together, Persepolis opens with a section titled “The Veil” in which Satrapi offers a portrait of herself at age ten, one year after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “This is me when I was 10 years old. And this is a class photo. I’m sitting on the far left so you don’t see me. From left to right: Golnaz, Mahshid, Narine, Minna.”47 Satrapi begins with the evocative image of the veiled girl ubiquitous in Western rescue projects and provides names and physical distinctions for each one. Representing Iranian girls as diverse individuals, she emphasizes the link between gender and state violence, and she captures the complexity of how controlling women is part of the Cultural Revolution that some women support. The limits of her intervention in the discourse of girls and rescue rests on how her narrative is taken up in a range of contexts.

Testimony, The Politics of Rescue, and Life Writing by Women of Color The life writing by Satrapi, Menchú, and Jacobs interrupts representations that rely on and propound a view of girls who lack the legal, educational, and material means to negotiate their own circumstances. Through this representation, various publics are incited to imagine themselves as empowered to rescue these girls. When such images make vivid appeals for at-

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tention in the West, it is often because they constitute the “West” as a site of sympathy for “distant suffering.”48 The images and narratives may elicit pity and sympathy for girls by fostering feelings of benevolence in Western spectators and inspiring donor support. Girls of color are often rendered primitivistic within mainstream discourses as inhabitants of a “developing world” with little capacity to frame the grave circumstances that entrap them. Although images of gendered violence, war, and natural devastation prompt “crises of witnessing,”49 they do so within a model of affective engagement that displaces girls into an imaginary realm of undifferentiated violability and victimization. These representations seek to hide what Jacobs’s narrative makes clear—that racial capitalism is foundational to the lives of girls in the United States. These representations also hide what Menchú and Satrapi bring to the fore—that the very policies and interventions from the “Global North” are in part responsible for the kinds of crises that girls experience. A range of efforts to assist girls and their specific communities are thus mediated by an ideology that links girls and women across the globe through their intransigent vulnerability. This discourse can be called to account for its tendency toward pathos, to be sure, yet more for its participation in a homogenizing globalization that circulates images and stories of endangered girls but does little to elaborate the different legal, cultural, political, and geographical specifics necessary to craft workable forms of assistance for gendered violence. Instead, the figure of the permanently vulnerable girl and the politics of rescue incited through her contribute to the creation of a perpetual state of wounded girlhood fueled by agendas at odds with the particular girls they represent. Moreover, it deflects attention from racial and gender violence in the United States. Stripped of local context and redolent of colonial representation, these girls never grow up or out of crisis, achieve different positions in relation to crisis, or reflect shifting temporalities as they and circumstances change. The fictions of vulnerable girlhood flow in the same transit lanes that carry narratives of individual success and community prosperity touting the payoffs of globalization.50 Folding neatly into the narrative template of the rise, girlhood as a state of inescapable incapacity features the vulnerable girl and her better-positioned rescuers. Bound by her need and their sympathy, they forge a bond that enables the girl to rise from wretched circumstances and become a leader.51 This story line masks the economic interests that drive globalization, including the drastically unequal resources of education, health care, and safety, as well as the real needs of girls in

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diverse locations and experiences of urgent and chronic suffering. In so doing, this narrative presents a blandly undifferentiated girl of color in need of a particular form of rescue, namely, education and empowerment that results in her community’s increased openness to market capitalism. Although racialized girlhood is central to this story, the capacity to witness and respond to her actual suffering is mediated through the sympathetic rescuer who makes the girl’s need intelligible by identifying with it. Such narratives form a seemingly inescapable discursive trap by keeping danger in place and homogenizing girls of color in many different geographic areas and historical periods as subjects lacking agency en route to a gendered and diminished personhood. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak sums this up in her memorable phrase, “White men are saving brown women from brown men.”52 How might self-representation enable women of color to develop rhetorical strategies to be heard within the dynamics of racialization, conflicted models of cultural difference, and gender Spivak describes? Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú, and Satrapi’s Persepolis offer a range of national and transnational engagements with girlhood that mark the complicated ways in which the girl is tied to larger claims for justice by, to, and for women. These claims are inflected by differences among women, some of which are more stable than others and some of which are rendered dynamic, if partially so, by the transformative work of critique. To a large extent, Jacobs and Menchú use racialized address to offset the universalizing blandness of the rescue paradigm and restore a focus on and a pedagogy about the material realities women experience and represent, including the ubiquity of violence that marks their girlhoods. As witnesses to diverse global contexts, Jacobs and Menchú use retrospective narratives of girlhood to blend two story lines: comingof-age and coming to political consciousness. These narratives stage the achievement of political critique as a part of coming-of-age rooted in gendered experience. Coming-of-age as a woman is represented as a crisis in which the child is compelled by the presence of state-sponsored violence to take up her position within a system that injures women and girls of color in gender-specific ways, both by denying them their gendered role within their own culture and sexualizing the harm that can be done to them through this denial, and momentarily suspending them in relation to gender. Just as they cannot claim the security (or constraints) of gendered norms in their home cultures, neither can they transfer their identity to the subordinate gendered construction offered to them (or to elite women) by their antagonists.

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Moreover, by placing gender at the crossroads of coming-of-age and coming to political consciousness, the narratives yoke two potentially conflicting responses that arise within the project of constructing readerly sympathy in relation to race and cultural differences: identification and disidentification. Identification can be used to generate sympathy not only in distant potential allies, but also in proximate others who do not recognize the gap in their knowledge represented by the writer’s story. Identification is facilitated, even propelled, by life stories, yet it risks short-circuiting an encounter with difference by mirroring the reader’s self-image as a compassionate person worthy of being addressed. Disidentification, however, represents an obstacle to sympathy with the potential to recur even if it is intermittently overcome. Jacobs and Menchú both recognize their readers’ predisposition to see them as too remote in geographical location or circumstance, and this is the distance they must bridge through narrative means. By presenting their own coming to political consciousness as the result of the same experiences that bring them from childhood to gendered adulthood, Jacobs and Menchú situate the radicalism that inheres in their politics within the representation of themselves as girls who grew up. This linkage enables testimonial narrators to construct the grounds of sympathy and identification more, if not purely, on their own terms. Instead of functioning primarily as a figure for lost innocence, the girl in these autobiographical performances becomes an important vehicle for producing and performing knowledge: She learns, and readers may learn from her. Although expectations for gender and race in childhood differ across reading publics, both Jacobs and Menchú sought to engage dominant audiences. Through their use of their own girlhoods and a self-conscious mode of racialized direct address, they seek not only to mobilize them on their behalf, but on their own terms. Thus, Jacobs and Menchú anticipate the very problem with which Spivak begins “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; namely, the problematic confusion of two types of representation present in Karl Marx and in Jacques Derrida: vertretung, or political representation, and darstellung, or representation. She writes: “Two senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation’ as in art or philosophy.”53 The difference in the meanings and the indifference in the single word create a space in which the ideology of the subject can hide. Autobiographical narrative offers Jacobs and Menchú dynamic material with which to craft authority, for autobiography appears to offer the presence of the real person, speaking directly of the value of her or his life, even as this rhetoric is prone to the ideological

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indifference Spivak pinpoints. A large part of autobiography’s appeal can be attributed to the ethical claims it makes on our attention, and the personal story has a testimonial status compounded by legal variants of giving witness. Autobiographical narratives appear to speed selves and stories across the globe and deliver them whole. Yet the pathways of globalization that make the circulation of these narratives possible also carry ideology (via both definitions of representation) as a corollary discourse to autobiographical narrative.54 This makes for a fair amount of noise in the cultural transit lanes and can easily threaten to overwhelm speech that challenges hegemony. Autobiographical narratives that seek to challenge hegemony must engage with it, and here is where the rhetorical strategies of Jacobs, Menchú, and Satrapi gain traction and find resistance. Working within the genealogy of political first-person writing, they demonstrate how to move readers from the uncritical stance of ideological certainty to an interpretive space of new knowing, including politicized self-knowing, by focusing their narratives initially on their girlhoods. To continue to work with Spivak’s terms, we could say that for the subaltern, political representation does not arise within the conditions of asking the dominant for voice, or accepting voice on its terms, but from an alternative articulation in which political representation grows from staging the story differently. In a global era characterized by the consolidation of media, it sometimes seems as if a personal story is the best and worst way to communicate across differences. The absorptive capacities of ideology, as detailed in Spivak’s trenchant analysis, make the personal story a volatile form through which to seek justice. Autobiographical texts ought to be encountered with skepticism about the seductions of testimonial forms and their implied access to privileged self-knowledge and transparency. Following Inderpal Grewal and Arundhati Roy,55 Gillian Whitlock has cautioned that even “feminist liberatory narratives of movement from victimhood to freedom are not necessarily anti-imperialist.” Indeed, Whitlock targets a paradox embedded in autobiographical narratives: On one hand, these narratives make “history and crisis personal” and “can be an effective vehicle for ethical self-reflection”; on the other, they “can reduce the complexity of forces at work . . . to the personal frame” and thereby be conscripted, even against the author’s own impulses, into a colonial narrative.56 Insofar as Jacobs, Menchú, and Satrapi succeed in reaching their audiences, they do so in part because they appear to diverse elements within dominant audiences as educated, even as they remain vulnerable to misinterpretation. Although Jacobs’s narrative went from being believed as

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her own, to doubted, and back to being believed, her rhetorical strategies must be credited, as they are by Yellin and contemporary critics, in providing readers across history with a trail to her truth. Although Menchú’s narrative has been caught up in controversy, the controversy itself, as with Jacobs, is informed by the politics of rescue and the production of vulnerable girls and disempowered women. Jacobs, Menchú, and Satrapi do not choose autobiographical narratives of gendered childhood in order to universalize human suffering, wring pathos from the spectacle of an at-risk girl, or develop identification with readers via the shared experience of the fiction of global girlhood. Instead, girlhood is a testimonial site through which feminist political critique and self-representation flow toward other women imagined as empowered subjects. Through this circuit of feminist knowledge new forms of engagement develop.

chapter 2

Gender Pessimism and Survivor Storytelling in the Memoir Boom: Girl, Interrupted, Autobiography of a Face, and Nanette “Quite often social contrariness and a generally pessimistic outlook are observed.” . . . I’ll admit to the generally pessimistic outlook. Freud had one, too. —susanna kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

We women cannot begin the re-vision of our own bodies . . . until we come to see that even when the mastery of the disciplines of femininity produces a triumphant result, we are still only women. —sandra lee bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression

An alternative to Freudian-based trauma theory arises in the lineage of autobiographical literature we trace in this book that foregrounds the ethics of witnessing while suspending doubt about the first-person author, and imagines the unfolding of testimony in an “alternative jurisdiction”— or forum of judgment—where an adequate witness may emerge to hold accounts of pain.1 As we demonstrated in chapter 1, the narratives teach readers to bear witness to stories that have complex timelines, unclear trajectories, and often begin in childhood. This chapter focuses on life writing and performance in which the temporality of gendered coming of age is interrupted by trauma and in which pessimism about gender is made visible. Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir about her stay in McLean psychiatric hospital, Girl, Interrupted; Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, which describes her diagnosis and treatment for cancer; and Hannah Gadsby’s autobiographical stand-up Hannah Gadsby: Nanette about male violence confront how girls and women are disciplined to align with normative heterosexual white womanhood.2

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Adult life writers like Kaysen, Grealy, and Gadsby who address childhood trauma may immure trauma within narrative, suspending the process of grieving, rebuilding, and surviving by holding onto a story that was formed early in the aftermath of the traumatic event. Life writing by women of color and white women speaks to the chronic, everyday quality of oppression in women’s lives, but does so from within different histories and specific locations. In texts reaching back to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú, literary memoirs such as Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, and solo performances such as Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, resituate trauma theory’s claim of unrepresentability in the interval of interpretation where doubt about women’s credibility and value lurks. The representational strategy Jacobs developed in Incidents to engage diverse audiences through a narrative of girlhood finds an important echo in the 1990s memoir boom in which Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face shift the focus from the co-location of “black injury and white privilege” to a renewed mystification of the sources of gendered trauma associated with girlhood as a condition.3 White memoirists Kaysen and Grealy describe experiences of childhood and adolescent gendered suffering, but their preference for episodic narration over a sustained engagement with the historical dimensions of the intersections of race, gender, and privilege means that context remains largely offstage even as they highlight the social construction of gendered injury and white privilege. The result is pessimism about gender itself.

Gender Pessimism In the early 1980s feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan suggested that women’s moral development differs from men’s and that girls struggle against “losing voice” in early adolescence.4 That work was later extended through the Project on the Psychology of Women and the Development of Girls at Harvard Graduate School of Education and published in a variety of studies in the 1990s, reframing female adolescence as a time of crisis.5 During the same period, Sandra Lee Bartky theorized femininity as a discipline aimed at producing docile gendered subjects through the repetition of practices designed to groom, condition, and confine women to expectations about their subordinate role in such a way that they identified these practices as their own desires. Through the enforced reduction of their right to take up space, the discipline of femininity made women

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strive to shrink. In the mid 1990s as the memoir boom was coming into view as an unprecedented period of book publishing by previously marginalized writers about various forms of trauma (from racism to mental illness and sexual abuse), girlhood was explicitly addressed by adult women in self-representation.6 Thus, at the same time that popular and academic cultures were preoccupied with the voicelessness of girls, life writing by women proclaimed that gendering traumatizes girls.7 The girlhood at the center of both movements was classed and raced, as writers of color and queer writers asserted intersectional sources of oppression rather than gender per se. Gender pessimism states that girls might retain their feistiness in the compromised form of “girl power”; however, they remain “merely” girls in a culture that sees them as less valuable than boys. They grow into women who are less valuable than men. They may resist and, when they do, they will be well served by their anger, but they will not be hailed as heroes who overcome challenges on the way to becoming women. Nor are feminists the only ones who see gender as a glass half-full. Some critics of contemporary feminism exhibit gender pessimism when they decry efforts to support girls by saying it disadvantages boys.8 They fear that boys will be shortchanged if girls are not gendered as inferior to them, or if boys are subjected to the same lessons in minding authority and playing nice as girls. Girls of color are often read within this framework as anomalous: punished rather than celebrated for retaining their voices through adolescence in schools, court, and public spaces.9 The entangling of gender pessimism with race, girlhood, and trauma is part of the history of psychoanalysis and the study of gendered childhood. This history includes how Freud developed the talking cure through his work with adolescent female patients. Because the witness is integral to autobiographical accounts of trauma, illness, and pain, we want to contend here with the claim of the unrepresentability of pain in trauma theory, which relies on Freud, and also with the persistence of this claim. Pain demands a witness. Yet trauma theory as it has developed from readings of Freud centers the genres of the interview, the case study, documentary film, myth, poetry, and the fable.10 From this lineage, we learn, according to Elaine Scarry, that “to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.”11 As resilient a notion in trauma studies as “loss of voice” is in feminist psychological conceptualizations of girlhood, the inexpressibility of trauma is oft-repeated, despite the more nuanced analysis of language and trauma by the very scholars associated with that claim.

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Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, and Gadsby’s Nanette challenge orthodox ideas about the unrepresentability of trauma, using literary memoir and autobiographical performance to shift the burden of being the target of a diagnosis that pathologizes gender and anger and place it, instead, onto the structures that sustain white male privilege.

Memoir as Alternative Case File Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir Girl, Interrupted is a slim volume. Its 136 pages of episodic narrative chapters are interleaved with 12 pages of reproductions of actual documents, and 3 pages about borderline personality transcribed directly from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Both the medical documents and the form of their reproduction are important to establishing the terms of the conflict she describes between her version of events and the official, psychiatric record. The threat posed by the inclusion of notes from her medical file centers on authority: Will the actual documents overwhelm her account with their stubborn claim to objectivity and alien form? Or will they become fully integrated into the narrative through Kaysen’s analysis of them? Kaysen manages the conflict through juxtaposition and argument: The documents and the narrative chapters stand alone: They are brief and her authority envelops them. In effect, her memoir represents an alternative case file, the subject of which is an interpretive struggle rather than an illness. The alternative case file offers Kaysen the autobiographer an authority that Kaysen the young patient lacked. Kaysen represents her adolescent suffering as both pathological and also within the range of gendered female unhappiness. Instead of offering this ambiguity as a symptom for psychiatric diagnosis, she reclaims it as the grounds from which her adult interpretation must build. She recasts her unease about her diagnosis (and its medical context) as an interpretive dilemma to unfold for readers. This opens two lines of critical thinking: one, on psychiatric diagnosis and treatment (and its limitations) and the other, on a search for the conditions that destabilized her and the risk and violence expressed in the suicidal symptom that set her on the path to a two-year commitment at McLean.12 Suicide is an important form of violence in the lives of the adolescent girls at McLean. It distills gender pessimism to a lethal form and links the girls through their shared vulnerability to predatory male violence. Kaysen probes the suicide attempts of young women who arrive at McLean in the

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aftermath of thwarted self-killing, suicides that happen after a patient is released, and, in this context, her own attempt. Suicide becomes a form of thinking about the relationship between unbearable situations and unbearable feelings. Kaysen can make this connection more readily for some of the girls and uses the analogy to reconsider her own attempt. She planned a suicide by overdose, rehearsed taking the aspirin out and counting them, and, on the day after she took fifty tablets, she believes she walked into the street, where she fainted and was discovered, on purpose. What kind of suicide was this? How was it a form of self-directed violence designed not, precisely, to end her life, but to enact the problem of unbearable feeling and an unbearable situation? The attempt resulted in a change of scene and the shedding of a boyfriend, which Kaysen minimizes in significance. It also followed in the wake of a sexual relationship with her English teacher, a man who is fired and flees to North Carolina, which, we should note, lies beyond the jurisdiction of authorities in Massachusetts and, in the 1960s, any paper trail that would follow him in his search for a new teaching job. The diagnosing psychiatrist folds this into what he calls Kaysen’s “promiscuity.” In the hospital, it is labeled as an “attachment.” What do we call it in the context of a feminist analysis of sex and power? Kaysen does not call it a “relationship,” and, although, she does not describe it as rape or sexual assault, she does not dress it up in the language of desire or romance. What she and the English teacher do sounds less like what she does with her high school boyfriend than what she does with the fifty aspirins in order to make the affair stop. Judith Herman observes that psychological trauma becomes visible only when there is a transformation in cultural politics such that people who suffer it have value. In the intervening years between 1967 and 1993, the feminist movement changed perceptions of the value of women and offered a feminist critique of everyday sexual violence, including male teachers sexually abusing underage girls and psychiatrists calling it “promiscuity.” As with the transformations wrought by the feminist movement Herman references, the #MeToo movement represents the emergence of a collective feminist witness to the pervasiveness of male sexual violence and a global public forum for testimonial accounts and first-person stories that center women’s understanding of the lingering effects of trauma. One of the many powerful #MeToo accounts is especially salient in contextualizing Kaysen’s distress: a January 2018 essay about the lifelong impact of a young woman’s sexual experience with a high school teacher.13 It took years for the author to understand how the pattern of self-destruction and

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thwarted forward-movement was laid down in the coercion and devastation of the teacher’s “interest” in her as “special,” and in the legal bargain that would enable him to leave the school quietly (like Kaysen’s teacher), with no record of statutory rape, even if he were to take a position that gave him proximity to and power over girls. The author would not be required (or, we should note, permitted) to testify about what he did to her. His grooming entailed manipulating her by making her feel special, hence eager to please him in order not to lose this status. She worried that her sexual inexperience would disappoint him, a feeling he exploited. He pushed her incrementally beyond either her knowledge of sex or her desire for intimacy, all as a means to build up the inevitability of her acquiescing to intercourse. She was mortified at the exposure a trial would bring, more so at the prospect of saying the words associated with the acts he made her feel she had chosen. Many symptoms developed, and this pattern of an older man in a position of authority and trust sexually abusing an adolescent and alienating her from friends, family, school, and daily life resembles the same patternlessness Kaysen’s referring psychiatrist identified when he admitted her to McLean, including being unable to turn any of her training, talent, and hard work in getting degrees or excelling in jobs into stable situations. She could only quit and fade away. Rather than assessing Kaysen’s teacher’s behavior as predatory, the McLean psychiatrist uses the word “attachment,”14 which manages to accuse Kaysen and minimize the teacher’s behavior. But let us end the use of a misleading language of romance to describe sexual relationships between male teachers and high school students. For Kaysen and many smart, disaffected, and talented teenagers, they are a suicide risk. Kaysen represents male authorities as benefiting from her “pattern confusion,”15 which she describes as her difficulty in reading people and situations accurately. She believes that the danger signals she observes are a projection and that calling out the strangeness in others would count as insanity. Going along with appearances despite her profound disturbance represents sanity in this formulation. Kaysen believes that complying with the gendered pact of coercions, dubious benefits, and vulnerability represents “behaving normally.” Stuck in a distorted feedback loop, Kaysen finds the psychiatric apparatus to offer her only a confirmation of her untrustworthiness. Lest we too quickly minimize the consequence of Kaysen’s struggle to orient within her diagnosis and assume that McLean was a finishing school for the difficult daughters of well-to-do white elites, or that her suffering from a little difficulty in reading situations was treated with restraint, girls at McLean were treated with tranquilization, as well

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as weekly electroshock, wrapped in ice cold sheets, and subjected to solitary confinement.16 When being otherwise unable to solve the problem of an unbearable situation and unbearable feelings meant a stay at McLean, the “rest” her referring psychiatrist prescribed included the threat and actual practice of long-lasting psychological and physical harm through treatment. Kaysen challenges the notion that the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is primarily medical. Instead, she returns to, and reorganizes, her girlhood in a way that disrupts the objectivity of psychiatric discourses and exposes how they are less interested in her particular experiences than in achieving her compliance with a generalized trajectory of white femininity—from girl to woman. Kaysen was entrapped by a diagnostic identity that seemed both pathological and an entirely normative example of white girlhood. For this reason, Kaysen could neither “recover” from mental illness nor simply grow up. Instead, she had to discover her difference from the figure of the wounded, hysterical girl and the coming-of-age story it required of her. As the title of her memoir suggests, Kaysen begins her story at a point of rupture. She constructs her gendered journey as less a straightforward path than an arbitrary one through which her interiority is defined by cultural practices outside of herself. Kaysen’s metaphorical and literal placement on the outskirts of the social enables her to relay the “facts” from the vantage point constructed in adulthood. Leigh Gilmore argues that a “first-person account of trauma represents an intervention in, even an interruption of, a whole meaning-making apparatus that threatens to shout it down at every turn. Thus a writer’s turn from the primarily documentary toward the fictional marks an effort to shift the ground of judgment toward a perspective she has struggled to achieve.”17 For Kaysen this means challenging, rather than reproducing, the cultural “truth” that white adolescent girlhood and mental illness are naturally entwined. As part of the alternative case file her memoir represents, Kaysen offers an “annotated diagnosis”18 that points out how gender is embedded within the DSM, which defines borderline personality as a disorder that is “more commonly diagnosed in women.”19 Kaysen argues: “Note the construction of that sentence. They did not write, ‘the disorder is more common in women.’ It would still be suspect, but they didn’t even bother trying to cover their tracks. Many disorders, judging by the hospital population, were more commonly diagnosed in women.”20 Kaysen remarks that “in the list of six ‘potentially self-damaging’ activities favored by the border-

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line personality, three are commonly associated with women (shopping sprees, shoplifting, and eating binges) and one with men (reckless driving). One is not ‘gender-specific,’ as they say these days (psychoactive substance abuse). And the definition of the other (casual sex) is in the eye of the beholder.”21 Kaysen points out how sexual behaviors are linked to the gendered terms of her diagnosis. She underscores the socially constructed link between a girl’s sexual practices and her mental health. When Kaysen places a teenage boy at the center of these diagnostic criteria, she exposes a gendered pedagogy aimed at disciplining girls’ bodies. Kaysen asks: How many girls do you think a seventeen-year-old boy would have to screw to earn the label “compulsively promiscuous”? Three? No, not enough. Six? Doubtful. Ten? That sounds more likely. Probably in the fifteen-to-twenty range, would be my guess—if they ever put that label on boys, which I don’t recall their doing. And for seventeen-year-old-girls, how many boys?22

Psychological discourses position the white adolescent girl as both a risktaker and fragile. Even when she challenges the definition of her illness by acting in a way that is resilient and assertive, she is enfolded within the tautologies of its definitional terms. Kaysen’s narrative ends with her resumption of conventional feminine behavior. A marriage proposal secures her release from McLean. The same gendered criteria that propelled her institutionalization allow her to exit. As an unmarried young woman, she was hospitalized. As a soon-to-bemarried woman, her sexuality is now sanctioned as legitimate and she is no longer at risk for promiscuity. The institution of marriage replaces the mental institution.

“Now you believe me”: Credibility Battles Kaysen constructs her diagnosis as a credibility battle that pits her against the monumental presence of patriarchal psychiatric authority. After a twenty-minute interview with a psychiatrist on April 27, 1967, eighteenyear-old Kaysen signed herself into McLean, where she would spend nearly two years. On the first page of her memoir, Kaysen reproduces the first of several documents that feature as evidence in her narrative and that we read as an alternative case file. Her “exhibit A” is titled “Case Record Folder.” In addition to names and addresses of parents and local emergency

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contacts, it records the date and legal status of her admission (“voluntary”), a diagnosis of “borderline personality,” and, under history of hospitalizations, a single entry from 1965: “(Stomach pumped).” The script is tidy and typewritten, heavy black rectangles redact street addresses and a phone number. The reproduction of a medical form introduces the twinning of narrative and visualization in Kaysen’s selfrepresentation of the parallel universe of mental illness that she maps as a version of femininity. Indeed, the first page of text finds Kaysen meditating on the “topography” of mental illness as a location into which one can easily slip, imaging it as so proximate to the everyday as to be separated by the thinnest membrane, a tissue that connects as much as it separates universes and that can be accessed initially for a view of what lies on the other side before one crosses the border to take up residence. Once on the other side, distortion rules. Perspective, the visual trope of proportion as well as self-image, follows new rules: Scale is unstable, as the “world you came from” is either huge or miniaturized; time is nonlinear; and safety, refuge, and imprisonment are disturbingly co-located. The memoir will represent in narrative form the perspective gained by “slipping over,” returning to events in the past multiple times in order to layer in new information in the long process of persuading the reader that Kaysen is a credible witness to her own experience—not only despite, but because of her mental illness. Credibility is key in the war between the documents that fill her case file and Kaysen’s perception. She does not dispute whether she was suffering— unhappy, stuck—but she casts her diffidence about it as lying within the range of tolerable adolescent affect. Her account of her psychiatric evaluation is two and a half pages long. Its brevity is purposeful, mimetic: It records a brief consultation in which the doctor observes she’s picked at a pimple, asks if she has a boyfriend, and declares she needs a rest. Nothing suggests that an urgent intervention into a mental health crisis is warranted. With Kaysen’s version of that meeting in place, she reproduces a second document from April 27, the one filled out after that meeting. The writing is in the doctor’s hand, a looping, regular script. The form asks for the patient’s name and address. Under “discussion of finances,” the doctor notes that the parents have adequate income to institutionalize the patient for a year. The question of payment on the form precedes the reason for the referral: that Kaysen is “profoundly depressed-suicidal, increasing patternlessness of life, promiscuous,” “might kill herself or get pregnant,” has “run away” from someone “she doesn’t want to return” to, and is “living

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in a boarding house.” The next page is also a document: a reproduction of a typed note by the diagnosing psychiatrist dated June 15, 1967, that references the April 27 visit. It describes the duration of that meeting as three hours. Kaysen will center the battle between her credibility and the psychiatrist’s on the length of the meeting. He said “three hours”; she said “not even close.” As elastic as temporality is in the parallel universe, Kaysen insists that in the realm of the normal, you can rely on the clock and she intends to tell time. Kaysen claims the doctor tricked her into signing the papers. He claims to have examined her for three hours. She places the time closer to fifteen minutes. The difference in their accounts emblematizes the problem of credibility Kaysen faces as a young woman. Credibility goes to the doctor, a man, by default. The chapter is titled “Do You Believe Him or Me?” and Kaysen presents it as a contest: “We can’t both be right.”23 She also plays with suspense, placing doubt initially on the doctor, but shifting it onto herself as she reconstructs the timeline based on his notes and the admitting time on the “Nurse’s Report of Patient on Admission. “Those documents plausibly confirm a three hour window for the interview and Kaysen concedes: ‘But now you believe him.’ ” 24 Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of her hat, Kaysen introduces an additional document from a doctor at McLean who did an extensive intake interview before Kaysen met with the nurse. He enters the time of her arrival as 11:30 a.m., which reshuffles the timeline, and means she must have left the referring doctor’s office at around 9:30 a.m. She spent, at most, thirty minutes in his office. Although the complete case file confirms her memory of events, she was doubted from the moment she arrived at that appointment until a couple of decades after she left McLean and wrote her memoir. Her memoir represents victory in a contest of interpretive power, and she is emphatic in conclusion: “Now you believe me.”25 “Now you believe me.” In order to pull the reader into a relation of witness, Kaysen requires documentary proof. She not only has to appear credible, but she has to prove the doctor was wrong. For women, credibility is a zero-sum game. To have any, they must take it away from men who are presumed to possess it by default. The struggle marks the text and exemplifies the defensiveness Kaysen bears as a result of her diagnosis.

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Metalepsis: Girlhood as a Parallel Universe It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. —susanna kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

The figure of the parallel universe permeates Girl, Interrupted. As an example of metalepsis—a figure of speech that makes reference to one thing through substituting of another figure of speech—the parallel universe trope captures the oscillating moods of her borderline diagnosis, which itself seems to be a metaphorical substitution employed by a psychiatrist for whom femininity is already a metaphor for fragility and instability. Parallel universes abound once metalepsis takes hold. The location of the mental hospital is “like” a college or a boarding school in which the students absorb similar lessons in docility.The revolving door of metalepsis takes on a life of its own: The substitutions convey the sense that the figuration of gender represents nothing so much as an exercise in failed analogy. It isn’t really like anything other than itself: the pretext for substitutions of constraint and inevitability when the subject is gendered female. Judith Butler’s theorization of gender as performative highlights this dilemma for Kaysen: “Gender is always a doing,” as Kaysen learns, but performing gender as if it were an identity leads more to depersonalization than to integration. In lines that could be inscribed above the portal to Kaysen’s parallel universe of femininity, Butler writes, “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”26 The “doing” of adolescent white feminine gender represents a catalogue of gestures that Kaysen’s diagnosing psychiatrist knows so well that it takes him only a half-hour office visit to diagnose her with borderline personality disorder. Following Butler, we would observe that Kaysen is “doing” feminine gender well enough to be read as a particular expression of it, recognizable from Freud onward in psychiatry’s pathologization of schoolgirl moodiness: the embodied language of shrugs and twitches; the clothing shrugged on and off, with unsuitable partners; and the interpretation of semiarticulate rebels as incipient hysterics. That a psychiatrist was able to offer the gendered diagnosis of borderline personality from a glum Kaysen within a half hour suggests not that her symptoms were inchoate or enigmatic, but that they were all too obvious. In this context, it is interesting to consider Kaysen’s reaction to the adolescent readers of her memoir who identified with her: “Girls and young women who have perhaps had some of the same suicidal thoughts and self-

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destructive behaviors that Kaysen did as an 18-year-old have been some of the biggest fans of the book.”27 During Kaysen’s promotional tour for Girl, Interrupted, young women waited to speak with her about their own suicide attempts. In an interview, Kaysen states that the girls “wanted to look at me and understand themselves.”28 Given that Kaysen writes about a suicide attempt, it is not surprising that girls with a similar experience would turn to her. Life writing, including Girl, Interrupted, often serves as a model of community for those who experience isolation. The intensity of this identification, as well as the incipience of a critical awareness of structural factors that contribute to suicidality (e.g., trauma, depression, misogyny, racism, transphobia), makes life writing an especially compelling discourse: both as a record of personal experience, including survival, and as a form of critique that can be more accessible because of its grounding in personal lives. However, Kaysen is uneasy with this attention and balks at this “strangely nonliterary response.” She insists that the reaction had “nothing to do with the book.”29 The girls and young women who showed up for these “nonliterary” reasons during Kaysen’s tour represent an emergent collective witness. That Kaysen does not imagine them as part of the audience for which she wrote demonstrates the co-construction of white privilege and gender pessimism. Of course, not all authors who write about trauma embrace their representativeness to other survivors, nor do they engage in the kind of political analysis that offers audiences a perspective on how systemic conditions shape lives. Kaysen found herself turning away from these girls, unwilling to bear witness to wounds they had not turned into words, unwilling to allow her own words to be turned back into a wound and risk a return to the parallel universe. After all, Kaysen’s recovery, constructed as we have argued through instabilities in gender, was itself vulnerable to expressions of gender pessimism: “Recovered. Had my personality crossed over that border, whatever and wherever it was, to resume life within the confines of the normal?”30 Counteridentification threatens a return to the borderline. The instability of gender, identity, and mental health recurs in Girl, Interrupted as narrated event and theme. In her narration of an event that crystallizes these connections, Kaysen focuses on a note from her case file about an episode diagnosed as depersonalization at McLean. Depersonalization in this context refers to a state in which a person is unable to feel or think of herself as real and might seek to restore a sense of personhood— or test her sense that she is not real in the right way—by cutting herself to see if, indeed, the right things lie under the skin: blood or bones, in

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particular. The “Progress Note,” recorded by a nurse, is dated August 24, 1967. An episode of agitation two weeks prior to the episode of depersonalization is also described with more detail. In the first episode, the “patient . . . began to become very frightened at the thought that she had never had a satisfying childhood.”31 As the image of her parents dissolves, Kaysen loses a stable sense of her own childhood. Without access to either, she confronts an existential question: Who is she? Can she still be said to be a person if she loses her sense of herself as having been a child? Kaysen reproduces the notes from her case file. The tiny typed font, the layout of the form, all testify to the materiality of her past, condensed and preserved from her time at McLean. The episodes of agitation and of depersonalization are sequential progress notes in her file. The terrifying scene of a dissolving childhood and the subsequent sense of disappearing as a person follow each other. Although the conclusion in the note states that the “precipitating event for this episode of depersonalization is still not clear,” Kaysen’s inclusion of the juxtaposed notes suggests otherwise. She grieves the girl who was interrupted, the girl whose life did not continue, the girl who her suicide attempt may have sought to make visible in her crisis of disappearance. When girls disappear, why is it “still not clear” that it is often because someone erased them? Kaysen carefully presents a self-portrait of suffering and mental illness that was unsatisfactorily diagnosed and treated. She feels rather better and a bit older after two years at McLean, but there is little to suggest that more than time, therapy, and community helped. It is sobering to think that confinement in a mental institution on a female ward offers some protection from exposure to “normal” men. Yet consider that on a single free day from the hospital gained as a privilege, Kaysen goes to a movie with a male friend who brings along a male friend who is a stranger to Kaysen. After the movie, Kaysen comments of her friend’s friend, “He wouldn’t let me go” (135). He and Kaysen spend the night together, and she returns to McLean. He, however, pursues Kaysen. He throws himself into writing her letters, and although he moves to Ann Arbor, he returns after eight months to be near her, exhibiting the kind of impulsivity and “patternlessness” that, for girls and women, would be read as psychological symptom. Yet when he proposes marriage, it is a sign that she has recovered enough to be released. Kaysen’s memoir bears witness to the institutions and structures that construct white girlhood as a flawed condition best repaired through heteronormativity: growing up docile, acceding to feminine gender, and marrying. In other words, acquiescence to gender pessimism with

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the protections, dubious as they are, white women are groomed to accept and reproduce.

Freud as Gender Pessimist In Group Psychology, Freud describes how girls and women bond over objects of shared enthusiasm in order to retain the pleasures of identification while avoiding jealousy.32 As an aspirational horizon, avoidance seems pretty low. But by construing the bonds among girls and women as secondary and compensatory, Freud fails to see them as a more dynamic and connected collective. Freud writes, We have only to think of the troop of women and girls, all of them in love in an enthusiastically sentimental way, who crowd round a singer or pianist after his performance. It would certainly be easy for each of them to be jealous of the rest; but, in the face of their numbers and the consequent impossibility of their reaching the aim of their love, they renounce it, and, instead of pulling out one another’s hair, they act as a united group, do homage to the hero of the occasion with their common actions, and would probably be glad to have a share of his flowing locks.33

This is one of the few places in the essay that Freud represents the threat of how people might act aggressively toward each other, and it is important that it arises in a discussion of how women and girls express attraction toward a man. The scene in question is theatrical, hardly a description of something Freud has witnessed or a real risk the female fan club poses. Instead, hair-pulling is a trope of gender melodrama. Although Freud italicizes his, the main attraction in the sentence is the concatenation of flowing and locks, which further derealizes the scene and underscores how it is created in and through a default language of cliché. Freud offers an “amusing” sketch to the like-minded—“we have only to think of the troop of women and girls”—that ends in a joke at the women’s expense instead of an inspection of the women’s observable preference in this scenario for forming affective bonds with each other. Freud’s belated theorization of femininity is a joke he tells an audience whose laughter he can rely on because they believe women are silly. Instead of heightening the tension by raising the expectation of a fuller discussion through reference to anecdotes about jealous schoolgirls, in one example, or hysterical fans, in another, and then offering one, femininity is the

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parallel universe he merely visits. Freud’s influence on the study of femininity contributed to pathologizing behavior in girls and women that he considered healthy and typical for boys and men, including sexual desire and activity; aggression, including against authorities, as a form of individuation; and the inevitability of the expression of conflict in a dynamic process of maturation. The discourse about girls is replete with gender pessimism, but it has been strikingly resistant to reading adolescent “unhappiness” as dissent, as a reservoir of experience from which critique might emerge. Anger, especially when it is verbal, is more recognizable as resistance. Freud’s expectations for normative femininity prevented him from crediting refusal, demurral, or passivity as pathways out of the parallel universe. Of the resistance to heteronormativity of girls and women, and of their preference for each other, Freud drew a blank. He could not understand why Dora, for example, objected to Herr K molesting her. Although she described the assault and her awareness that her father had placed her in Herr K’s path, Freud preferred to read her bodily symptoms for clues to a different explanation of her unhappiness over which he would have authority. One thinks here, too, of other girls and women who have baffled authorities. In Salem, the girls who told tales of witchcraft did not invent the concepts of spectral evidence or satanic visitation, but they have become iconic figures of false accusation (despite the very real dangers of life in a female body they faced).34 As a group, then, girls and young women are too easily determined by adult authorities to have nothing to say for themselves. Freud’s description of this group veers toward formula and caricature. How can such figures bear witness or even be permitted to offer an account of themselves that does something other than conjure suspicion, dismissal, or punishment? We will return to the link between girls and women as a group, the structure of jokes, and its relationship to survivor storytelling as a way to explore Hannah Gadsby’s 2017 solo comedy performance Nanette at the end of this chapter. But the route to Gadsby’s first-person testimony about how sexual violence relies on caricaturing gender identities and sexual identities leads through the gender pessimism that characterizes some key texts in the memoir boom. Gadsby’s Nanette offers an analysis of form; namely, through the claim that the structure of a joke differs from the structure of a story in a way that makes jokes inhospitable to the kind of storytelling that may become both a political act of witness and a therapeutic narrative. Nanette exemplifies how first-person accounts in the memoir boom combine the self-representation of sexual abuse and trauma, direct address to

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an audience that they seek to confront and transform, and the centering of survivor experience as the new point of reference for knowledge.

Autobiography of a Face In her 1994 memoir Autobiography of a Face, Grealy narrates her experience of childhood cancer through treatment, multiple surgeries, and hospitalizations. Like Kaysen’s hospitalization, Lucy Grealy’s illness and treatment, including a series of failed jaw reconstructive procedures, placed her in parallel universe. Grealy was born in Dublin, Ireland, and her family immigrated to Spring Valley, New York, when she was four years old so her father could pursue a career in broadcast journalism. She was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma when she was nine, and although Grealy the child was told little about her diagnosis, Grealy the adult writes that this cancer had a 5 percent survival rate for children. The childhood experience of illness takes the author out of time—suspending a childhood temporality of diachronic dailiness and supplanting it with the tempo of diagnosis, treatment, often ongoing, hospitalizations, often frequent, and recovery, often incomplete. One form of childhood time characterized by growing in relation to siblings and peers, schooling, and neighborhood life is replaced with the rhythms and routines of the hospital, routines that offer new markers for charting life. Grealy offers different trajectories of growth for her body and her face, deftly revealing how the medicalization of her childhood lacked a developmental language adaptable to her sexuality. Viewed as a childhood patient, yet living in a maturing body, Grealy’s face emblematizes a complex site of traumatic experience and testimony. Grealy’s life is interrupted by a new story of how she is made different by the removal of part of her jaw, a difference she cannot outgrow but must address through narrative. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times calls Grealy’s graceful meditation on the temporalities of a childhood experience that shifts subtly into a new medical “problem” of jaw reconstruction and the times and space of adult witness a “memoir of disfigurement” which summarizes the judgment that drives so much of Grealy’s postcancer suffering. In her observation that her most long-lasting and intransigent pain derives from other people’s reactions to her appearance, Grealy moves illness memoir into disability studies, from what Tom Couser calls “autopathography” to a critique of social relations. Grealy’s descriptions of pain conform to what Susannah Mintz calls the lyrical language of pain. Although Mintz cites Elaine Scarry on the failure of language to describe

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pain, she reads the subtle and textured pain lexicons of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Eula Biss for their plenitude. The effects of this lyrical language move us to examine how an intimate experience of medical procedures draws Grealy into relationships to objects. Memoirists like Grealy are vibrant materialists avant la lettre.35 Grealy focuses on objects that lead into the assemblage of pain and medicine. The needle—but also diagnostic machinery and the surgical array of tools and techniques—interposes a haptic space where patient and clinicians touch. And here, for Grealy, the language of an observing, sensing, and hurting self strives for a language of witness to replace a confession of damage. Yet what has Grealy lost or been denied by her transformed face beyond access to a conventional version of female beauty? In other words, how does the location of her autobiographical subjectivity in her face, as the title suggests, restrict or expand an understanding of white girlhood and gender pessimism? What is a face? Grealy asks an age-old question about the primacy of one part of the body to represent the self. For Levinas, the face represents “the living presence,” and the face-to-face encounter is the model of social and ethical connection.36 Although not confined to a literal description of the human face, of course, Levinas and Grealy identify the high stakes a “different” face presents: when others react with aversion or disgust, that reaction is internalized as one’s own “face.” Here is where the constitutive thwarting that defines white female coming of age comes into view. Unable to attend school regularly, to forge childhood friendships without self-consciousness and shame, and intermittently aware of the financial and emotional stress her treatment imposes on her family, Grealy as an adult struggles to find some position within the circumstances of her personal life to tell a more impersonal (both general and shared) story: She addresses how recognition and aversion are gendered responses to the female face, which, as a visual emblem of feminine beauty, is already a metalepsis of the female self, a copy for which there is no original.37 The impersonal story of girlhood here is both about childhood illness and how the ill live among the well, but it is also about how the normative fragility of white girlhood increases Grealy’s suffering by restricting her aspirations and agency to trying to attain it through achieving a prettier face. The restriction of suffering to her face as a metaphor of female identity—“I was my face, I was ugliness”38— comes at the expense of a better understanding of how Grealy lives after she is cured. This includes the posttraumatic psychic formation of how this particular girl was taught to lose her voice. Young Grealy explains the slow process through which she

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was shaped by a pedagogy of shame in order to fall silent, and to become a confessional subject who apologizes for the harm others do to her. During chemotherapy, for example, Dr. Woolf, whose names seems drawn from the Brothers Grimm, wields his needle and bullies Grealy and her mother. He humiliates Grealy for her fear and Grealy’s mother for failing to make her daughter into the right kind of patient. In Dr. Woolf ’s office, passivity and dissociation masquerade as courage. We can see how this pedagogy of silencing, shaming, and guilt crosses time and space and unites Grealy as she suffers under Dr. Woolf ’s brusque sadism with the women who experience sexual abuse and cannot gain a hearing, or are blamed themselves for the actions of abusers, like so many women for whom the #MeToo movement and its accounts of everyday harassment resonate. Dr. Woolf tells Grealy her fear will cause her pain (not the needle he wields or what she comes to realize is his ineptitude with it), and that if she is in pain it is her fault because she has given in to fear, which is also her fault. Bodily and psychic pain travel together as surely as disease and treatment. It is all her fault. When language skips a beat in the representation of pain, Grealy is skeptical that language is at fault. Instead, she sees silence as instructive, as a necessary aspect of language that supplies context: She doesn’t know she has cancer because no one uses that word. Instead they say “malignancy,” which young Lucy repeats as she strolls the hospital ward. She doesn’t know what it means and is shocked to discover that she had cancer when her siblings refer to it in casual conversation. “Language supplies us with ways to express ever subtler levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name a thing?”39 For Grealy, not knowing is key here rather than not having access to a particular kind of language about her experience. Grealy focuses her questions about identity initially on her face and, with this focus, the history of associating the face with identity, recognition, and ethics. In this context, let’s consider again the slippage, often enacted on women and girls, people of color, the queer and disabled, between face and body as the location of pain. The pain in her jaw from cancer, the pain from treatment, and the pain of multiple operations designed to build out her jaw after her cancer is in remission blend into the pain of being bullied and cast out for her appearance that she experiences as a child, throughout adolescence, and as a young woman. For the marginalized, the body represents the negative site of the ethical encounter Levinas attributes to the face. How can one stake a claim through the body for the self ? Grealy’s body is “gender normal,”40 feminine, toned through

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exercise, desirable and desiring. Heteronormative expectations of attractiveness and Grealy’s navigation of them leave her with an existential question about what—after the cancer is in remission—is wrong with her? As a college-aged student and then young adult, the pain that reconstructive surgery addresses is less about the damaged jaw and its challenges (she has trouble eating) than about how people treat her and how this makes her feel. Living as a target of the negative affects of others—their aversion, fear, callousness, and sadism — offers the body as a graphic site. When others see her, they read her difference as something to be feared or mocked. When she is catcalled by men in the town where she goes to college, they recoil when she turns around. The outside of the body is a site of seeing, with or without bearing witness. Yet Grealy does not leave the meaning of her identity with those who assess her face and body as prompting a crisis of reconciling an incongruity they perceive. Illness has given Grealy a three-dimensional experience of embodiment, which means, for her, self-representation does not end with the surface of her face and body, but includes how the body feels itself beneath the skin through pain and treatment. Grealy visualizes the inside of her body, too, when she describes the experience of chemotherapy injected into her vein. She outlines veins and organs, mapping the path of the medicine through the previously unvisualized interiority of the body and its pain. Grealy shows us how to bear witness. An ethics of recognition based on assumptions about the exterior appearance of face and body, she suggests, will fail to register the pain of the other. The risk such ethical failure imposes on gender not-normal, gender queer, nonbinary, and trans people becomes the focus of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. Grealy does not offer an account of sexual harassment or abuse like those who have come forward recently to say #MeToo, but the form in which she bears witness to illness and pain calls attention to how language about trauma is grounded in a body that can be shamed and silenced or made eloquent. For an ethical witness to emerge in the interval of interpretation, we need to rethink the certainty that attaches to doubt.41 The chastising reviewers who have rebuked white women memoirists for speaking out are not doing so as a way to promote memoirs by women of color.42 Instead, they can be read as part of the discourse linking white girlhood and gender pessimism. If we fail to read these authors as also part of a testimonial tradition and see them as merely confessional, we associate them with the practices of shaming they expose and resist. Because what Kaysen, Grealy, Gadsby (and others) teach us is that women’s life writing produces new

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knowledge about pain, suffering, and justice. It asks new questions, offers new trajectories of life history, and supplies new imaginaries. Aspirationally, it enacts agency.

“Nothing Stronger”: Nanette and Survivor Storytelling I need to tell my story properly because you learn from the part of the story you focus on. —hannah gadsby, Hannah Gadsby: Nanette

Australian comedian and actor Hannah Gadsby performed her solo comedy show Hannah Gadsby: Nanette throughout 2017, garnering the Best Show award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, before a run at the SoHo Playhouse in New York in summer 2018. A performance at the Sydney Opera House was taped for distribution by Netflix in June 2018, and was critically acclaimed by reviewers, audiences, and other comedians. Her performance represents the eruption of survivor discourse in a form that has frequently been not only hostile to women, queer, and transgender people, but instrumental in normalizing everyday violence against them. Gadsby calls out comedy itself as a deterrent to the articulation and circulation of survivor narratives because of the normalization of abusive language that jokes trade in and the routine blaming of targets as humorless. As an overarching structure, the joke form freezes the processing of traumatic events in order to get a laugh. In Nanette, Gadsby interrupts the autobiographical form of stand-up comedy, gains the audience’s willingness to forgo the pleasure of jokes and the familiar tropes of excusing abuse that they tacitly endorse, and enacts survivor self-representation as an act of witness. Gadsby’s stand-up reflects how the memoir boom has enabled the emergence of multiple forms of self-representation since it emerged in the 1990s. Although neoliberal life narratives that recycle American tropes like the rise from rags to riches and the celebration of individual success have flourished, the field is crowded, too, with a range of voices, like Gadsby’s, that draw their power and timeliness from social and political movements like Black Lives Matter and, for Gadsby, the wave of female and feminist anger represented in the #MeToo movement.43 Gadsby opens her challenging and genre-transforming stand-up with a representation of her childhood and a critique of her own performance of the coming-out

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narrative as insufficient to the self-representation of trauma and survival that Gadsby as an adult centers. The show begins with reference to Gadsby’s childhood in Tasmania, which she describes as especially dangerous because of its homophobia: “Homosexuality was a crime in Tasmania until 1997 . . . not long enough ago,” she jokes. Although Gadsby is initially more aware of not being like other girls than of being a lesbian, she nonetheless looks to images on TV of Mardi Gras and gay pride in Sydney for a way to identify. The quiet girl watching TV is not sure how she’ll be gay if it is so “noisy.” When she comes out, her mother responds, “Oh, Hannah, that isn’t something I need to know. What if I told you I was a murderer?” The moment is played for laughs and the tone of the initial childhood and young adolescent autobiographical narrative is cast as self-deprecation, a tone at which Gadsby excels. The first break from the coming-out narrative takes the form of direct address to the audience. Gadsby’s sharp turn from self-deprecating reminiscence startles. Her practiced stand-up delivery changes, her voice loses its knowing wink, and the manner of address moves into the present tense: “I do think I have to quit comedy. . . . I have been questioning this whole comedy thing. I don’t feel comfortable in it anymore. . . . I built a career out of self-deprecating humor and I don’t want to do that anymore. Because if you understand what self-deprecation means to somebody who already exists in the margins, it’s not humility, it’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak. In order to seek permission to speak. And I simply won’t do that anymore. Not to myself and to anybody who identifies with me.” Without knowing what this bodes for the rest of their evening, the audience cheers. During the opening minutes of the show, the audience laughs at jokes about lesbians and homophobia that Gadsby filters through wry selfdeprecation and her winning persona as a quiet lesbian. Her primary target is the skewering of male privilege and its tendency to erupt in violence when challenged, but she keeps the tone light and the pace brisk. The carefully laid groundwork works to illustrate the comedy she will turn to critiquing, in no small part because she implicates the audience who has been taking a pleasure she will problematize. Gadsby explains that a joke has two parts: a setup and a punch line. This structure restricts any story a comedian tells to the form of a question and a surprise answer, which prevents the comedian from telling what Gadsby calls “the best part of the story . . . which is the ending.” She offers her first stand-up show and its focus on coming-out as an example of how

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the structure of the joke imposes a single meaning. “Take my coming out story. The best part of that story is that my mum and I have a wonderful relationship now.” In the joke version of her coming out, as Gadsby tells it, she and her mother are having one of their usual heart-to-hearts, when her mum flips the script and goes from being one of the oppressive forces in Hannah’s life (“You made my life difficult,” says Gadsby quoting one of their exchanges) to confessing her failure as a parent and offering a sincere apology. To which adult Gadsby responds, “How did that happen?” A rhetorical question that could be expanded along the lines: How did it happen that my mum developed this new insight, saw herself and her impact on me in a new way? How did my mum change?” Instead, Gadsby asks, “How did my mum get to be the hero of my story? She evolved. I didn’t. Comedy has suspended me in a state of perpetual adolescence.” She had given her ending away to her mother by telling her own coming-out story as a joke. In order to reclaim it as a survivor story, she would have to write an ending. In shifting from the joke form to the story, she also shifts from coming out as lesbian to coming out as the target of multiple violent sexual assaults that brutalized her for her gender expression and also for her perceived sexual identity. Adult comedian Gadsby returns to the scene of adolescent trauma to critique and reclaim narrative, especially the self-representation of coming out as she previously told it in the form of stand-up comedy. To position herself before the collective witness of the audience, she critiques the form of trauma narrative that would allow her mother to stand in the place she intends to occupy—not only hero, but, sequentially, victim, and then survivor—before an audience to whom she constantly reveals the magic tricks comics use to entertain audiences. But she also demonstrates how— before the audience’s eyes—that form can be twisted and remade to serve a different purpose: The story that can become a survivor story has three parts, which she identifies, classically, as beginning, middle, end. “The way I’ve been telling that story is through jokes.” By retelling coming out to include violence and its aftermath, Gadsby ensures that no one who hurt her gets to be the hero of her story. With the analysis of form in place and the stakes for survivors of male violence established, Gadsby shifts the temporal logic of the show. She returns to the material she presented initially as jokes and reframes them. In her survivor narrative, childhood becomes the scene of trauma as the figure of the child is victimized by Tasmania’s bitter ten years’ debate, “effectively the duration of my adolescence,” about the legalization of homosexuality. During that time, young Hannah steeps in a toxic brew of shame,

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secrecy, and silence. Seventy percent, she says, of the adults who cared for her believed that homosexuality is a criminal act. “When you soak a child in shame, they cannot develop the neurological pathways that carry thoughts . . . of self-worth.” The child bears the mark of her instruction in self-loathing, and jokes will not help her evade its effects. Gadsby is stuck in the temporal frame of trauma because of the way she tells the story, preempting the work of narrative transformation that would enable her to become the self who differs from itself over time.44 She says: “I froze an incredibly formative experience at its trauma point and I sealed it off in jokes.” She is in search of a form that provides an ending. Jokes are not up to the task. The form is “not nearly sophisticated enough to undo the damage done to me in reality.” For that she requires narrative, which allows for an expansion of the frame beyond the one-two of setup and punch line: “You learn from the part of the story you focus on.” With this marker posted, she returns to a story of violence she told as a joke in the early minutes of the set: “Do you remember that story I told about that young man who almost beat me up?” In the joke version, he threatens to beat her up because he mistakes her for a man hitting on his girlfriend. He realizes his mistake—she’s a woman—and he relaxes, but the joke’s on him in this version because Gadsby is a lesbian. In actuality and in the story Gadsby supplants the joke when the man “gets it,” calling her a “lady faggot” and viciously beating her: “He beat the shit out of me and nobody stopped him.” She did not report the attack and, despite her injuries, did not take herself to a hospital because she felt she did not deserve to. Because her focus is the impunity with which men hurt girls and women, she emphasizes the cultural pedagogy and its misogynist message: “That is what happens when you soak one child in shame and give permission to the other to hate . . . and that was not homophobia pure and simple, that was gendered.” Through her focus on childhood and witness, Gadsby powerfully laments the vulnerability of girls, the disproportionate valorization of men, the disposability of girls and women when their pain would threaten a man’s reputation. In sum, white male privilege is exposed as a pedagogy of hate that breaks girls and women through violence and then through forbidding them from claiming the cultural space their stories deserve. Gadsby concludes with direct address to the white men in audience. She acknowledges she has sharply criticized them. For this, she will not apologize. Instead, in the last minutes of the show, she says to men: “The story is as you have told it. The power belongs to you. But I wonder how a man would feel if he had to live my life? Because it was a man who sexually

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abused me when I was a child. It was a man who beat the shit out of me when I was 17. . . . It was two men who raped me when I was barely in my twenties.” What form is this? Not a joke in Freud’s terms, certainly, but a specific kind of story. This, we argue, is testimony. There is no apology lingering in it, so it cannot be mistaken for confession. Instead, its power lies in the authority of the eyewitness whose truth consists in a public account that defies any return to everyday male privilege. In Gadsby’s direct address, she avers, “I do not tell you this because I am a victim. I am not a victim. I tell you this because my story has value. I tell you this because I want you to know what I know. . . . There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” The transformative potential of storytelling marks her show as survivor speech and testimony. But her emphasis on the figure of the child and the narrative of her own girlhood revisited in adulthood to compel a diverse audience to adopt a new and ethical stance toward the sexual abuse of girls and women defines Nanette as a contemporary development in the history we trace here. She concludes with a call for the assembly of a collective that can hold the pain of her story—and all the stories like hers—so that they do not disappear, but become jointly witnessed: “All I can ask is just please help me take care of my story.”

Girl, Accompanied The title of Kaysen’s memoir alludes to Vermeer’s famous painting housed in the Frick Museum, Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Of it, Kaysen writes: It’s the painting from whose frame a girl looks out, ignoring her beefy music teacher, whose proprietary hand rests on her chair. I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled. She was warning me of something—she had looked up from her work to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn a breath in order to say to me, “Don’t!”45

Kaysen first sees the painting on a trip to the museum with her high school English teacher, who after the visit grooms her for a sexual relationship. Kaysen realizes later that the girl in the painting offered her a warning: “I didn’t listen to her. I went out to dinner with my English teacher, and he kissed me, and I went back to Cambridge and failed biology, though I did graduate, and, eventually, I went crazy.”46 She revisits the painting after her hospitalization and notices the sadness and stuckness of the girl. The music teacher will win; he will interrupt her life and redirect it down well-worn

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channels of sexual coercion and suffering. The girl, Kaysen later sees, is trying to get out. The girl whose gaze in the Vermeer painting provided a mirror for Kaysen was, notably, interrupted at her music. The music of her life, Kaysen observes. Through the form of life writing, Kaysen provides the companion her younger self suffered from not having. In the place of the predatory teacher, the “troublesome” boyfriend, and the escape hatch husband, Kaysen returns to double her young “I” with the authorial “I” to accompany the music of her young life, and, if not replaying or filling in its gaps, at least giving voice to its halting progress. The adult interrupts the narrative of girlhood to accompany and protect the younger, narrated self. Although the authorial self is particularly prone to disappear in life writing, something different happens in these narratives of childhood when the I who is writing intervenes in order to accompany her younger self and to offer her more compassion and understanding than she received in her youth. Like Jacobs and Menchú, who, as we demonstrated in chapter 1, use narrative discretion about the self-representation of violence to deflect a potentially voyeuristic gaze and channel it, instead, toward ethical witnessing, and like the gymnasts and other athletes, girls and adolescents who forged survivor identities by offering justice-seeking accounts of victimization in the choral testimony of collective witness when Larry Nassar was sentenced, Kaysen, Grealy, and Gadsby insert their authorial selves to accompany their younger selves through traumatic experience. As they do so, they disrupt the story written for them, and occupy life narrative in an interventionist mode. Viewed through our analysis of gender pessimism, the recurring cultural fascination with both girlhood passivity and aggression represents a failure to acknowledge histories of trauma.

chapter 3

Visualizing Sexual Violence and Feminist Child Witness: A Child’s Life and Other Stories and Becoming Unbecoming Why is the idea that women and girls deserve what they get so much easier for societies across the globe to accept than the fact that violent males cause misery to millions worldwide, in times of peace and times of war? —una, Becoming Unbecoming

Feminist scholars of visual culture have a fine-tuned sense of the relationship between images and the politics of looking that produce cultural forms of knowledge.1 From analyses of how women and girls are represented in popular media as well as in humanitarian discourse that sentimentalizes girlhood, feminist scholarship clarifies how visual culture is a site for producing voyeurism and apathy, as well as empathy and witness. Autobiographical representations of vulnerability and sexual violence augment scholarly studies by centering survivor experience, memory, and perspective. Like the literary memoirs considered in the preceding chapter, graphic narratives about girlhood and rape emerged in the memoir boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and transformed cultural norms around the self-representation of trauma and the conditions of ethical witness. No longer steeped in victim-blaming or silence, and often speaking frankly to feminist and general audiences alike, comics artists and graphic memoirists contributed to life writing a sequential form for representing memory, experience, and temporality. A number of feminist artists use the comics form to return to girlhood experiences of sexual violence 63

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and re-present the legacy of trauma in their lives. They navigate changing temporalities of self-blame and worthlessness, guilt about how their desire was used by men to entrap and harm them, and the possibilities of posttraumatic agency. How Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories and Una’s Becoming Unbecoming use graphic life writing to transform the visualization of girlhood and sexual violence and create the conditions of feminist witness is the subject of this chapter.2 As scholars of visual culture have noted, images are not neutral. The representation of sexual violence amplifies or contains understandings of rape. Gillian Rose argues that “a specific visuality will make certain things visible in particular ways, and other things unseeable . . . and subjects will be produced and act within that field of vision.”3 For Wendy Hesford, “images acquire social value and symbolic overtones from larger frames of reference,” and thus multimodal representations construct certain bodies as “victims,” or worthy subjects to be saved through the manipulation of a text’s optics.4 Images, then, are productive rather than reflective— they create ways of seeing and feeling. The comics form is one location where feminist artists arbitrate cultural imaginaries of sexual violence. Hillary Chute considers comics a form of “visual witnessing,”5 while Leigh Gilmore argues that graphic memoir is a form that “can take up testimony as it draws attention to the act of witnessing.”6 Thus, comics do not merely represent, they materialize the social fact of girlhood and rape. They create perspective through scale and represent different temporalities in which ethical witness rather than voyeuristic or detached looking can arise. Indeed, feminist self-representations of sexual violence disturb those forms of visual access. The self-representation of the sexual violation of children offers a counterdiscourse to what Wendy Hesford calls a “long-standing sentimental tradition in the feminization of childhood.”7 Viewing sexual violence requires critically engaging familiar visual practices in mainstream cultural texts that sustain “culture’s masculinist predatory gaze.”8 Through this gaze, girls and women are rendered simultaneously and perpetually childlike and sexualized. They remain chronically vulnerable because they cannot grow into autonomy. Gloeckner and Una use the comics form to intervene in this visual tradition and, in different ways, use the following three elements to center survivors and re-picture sexual violence and the time of traumatic memory: defamiliarization of materials and objects associated with childhood, comics’s unique capacities to render multiple meanings through scale and temporality, and a use of the gutter

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to make visible a feminist perspective on the experience of sexual violence and their representation of it. Gloeckner and Una rework dominant practices in visual culture that efface rape and minimize its harm. The minimization of harm represents both a politics and an epistemology of gender. Building on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed who link affect and precarity to how inequalities are produced and sustained through material and representational practices, we can see how the seeming naturalness of feelings is produced through representations that construe rape as something “we” would prevent or halt if “we” could “see” it (perceive, recognize, know as harm).9 Although representations of risk are ubiquitous, they misrepresent male violence as a consequence of the actions of girls and women, thus displacing the source of danger from male aggression onto girls and women, and blame, as well. How does this happen? In disturbing videos captured by surveillance cameras of male assaults on women, in comics saturated with violent and sexual imagery in which girls and women are figured as prey, and in narratives of girls’ vulnerability to violence shaped to grab headlines, the partiality of the imagery coupled with the facts of violence sustain a myth of not-knowing what one is nevertheless overwhelmed by. The mismatch between an adequate response to these images and narratives and their overwhelming presence enables a peculiar exculpatory response around “not-seeing” and “not-knowing,” in which one can admit that although one witnessed the physical evidence of abuse in the form of marks on the body or traumatized affect, one can claim not to know what happened and, further, to insist that if the abuse had been seen and known, then a virtuous “we” would have intervened and stopped it. We are interested here in Una and Gloeckner’s feminist interventions into the representational elements that contribute to this formation around sexual precarity, and to the use of the child witness to make sexual violence visible. The context for their graphic intervention is rape culture, a term used to describe the normalization of sexual violence by trivializing its victims, discrediting their credibility and suffering, routinely denying them justice, and portraying rapists as themselves sympathetic victims of unstable, conniving women. The blaming of victims and exonerating of rapists follows familiar scripts of women’s unreliability, not only in court, but also in their everyday experience.10 Intersectional feminist analysis addresses the racial disparities in arrests and sentencing of accused rapists, the tendency to see male rapists, especially when they are young and white, as men in need of protecting.11

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The notorious case of Brock Turner exemplifies these disparities.12 Turner, now a registered sex offender, was found guilty of three counts of felony sexual assault after being caught while sexually assaulting an unconscious woman on the Stanford campus behind a dumpster; yet he received a disturbingly light sentence by a judge with a history of going easy on men convicted of sexually assaulting women, especially showing lenience at sentencing to men who had sexually violated unconscious women.13 Far more comprehensive in scope than the investigation into Brock Turner’s sentencing and the judge’s history are two recent studies that document the systemic under-investigation of reports of sexual assault: one, a twentymonth investigation of 870 police departments in Canada, found that one in five reports are not investigated,14 and another by the Department of Justice in the United States, found that the Baltimore City Police, among other crimes, “seriously and systematically under-investigates reports of sexual assault.”15 For a rape culture to coalesce, women and others who are victimized must be vulnerable to violence and lack access to justice. Those who commit this violence must be permitted to hide within norms of aggressive masculinity without appearing as dangerous as they are, and, despite breaking laws that make sexual assault a crime, expect easy treatment from courts, especially if they are white or aligned with state power.16 This is the context in which Una and Gloeckner visualize witness in order to expose how sexual violence against girls and women hides in plain sight. Yet as both enter the scene of sexual violence through visual self-representation, they show risk to be a social construction and not an essential and immutable consequence of male sexual aggression and intransigent female vulnerability. Rather, as feminist scholars of rape culture argue, it is composed of rape scripts that can be interrogated and interrupted.17

A Child’s Life and Other Stories Graphic artist Phoebe Gloeckner began her career as a medical illustrator. Her “semiautobiographical” comic A Child’s Life and Other Stories (first published in 1998 and reprinted with additional material in 2000) deftly anatomizes the pathology of sexual violence in some of its most insidious forms.18 Gloeckner creates “devastatingly ‘realistic’ ” drawings of sexual abuse in the panels.19 Her work challenges graphically the ideology that links not-seeing and not-knowing to the sexual precarity of girls and women. She reclaims sexual images of women and violence endemic to the

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comics form as a means to visualize the violence from the girl’s point of view, specifically, the rape of an adolescent girl by her mother’s boyfriend. Gloeckner’s images are graphic: Explicit and published, they stake a claim to public knowledge about “a child’s life.” She chooses to depict violence rather than imply it. Moreover, Gloeckner offers a resistant counterexample and a tactical rereading of the visual traditions of curiosity, sexuality, and endangerment. Like other life writers for whom the temporality of trauma is central, Gloeckner writes as an adult who relies on memory and imagination to distill childhood in her work. As early as 2006, a specific focus on self-representational comics was established in life writing scholarship, especially in projects centrally concerned with form, testimony, ethics, and feminism. Writing in response to the need for renewed thinking about words and images in the context of the war on terror, Gillian Whitlock coined the term autographics in her analysis of two celebrated graphic texts of the late twentieth century: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Satrapi’s Persepolis.20 Her use of the term explicitly references Leigh Gilmore’s “autobiographics” in order to leverage Gilmore’s emphasis on how changing discourses of truth and identity give rise to jurisdictions within which self-representation will be produced and consumed.21 In a special volume of Biography in 2008, Whitlock and Anna Poletti use the term as a synonym for autobiographical comics and graphic memoirs—that is, as a genre.22 We use Gilmore’s “autobiographics” as inclusive of visual discourses and retain the term to highlight how a critique of genre arises from engagement with life writing by women and other marginalized subjects about trauma. Selfrepresentation that falls outside the genre of autobiography and biography often takes the form of interruption and fragmentation, and references or otherwise incorporates other “private” forms like letters and diaries, along with evidentiary forms like medical records, court documents, and unpublished material.23 It is fashioned from diverse materials as they arise within contexts of experience and self-representation, which are themselves temporally distinct. Creators and readers are profoundly concerned with drawing violence, memory, and witness on the page. Self-representational scenes within comics about sexual assault, family, and historical trauma, and the co-presence of everyday life and terrible violence draw the events from the comics artist’s perspective and within her visual style. Our insistence in this project on recognizing the amplification of witness offered by the adult who narrates her own childhood is not a claim that such projects offer more transparent representations of

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the past. They do not have magical powers to summon documentary evidence and clear all doubts. Instead, they navigate credibility battles, as we demonstrate in our reading of Susanna Kaysen in chapter 2, knowing that ethical witness is not a product of “more” visibility, but of perspective, including the lines of sight opened to readers through how the comics artist draws herself.

Childish Things Through what visual strategies, then, does Gloeckner leverage the testimonial power of witness? One strategy is to repurpose and reenvision materials associated with girlhood, including the fairy tale. That is, to use materials of childhood to furnish a scene to which she will return to offer a new form of evidence. In the comic “Magda Meets the Little Men in the Woods,” Gloeckner remediates the fairy tale in contemporary comics form, replacing the naïve and violated girl with a knowledgeable child witness. The fairy tale becomes a platform on which to stage a feminist intervention that challenges the precarity of the girl in public spaces. The comic strip appears in a section titled “More Childish Stories.” Its title recalls the Grimm Brothers’ “The Three Little Men in the Woods.”24 In this tale a daughter and a stepdaughter are each asked to share food with three dwarves in the wood and are judged as either good or bad depending on whether or not they exhibit “selflessness and/or generosity.”25 Magda enters the forest singing a lewd verse: “Choo-choo Charlie was an engineer, stuck his finger up his mother’s—.”26 Magda is visualized as girlish in a black skirt with ruffles, sleeveless T-shirt, short socks, and oxfords; her hair tied in pigtails, she hugs a teddy bear. She presents as a good (and sexually innocent) girl; however, in the first frame, Gloeckner challenges this representation (and the naïveté of familiar fairy tale heroines) as the words in the speech bubble deliberately contrast with this impression of Magda singing and whistling about a boy sticking a finger up his mother’s rear. Her tune resonates as raunchy and more childish when placed in contrast to her girlish getup.

Scale Gloeckner builds on this contradiction between image and word through scale. Initially, Magda’s precarity is not so much about protecting her body from violation or being attacked by a stranger; instead, the men she encounters are tiny and seemingly unthreatening figures (Figure 2). Each

Figure 2. Magda encounters small men in the forest. Illustrations from A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 1998, 2000 by Phoebe Gloeckner. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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claims a close connection as Magda’s two potential husbands and one boyfriend in the following ten, thirteen, and seventeen years. Gloeckner draws Magda as a giant girl who towers over the little men and, in so doing, creates an image that destabilizes the logic of male size and power as well as the discourse of stranger danger. She draws a fully dressed girl, usually inferior in size to men in images in advertising and other popular cultural texts, who is now large enough, in one panel, to pick up one of the men like a toy and exclaim, “You’re little and cute!”27 The male figure resembles a Barbie or baby doll that Gloeckner manipulates. The small man in the comic—a future husband—says, “So are you! I have got a lot of troubles and you are going to take care of me! We’ll have some kids!”28 Gloeckner brings attention to the ways in which adult women experience risk and refuses to make girlhood the site of crisis. This is important because she detaches risk from the girl’s body and places it on the adult woman. Gloeckner points out how adult women are made girlish through patriarchy and male violence. Here marriage makes the adult woman regress and become more childlike. Gloeckner’s critique folds into a larger “gender pessimism” about becoming a woman that we analyze in the preceding chapter. Her visual strategy and use of scale rework the familiar image of a looming male stranger in the forest who overpowers the prepubescent heroine. She also suggests that if playthings were small men rather than cute baby dolls different kinds of feminist knowledge might become available, including reimagining heterosexual romance as “trouble.”

Temporality The panels allow for at least two perspectives: the young girl’s and her future, married, adult self. The girl is narrator, actor, and observer. When Gloeckner places two selves in the picture, she shifts temporality to challenge girlhood vulnerability. She uses the strategy of grafting girlhood onto womanhood visually by offering a girl who “knows” not only about sexuality, but also about the oppressive and patriarchal institution of marriage and family. By telescoping two temporalities, she asks the reader to see a young girl who understands that risk lies hidden in plain sight, in the institutions of patriarchy and white male privilege. Extending this idea, the first man she encounters will get her pregnant when she is seventeen years old. He promises, “I’m going to lie to you a lot!”29 In the next series of panels, she meets her second husband, who offers her an “open marriage,” tells her how to dress, and sends her to

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Figure 3. Magda witnesses and stops abuse. Illustrations from A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 1998, 2000 by Phoebe Gloeckner. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

college. He also “disciplines” her children, and in this image the future husband hits a young girl in the head with a broom, knocking her off a tree branch on which Magda’s adult self and two children also sit (Figure 3). In the panel, the child Magda is oversized and her large arm reaches into the scene to interrupt abuse and shout, “Hey! Don’t Touch Those Babies!!” Gloeckner draws young Magda as a witness who moves to protect the abused girl from further harm. The last panel sequence focuses on her boyfriend who, in seventeen years, will sexually violate her child: “We’ll have fun! I’ll move in with you and we’ll drink a lot and I’ll sleep with your daughter! I sell real estate!”30 The larger scale Magda kicks two of the men and punches the third in the stomach. She runs from the forest to her mother’s arms, crying, “Mommy! I don’t ever want to grow up!” “Oh honey, don’t be silly!” her mother replies, “You’ll grow up and find a nice man and get married and

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have children and live Happily Ever After!”31 The violence in “Magda Meets the Little Men in the Woods” hides in the everyday expectations of domesticity. Gloeckner destabilizes lessons embedded in familiar fairy tales and other cultural texts about the family as the safe space of childhood or private retreat to which the heroine can return as daughter or wife. Importantly, Gloeckner relies on visual and textual humor, providing a punch line for each image, a strategy that allows her to jolt the reader’s complacency.

Out of the Gutter and into the Panel Gloeckner’s comic “Fun Things to Do with Little Girls” also focuses on vulnerability, girlhood, and the domestic space (Figure 4). In one image, Gloeckner draws her mother’s boyfriend raping her. A clock on the wall reads 3:00 p.m., a time of “surreptitiousness”32 when predators know that the child is unsupervised. This in-between time of vulnerability also shows how “dubious” free time is for girls. The girl looks out at the audience rather than at her perpetrator, as text in the upper-left corner of the panel announces, “Years later, the first time I had sex was with my mother’s boy-

Figure 4. Gloeckner moves sexual violation onto the page. Illustration from A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 1998, 2000 by Phoebe Gloeckner. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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friend. I was eager to be sophisticated and wanted nothing more than to please.”33 As she does in the Magda comic, Gloeckner illustrates a grown man in full physical detail, sweating and thrusting while the young girl looks out of the frame and at the reader. We see her face and return her gaze. As Hillary Chute observes, Gloeckner “uses visual tools— illustrations, comic strips—to point to and undo culture’s masculinist predatory gaze.”34 By making physical violation explicit, Gloeckner enables the reader to imagine the “emotional truth” of sexual violence. Gloeckner graphically represents the girl’s body and her precarity by moving her violation out of the gutter and onto the page. As comics theory insists, the gutter is not a void but, rather, a site of signification in the totality of the comics form. For Scott McCloud, the work of closure defines how we read comics.35 Working between panels, the gutter represents the space of transition, continuity but also discontinuity, a gap, McCloud argues, that the reader must close. Gillian Whitlock notes that “the technology of comics draws our attention to the semiotics of sequential art, and its unique demands on the reader.”36 Michael Chaney, too, observes how when comics witness trauma, it makes an ethical claim on readers. He writes, “Take, for example, the way gutters (or wounds) separating one pictorial panel from another are routinely resolved in order to create meaning and coherence, the process Scott McCloud refers to as ‘closure.’ ”37 Hillary Chute identifies the gutter as a capacious site where the reader participates in making meaning. However, Chute does not assume that an ethical response emerges automatically from the comics form; instead, readers must participate in managing causality and temporality. Gloeckner moves violation out of the gutter and into plain sight. What happens in this shift, we argue, transforms the experience of the violated girl into the self-representation of a feminist child witness. Gloeckner uses the gutter to manage affect, specifically, by creating a comic in which scene-to-scene transition requires feminist knowledge of sexual precarity. Gloeckner disrupts the coordinates of meaning and incoherence that map onto invisible/present rape and visual/implied feminist knowledge. In an interview, Gloeckner elucidates this practice: “There is a process of dissociation that takes place when I make a story, I make creative decisions in a fugue state that I could hardly describe to you, but the end result is, I hope, a story with some meaning or resonance, something created, with a beginning, a middle and an end, an encapsulation of feeling and impression, but in no way a documentary of anything other than an ‘emotional truth.’ ”38 Rather than being taught to imagine what body parts go where,

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the reader is tutored by Gloeckner to witness emotional truth in the space of the gutter. That Gloeckner broke with mainstream forms for representing the sexual violation of girls—in her repurposing of childhood fairy tales, use of scale, temporality, the visualization of the male body from a feminist perspective—is clear when considering that the 1998 edition of A Child’s Life and Other Stories was halted from publication by the publisher’s printer because of the realistic drawings of penises and the straightforward representation of the sexual abuse of a young girl. In 2004, A Child’s Life and Other Stories was removed from library shelves in Stockton, California, after an eleven-year-old boy checked the book out from the library. The Gloeckner case makes visible the stakes of representing girls’ sexual precarity from a feminist perspective. Although Stockton mayor Gary Podesto called Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories “a how-to book for pedophiles,”39 Gloeckner’s aim was to expose and thwart such predation. Her work is not explicit and graphic in relation to the prevalence of sexualized and violent imagery but, rather, in relation to the norm of not representing rape and incest from the girl’s perspective. In an interview in the New York Times, Gloeckner argues that it is not only her content that is disturbing, but also her refusal to represent rape as invisible. “Some people think what I draw is pornography, but there are children who experience this, who have this penis in front of their faces. They see it, so why can’t I show it to make the impact clear?”40 Gloeckner moves the sexual precarity of girls out of the gutter and into the drawn space, and offers an alternative visualization of rape from the survivor’s perspective. The censorship of her work suggests how the practice of hiding girls’ precarity in plain sight in visual culture sets up the explicit feminist representation of the sexual abuse of girls for condemnation and exposes it to censorship. The pervasive visual codes for representing girls’ precarity as implied threat involves hiding violence in the gutter and agreeing on its invisibility in everyday spaces. Gloeckner’s work counters this cultural practice by providing graphic knowledge of its presence through the figure of the child witness. Gloeckner’s refusal to place sexual violence outside the frame allows us to reread a legacy of gendered ways of looking as part of a visual system of meaning. In this context, Gloeckner’s work is less a private story of rape than a feminist autobiographical practice that refuses to leave childhood harm in the gutter. Although no medium can guarantee that the affect of feminist witnessing will emerge, we should pay attention to how Gloeckner draws the conditions from which it may arise in the shared gaze

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of the girl and the reader, the graphic depiction of predatory sex, and the use of text to render the action unavoidably explicit.

Becoming Unbecoming Una’s graphic memoir Becoming Unbecoming centers on her experiences of sexual violation during her girlhood in Yorkshire, UK, in the 1970s. Unlike Gloeckner’s work, which remains highly controversial, Becoming Unbecoming was positively received, appearing on Paul Gravett’s “Top Ten British Graphic Novels” of 2015 list, the New York Times’s 2016 Season’s Best Graphic Novels, and garnering attention in mainstream magazines such as Newsweek.41 Una is a pen name “meaning one, one life, one of many” taken by a feminist academic and comics artist living in the UK.42 In Becoming Unbecoming, Una braids together two narratives: her memories of multiple sexual violations as a young girl and a history of the hunt for Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Sutcliffe brutally murdered women in West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester between 1975 and 1980 and is thought to be responsible for up to seventeen additional cases (and, as of 2017, offenses against girls and women as early as 1964).43 The twinned narratives of sexual violence unfold chronologically, but Una, like Gloeckner, attends to the gaps in the story of coming-of-age that sexual abuse imposes. To capture the affects of abuse, Una shows temporal derangement, scrambling the time of adulthood and girlhood, and visualizing childish things in unfamiliar ways to capture the distortions imposed by abuse. However, in contrast to Gloeckner’s realistic representation of sexual violence in the panel, Una constructs a feminist child witness that compels readers to turn their gaze away from the brutalized bodies of girls and women and toward the brutality of men.44 Una’s testimony is only one story in a capacious archive, one of many, and she dedicates the book “to all the others.” Through a refusal to picture her own violation and Sutcliffe’s victims in sensationalistic or dehumanizing terms, Una disrupts how we look, detaching the victim of sexual assault from assumptions about her sexual promiscuity, her madness, or her inability to say no. Una defines comics, and particularly the first-person perspective afforded in self-representational comics, as a key form for exploring traumatic subjects: Perhaps comics, because they can approach difficult subjects on several visual, textual and temporal planes . . . are better than other popular

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mediums such as film or TV at depicting traumatic narratives. But I think this only works when they are in the first person, or take a position as a sympathetic witness, and this has something to do with comics’ core humanity as a form. . . . There’s no room for complacency though, the comics mode is also full of examples of gratuitous violence against women.45

Una recognizes violence against women within the comics tradition, and this informs her representation of the child witness, how she draws the girl’s body, and how she uses the temporality of comics to tell her story of abuse as one tale in a larger cultural script that normalizes male violence. Una works against what she calls a “fetish” with male violence and its representation of the rape and murder of women in film, comics, television, and other popular cultural texts where it is used “as a narrative device, primarily for excitement and dramatic effect.”46 Through her own story, Una disrupts cultural assumptions about girls and women as unreliable witnesses who are shamed and discredited as “sluts and whores,” or dismissed as mentally ill. Una represents sexual violence through diverse styles. Some pages are filled with conventional comics panels, while others feature “abstract” drawings that reference the comics form, like an empty speech bubble, or the visual iconography of loneliness, like a gray cloud floating in white space. The diversity of her style suggests the making of perspective and understanding through the process of composition. She writes that these “drawings can be understood as functioning on a more unconscious, symbolic level than the more conventional narrative panels. . . . The varied visual approaches and experiments within the book demonstrate the journey of learning how to make a graphic narrative by making one.”47 Una’s representation of the psychological states associated with trauma and posttraumatic stress include an elaborate retracing of mohair as a trigger from a previous assault.48 The patient uncovering of a visual detail’s terrifying force provides a template for the therapeutic process of witnessing necessary to survival. It also uses the comics form’s capacity to combine multiple times in one panel, making it especially helpful in representing the temporal dislocation and layering that are expressed as triggers. In addition to a close inspection of naturalistic details and their relationship to trauma, Una offers surrealistic pencil drawings of feminine hybrid insects, a girl’s limbs bursting out of a tree trunk, and various images of disassembled, melting, or prone girls and women to visualize how their bodies record the psychological toll of sexual violence.

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Figure 5. Una visually documents the scale of unreported sexual assault. Reprinted with permission from Becoming Unbecoming by Una (North American edition: Arsenal Pup Press, 2016).

Una intersperses staggering statistics about sexual violence throughout the text.49 In one full-page image, the reader looks down on Una’s slumped head as she rows a boat through an ocean of blue numbers representing the scale of unreported sexual assaults (Figure 5). As oceanic and overwhelming the sea of statistics is, it offers an incomplete record of accounting

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for actual crime due to the shaming of victims and police inaction when women do report: “Two most common reasons given for not reporting the most serious sexual assaults were . . . embarrassment and thinking police can’t do much to help. Of course, if you don’t report it, you don’t count, but it doesn’t seem you count much more if you do.”50 In contrast to a sensationalistic gaze drawn from rape culture that would render a girl’s body as itself risky or vulnerable, Una visualizes statistics and news reports that reveal the chronic and pervasive ordinariness of male violence. As a reviewer for the Los Angeles Review writes, “Rapes in Becoming Unbecoming are primarily illustrated by their psychological after-effects; eerie blendings of shadow, tree branches and the dense brush of Northern England into Rorschachs of terror.”51 Una leaves the depiction of male violence in the gutter as she maps her story onto a larger phenomenon of sensationalized violence in order to contribute to the feminist project of visualizing rape culture.52 Through the unpredictable visual structure of her graphic memoir, Una purposefully captures the time of trauma and the time of witness. She produces an affective guide for readers through her use of line, space, color, and the layering of temporalities. Comics allows Una to stay in the time of girlhood and its trauma, demanding that her childhood be read as a space of feminist witnessing. As a child, Una could not tell adults, teachers, or the police about what had happened to her. This narrative coincides with a real life witness, the fourteen-year-old Tracy Brown who was beaten with a hammer and thrown over a fence by Sutcliffe. Tracy Brown lost her credibility battle. Like Una, she is considered an unreliable witness even as she provides a drawing of Sutcliffe that later turns out to be “an almost exact likeness” of him in 1975.53 Police ignore Brown’s testimony because of her young age and because she does not fit their profile of Sutcliffe’s victims. As Una documents in her memoir, throughout the case, police and news reports insist that Sutcliffe must be attacking prostitutes rather than white girls from good families like Brown. It is through this logic—a girl is either good or bad, a whore or a saint—that Una is defined as a slut who must be asking for it. Una layers her girlhood experience onto that of Brown’s to argue for the reliability of the child witness. She replaces doubt, shame, and silence with belated testimony and the context necessary to make it credible. Her adult self accompanies her younger one to reframe and repicture her experience, to put it in context, and reassert her authority as a child witness who, like Tracy Brown, knows what violence looks and feels like. Becoming Unbecoming begins with a slouching Una carrying an empty speech bubble up a hill. Like the majority of the images in the book,

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the palette is monochromatic, resembling the black-and-white print of the newspaper articles about the Ripper scattered throughout the pages.54 The recurring image of Una’s blank speech bubble doubles visually as a burden that her small frame must carry across time and space. In an interview with the F Word, Una says that her memoir is less about narrating her experiences than exploring “the shapes and forms within the feeling of what you might call the traumatic space that’s left when violence of any kind happens. I was pleased with this as an icon, as it’s literally an empty speech bubble that she’s carrying with her, so it signifies silence.”55 Silence finds a visual representation in Una’s use of empty space. Una resides in two temporalities at the same time, adult and child. Yet the title of the book belies this state. The first half of Una’s title, Becoming, suggests a classic coming-of-age narrative. However, Una is often pictured with hampered wings on her back symbolizing a state of interrupted transformation, and the idea that the body might be doing one thing, but her interior life is stuck in the time of girlhood trauma. The adult hand draws her child self as a thing in pieces, disassembled and reassembled into hybrid creatures that cannot be qualified or deemed human. It is not until she is sixteen and “flew away” from home and school, family and peers, to a place where no one knew her that the wings function.56 Unbecoming is also a term used by others to shame her by defining her as unbecoming, a “slut” who violates norms of propriety by exhibiting conduct unbecoming to the pedagogy of young ladyhood. Thus becoming and unbecoming are intertwined, crossing over in fits and starts across time and location. Indeed, Una’s transformation is interrupted by sexual violence making it difficult to grow up and out of girlhood; but, she also actively rejects the label of the unbecoming girl (or slut), asking the reader to see male rapists instead as unbecoming predators. She challenges and refutes how the only acceptable response is to “become” the properly socialized victim, the silent girl-woman that society expects. On a full-page black-and-white image, Una’s handwritten text floats near the top of the page, and below a young Una lies prone, like the dead Ophelia in John Everett Millais’s painting (Figure 6). The ground upon which she rests resembles a Rorschach inkblot, a visual question for the reader: “What do you see? Whose perception is correct?” These questions voice the larger themes of the book about doubt and veracity. The text reads, “So I became an unreliable witness and a perfect victim.”57 Una plays the part that has been scripted for her— eyes closed, immobile, quiet—yet her hand is possibly curled in a fist that hints at the gestural remnant of resistance. By testifying she takes on the identity of survivor, a temporally

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Figure 6. Una, pictured as an “unreliable witness.” Reprinted with permission from Becoming Unbecoming by Una (North American edition: Arsenal Pup Press, 2016).

and politically distinct identity from victim alone. The survivor identity accompanies the victim identity rather than betrays or indicts her. Una observes that the blame and shame she experiences in girlhood is a common tactic for silencing women’s testimonies, especially about sexual violence. As Gilmore argues: “When the witness is a woman, and

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especially when the harm includes sexual violence, she will be subjected to practices of shaming and discrediting that pre-exist any specific case.”58 Una, too, traces a history of disbelief. Arguing that girls and women who have been sexually assaulted are often assumed to be “mad” or mentally ill. She writes: The idea that one is left disturbed is disturbing in itself, because it’s hard to take the testimony of the mad seriously. Trauma is not easy to deal with, even when support is available. Unfortunately, a lack of support from family and community can worsen the effects of trauma. The hysteric is an interesting figure; she has as little control over her own image as a slut. If she discloses abuse and is believed, she is a disturbed victim. If she discloses and is not believed, she is a disturbed liar.59

Una places her own credibility battle within a larger history that women as witnesses to their own sexual violation always encounter. Girls’ lack of credibility is amplified by their youth, and thus exposed when they write about the experience from their adult perspective. Una notes that this doubt makes it difficult to speak at all (Figure 7). She writes, “The whole subject was cloaked in secrecy and embarrassment but was simultaneously in plain sight.”60 Una describes several assaults she suffered in girlhood. She harnesses comics’s ability to communicate on multiple temporal, visual, and textual levels simultaneously. Because victims of sexual assault are required to describe their clothing as part of the rape defense strategy to blame them, Una draws what she wore when she was assaulted—a long sleeve shirt, jeans, and flats.61 Her body is missing from the image and she re-creates her outfit as clothes with tabs intended to fold over a flat two-dimensional paper doll. Like Gloeckner, Una repurposes material artifacts of girlhood for dissonant affective purposes and to claim authority over her experience. Evoking paper dolls symbolizes Una’s girlhood and adds weight to a scene in which an adult male takes the clothes off of her child’s body without consent (Figure 8). On the top of the page she writes “Jeans (N): Hard-wearing casual trousers made of denim or other cotton fabric.” A disembodied speech bubble appears on the side of the page, and an adult Una provides commentary about the jeans in the image: “It was the seventies, so they would have been flared. I used to find the button too stiff.” A square speech bubble pops up from the bottom of the page to distinguish

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Figure 7. “I am not a slut!” Reprinted with permission from Becoming Unbecoming by Una (North American edition: Arsenal Pup Press, 2016).

it from Una’s narration. The voice of Terry enters the scene: “It’d be a lot easier next time if you wore a skirt.” Through another speech bubble positioned next to Terry’s, the reader hears Una’s adult voice again: “Yes, that is actually what he said.”62 Una further facilitates this image for the reader, providing a footnote in her last speech bubble. Turning to the back of the

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Figure 8. Una repurposes childish things. Reprinted with permission from Becoming Unbecoming by Una (North American edition: Arsenal Pup Press, 2016).

book, Una’s adult voice accompanies her younger self to verify the perspective of the child witness. She writes, “I have not used the word ‘rape’ to describe this incident, even though that is what it was. This is because I didn’t name it as rape until many years later. It’s impossible to explain why. I can only say that Terry was not interested in whether I consented,

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or whether I was old enough to consent. He also didn’t care whether I was hurt or shocked or whether I cried, which I did.”63 The temporality of childhood (signified by the representation of the clothes worn during the assault as an outfit for a paper doll) and adulthood (Una’s commentary in image and footnote) are co-present so that the adult can provide the perspective that the child couldn’t. Her serial violation by a number of men is folded into the history of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper and through this cultural reference, she criticizes patterns of representations. Rather than continue fetishizing the damaged and dismembered feminine body, Una focuses on visualizing the scale and ordinariness of male violence and its social acceptance. As Una incorporates “the facts” of overwhelming and underreported instances of male violence, she demythologizes the loner or charmer, as a unique character. She moves the rapist out of the woods and exposes him as an ordinary white middle-class man. In this way, she does not celebrate Sutcliffe or the men who violated her. Una writes: There are so many books dedicated to Peter Sutcliffe—websites, whole conspiracy theories. It’s all about him. But, if you try and find out anything about any of those women (the victims), it’s extremely difficult. They exist, basically, as 13 mugshots. If you Google it, you get a grid, with 13 mugshots of 13 women and, sometimes, they’re not even the right women on the grid.64

Una refuses the “monstrous male, the lunatic, the cloaked figure in the shadows” that “directs the collective gaze away from the ordinariness of male violence”65 and places the blame for sexual violence on the ordinary male perpetrator. Becoming Unbecoming begins with Una dragging a speech bubble weighted by silence, it ends with a graphic tribute to the thirteen women killed by the Ripper. Una draws each woman as if she were alive today— sitting at computer, walking a dog, lying in a hospital bed. She continues their lives, reimagining and drawing an alternative temporality of collective survivorship. Una’s speculative graphic biographical portraits speak to a collective experience of living with male violence. All the women are fully clothed, alive, and engaged in everyday work. This moving memorial asks readers to think about who we lost through this violence and seeks to return some humanity to the people killed, charting new pathways for remembrance that refuse to blame the victim.

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Comics and Feminist Child Witness Through our reading of Una and Gloeckner, we suggest that comics offers an alternative jurisdiction— or forum of judgment— convened by the graphics artist in book form. In this jurisdiction, sexual violence will be visualized as injury, men will be drawn as both everyday actors and as sexually violent and predatory, and readers will be required to see the violence from the artist’s point of view because of the form.66 Gloeckner and Una transform the experience of the violated girl into the self-representation by an adult of a feminist child witness to intervene in the production of knowledge about the girl’s sexual vulnerability to harm, disbelief, silencing, and shaming. Feminist witness represents the perspective that Gloeckner and Una as adults bring to their engagement with autobiographical material and also the readerly perspective they intend to address. They not only counter the claim that sexual violence is invisible and unknown, they craft a form in which readers must engage the self-representation of sexual violence from this perspective. Gloeckner refuses to hide rape in the gutter, and thereby forces its materiality from under the cover of its visual encoding as permissible so long as unseen. Una employs representational strategies that de-sensationalize male violence and shift the viewer’s gaze away from a fascination with the serial killers and rapists who brutalize girls and women. She does not avert the reader’s gaze, however, from horrific statistics or faulty assumptions about women as either innocent or “loose.” Gloeckner and Una return to childish things and use the comics form to disassemble child and adult temporalities in the service of visual testimony. Each is strategic about gaps and gutters, employing visual space to reenvision sexual violence in their own terms to challenge the depiction of girls as lacking control of their bodies and lives, as dependent, and as vulnerable. Their work demands an ethical response from readers and requests a kind of looking that uses images affectively for a feminist critique of girlhood and precarity. It asks us to look at and hear the child witness as reliable.

chapter 4

Teaching Dissent through Picture Books: Girlhood Activism and Graphic Life Writing for the Child I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. —james baldwin, “A Talk To Teachers,” Saturday Review, December 1963

Like comics, picture books communicate through the sequential interplay between word and image as they generate scenes and relations of witness within the larger feminist genealogy of self-representation we chart in this book.1 Life writing for children offers another “alternative jurisdiction” through which adult women testify to harm and call for action.2 Picture books produced for the child enact strategic representations of childhood experience for a cross-generational audience they aim to teach and encourage toward activism. We include picture books as a distinct form of child witness. Although often considered childish, picture books are better understood as artifacts of visual culture; those about trauma are objects to be read alongside other forms of testimony in a broad practice of representation that Kyo Maclear calls the “art of witnessing.”3 The graphic memoir My Hiroshima by award-winning picture book creator and nuclear disarmament activist Junko Morimoto and the picture book biography of Jewish labor activist Clara Lemlich, Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909, by journalist Michelle Markel and illustrator Melissa Sweet, extend the tradition of using the child to bear witness to collective violence that we trace in life writing by Harriet 86

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Jacobs, Rigoberta Menchú, and Marjane Satrapi.4 Morimoto and Markel begin their narratives in girlhood to compel readers to see the child witness as a member of a loving family before each testifies to the specific experiences of violence that impel them to experience coming-of-age as coming-to-political consciousness. More specifically, each picture book constructs a child activist who reclaims her experience as a collective one and calls on her audience to take an ethical stance.5 Children’s authors and illustrators offer instructional scenes for ethical witness by repicturing history through the perspective of the child witness, reclaiming visual images of violence through memory, and crafting graphic representations of child activism and resistance. In so doing, they challenge historical narratives and alter “our habits of looking.”6 Morimoto’s text focuses on the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, and Markel and Sweet’s takes up the 1909 New York shirtwaist strike in the United States. These two examples of life writing extend across diverse topics and periods, underscoring the picture book as flexible enough to address the atrocity of war and the all too ubiquitous exploitations of child labor.

Trauma, Picture Books, and Pedagogical Testimony Picture books are synonymous with children’s literature. But is this a necessary condition of the art form itself ? Or is it just a cultural convention, more to do with existing expectations, marketing prejudices and literary discourse? —shaun tan, “Picture Books: Who Are They For?”

Picture books are a boundary-breaking form that many artists, including Maurice Sendak, Wolf Erlbruch, Tom Feelings, Shaun Tan, and Carole Boston Weatherford use to represent trauma. Writing in a form most commonly associated with children, artists like Sendak and Tan often eschew the question of audience, stating that they create picture books for all ages and readers. Picture books are neither innocent nor simple and by design they tap into a dual audience of adults and children. As Natasha Hurley argues about the invention of the child audience for children’s literature: “No body of literature is so charged with forming the very audience its existence presupposes.”7 Graphic life writing for the child addresses and seeks to encourage an ethical witness and to shape an activist subject; it also assumes an adult reader who will buy, share, and/or teach picture books.

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The construction of childhood in women’s graphic life writing for children references a history of representation in which “children have become the moral referent.”8 Specifically, self-representations of girlhood and violence rely on a familiar trope of the wounded or suffering child that compels the viewer to look, to witness harm, and to enter larger ethical debates.9 This is not simply a case of the adult speaking on behalf of the child; rather, as we have argued, the adult accompanies the childhood self, drawing, narrating, and contextualizing memories, and supplying interpretation and context for a multi-age audience. There are many “children” within and beyond the physical object of the book, including the actual child who experienced violence, the child-self constructed by the adult, and the real and imaged child reader. Given their association with childhood, picture books are often read through the lens of or on behalf of the imaginary child reader. As Kenneth Kidd notes, “[Of ] all contemporary genres of children’s literature, the picture book offers the most dramatic and/or ironic testimony to trauma, precisely because the genre is usually presumed innocent.”10 For some, youth are assumed to be less knowledgeable, and therefore less adept at navigating traumatic material, a construction that suggests that children will be introduced to the topic of social violence through a book rather than through everyday experience. Alongside the idea that the child reader is a subject to be delicately handled runs a competing idea that the young reader is an ethical subject who can be educated into goodness. Through picture books about trauma, the child witness is called up as a harbinger of hope or as a potential activist. Thus while Morimoto and Markel challenge sentimental ideas about childhood innocence in their depiction of the child witness, they also reach out to the real and implied child witnesses reading the book, whom they address as teachable subjects and readers who can be instructed to take an ethical stand and work against future violence. In addition to being part of an archive of childhood material, picture books are also a potentially subversive art form. Picture books for and about the child often circumvent official school curricula, providing what James Baldwin in the epigraph to this chapter heralds as an education that seeks to develop “a conscience that is at war with society.” Educators, librarians, and parents have long used children’s trade books to supplement the official school curriculum, incorporating these nonfiction books as an antidote to the detached historical accounts found in textbooks.11 Morimoto’s eyewitness account in My Hiroshima provides a contrast to brief descriptions in U.S. textbooks that “focus on abstract facts and figures, offering little discussion of the reality of the bombing.”12 In her history of children’s

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literature and its authors, Learning from the Left, Julia Mickenberg documents how nonfiction trade books for children, including life writing, have historically circulated as an alternative pedagogy within schools and libraries with little controversy.13 In particular, biographies by women for children belong to a broader radical history in the United States. Mickenberg writes that “between 1945 and 1965, the early years of the Cold War, more than a dozen writers on the left—many of whom were African American or Jewish, most of whom were women—wrote and illustrated books for children about American history, often using the medium of biography.”14 The picture books analyzed here follow this progressive, antiwar, pro-labor, feminist, and antiracist educational tradition.15 Life writing for children continues to advocate dissent as adult women picture their pasts and use their girlhoods as a site of pedagogical testimony.

Repicturing History through the Child Witness My Hiroshima can be situated within a larger trend in children’s trauma literature, including representations of the Holocaust that emerged throughout the late 1980s and 1990s,16 that offers the strategic use of the child witness. My Hiroshima is an account of the bombing on August 6, 1945. Morimoto signals her relationship to this atrocity through the use of the possessive “my” in the title, informing the reader that this story is hers, reclaiming her childhood experience from detached histories of the bombing. If we unmoor children’s trauma literature from its ties to an imaginary (and presumably untraumatized) child audience and turn our attention to how the form testifies to trauma, then new questions emerge about how the picture book can be utilized to create fresh ways of looking and witnessing. Morimoto draws on contradictory understandings of the child as a reliable witness, a vulnerable subject who should be protected from harm, and an ethical subject upon which to attach hope for a peaceful future. The adult artist Morimoto captures disparate temporalities on the page by drawing her child self on the cover of the book (Figure 9). In the lower left corner, a young Junko appears dressed in a school uniform. Her face turns away from the viewer, her gaze focused on a large white smoke plume, the iconic mushroom cloud. The younger Morimoto tugs at her brother’s blue coat; his eyes shut as he faces the viewer, avoiding the destruction alongside them. Morimoto is the child witness who urgently asks her brother as well as the reader to look. Like the child witness-narrator of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Morimoto “reenters the scene of gendered childhood

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Figure 9. Morimoto asks the reader to look. Reprinted with permission from My Hiroshima by Junko Morimoto, Lothian Children’s Books, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 2014.

to clarify the relation of private and familial experiences of trauma to the public upheaval in which they are enmeshed.”17 The adult Morimoto guides the reader to see what others (including her brother) do not wish to acknowledge. A small handwritten signature, “Morimoto,” rests under the illustration of the blast, a testament to the adult hand that draws the images, and an acknowledgment of her materiality. Her handwritten signature also appears on the title page, suggesting that like comics, picture books are a “haptic form for both its creators and its readers.”18 The picture book is an object designed for holding in a child’s hands. As such, it conjures the body of childhood no matter who holds the book.

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Morimoto’s illustrations of the aftermath of the attack echo Keiji Nakazawa’s 1972 nonfiction comic about Hiroshima I Saw It. As Hillary Chute notes, “I Saw It is famous for visualizing the effect of the physical disfigurement wreaked by the bomb, such as bodies with flaps of dissolving skin dripping off their frames, eaten faces without eyeballs and bald, burning women.”19 Morimoto’s illustrations repeat this imagery. In a twopage spread set moments after the bombing, Morimoto draws two brown and burned figures with skin dripping off of their hands, wearing tattered clothes and grief-stricken expressions.20 Similarly disturbing images appear throughout the book as survivors walk like zombies, and a dead baby screams to wake up its dead mother. Morimoto moves between materializing herself on the page and providing a broader perspective on the bombing. From the front cover of the book to the title page that includes Morimoto’s handwritten signature in tiny letters to the image of herself as a small child, Morimoto draws herself on the page in a relational web: first, in a family photograph; next as a young artist, holding on to the pen, which functions as a reminder of her hand in the making of the picture book; and subsequently in illustrations that depict her as she grows, including an image with her playmates, brother, and classmates, as a girl conscripted into the war effort by her government. Recalling the day of the bombing, Morimoto changes the viewpoint, toggling visually from her own perspective to that of the bomber pilot. She visualizes the view of Paul Tibbets and photographer Bob Caron on the Enola Gay before they drop Little Boy on Hiroshima; the reader flies over nondescript houses as well as small barely discernible human figures. Morimoto draws this scene in pencil, mimicking the visual technology of black-and-white photography and also signifying that the bomb will erase the buildings and living beings out of existence. Over this documentary footage from the sky, Morimoto layers colored images in differently shaped frames, showing a close-up of everyday activities that cannot be discerned from above: a woman walks a baby, people ride bikes, work in fields, and ride a bus. The text reads “8:15 AM August 6 1945. The people of Hiroshima had just begun their day’s work.” As with other testimonial art about the bombing, Morimoto’s has a “documentary character; survivors pay attention to clocktime” to signal before and after.21 In contrast to the activity on this page, the next scene is eerily still. On a blue background a long shot of a small gray plane zips out of the left side of the page on a diagonal, giving it an intense sense of movement.22 The backdrop of the opposing page is white, a visual strategy that, like the

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Figure 10. Hands reach up and out of the ground, framing the iconic mushroom cloud of the Hiroshima bombing. Reprinted with permission from My Hiroshima by Junko Morimoto, Lothian Children’s Books, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 2014.

gutter in comics, slows time. A young Morimoto and her sister sit at the bottom of the page and no hard line defines them, suggesting that they are open targets. Time is shattered on the next page as a swirl of brown pushes the two girls (now entwined) off of the bottom right of the page. Morimoto recalls: “I was hit by a thunderous flash and an explosion of sound. My eyes burnt— everything went black. I held my sister. Everything faded away— I thought I was dying.” A two-page illustration includes three horizontal frames: a middle panel of blue sky and the mushroom cloud that appears on the front cover, which is sandwiched by two brown panels (Figure 10). In the panels, gray hands claw up and out of the dirt, reach for bodies that have been thrown asunder, and hang limp. Disembodied hands come to signify physical pain and historical trauma. Leigh Gilmore writes, “In the pantheon of body parts that dominate visual images of pain, hands play a special role. Like faces, hands are associated with identity, and also like faces, hands have a long history in visual culture of embodying the human.”23 As haptic signifiers of trauma, these hands represent the devastation of humanity. When Morimoto returns to school, she includes an official government issue aerial black-and-white photo that cuts across both pages. At the bottom right-hand corner, Morimoto draws a facsimile of a sepia-colored snapshot of a young Junko grasping the bones of her friends from the dirt. Morimoto “captures both exterior and interior trauma.”24 She does so

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visually by juxtaposing the black-and-white photo of the destruction with her own personal loss. At the end of the book, Morimoto mirrors this sepia image and inserts a color photograph of herself as an adult in the same stance and place on the playground. Adult and child temporalities overlap. She has grown, but her friends remain dead. Life writing for children includes didactic textual features unique to its implied audience of teachers and children, highlighting how the book works as pedagogical testimony. Morimoto’s memoir incorporates a “Facts About Hiroshima” page that details how 70,000 people died instantly and another 70,000 died by the end of 1945, and that people who survived the initial blast—the Hibakusha— continue to die from complications from radiation. Under the text are two color photos of present-day bustling Hiroshima that belie the ongoing effects of the bomb. Morimoto amplifies the peritextual elements that the picture book affords through the inclusion on the inside cover of black-and-white photos taken before the bombing. Documentary bookends to her graphic testimony inside the book, the photographs provide a stark contrast—a photo taken by an unseen hand versus the full color illustrations within the book drawn by the hand of a survivor. The endpapers of the book reproduce a black-and-white photograph of the Genbaku Dome before the bombing (the only structure left standing near the hypocenter, and now the Hiroshima Peace Park memorial) that bleeds onto the opposing page, suggesting the inability to contain the destruction of the bomb. In the image, the area surrounding the memorial is packed with people and testifies to the scope of loss on August 6, 1945. Morimoto concludes the book with a letter to adult readers: “Dear parents and teachers.” Morimoto addresses the audience who will buy, read, and teach this book. She writes: In My Hiroshima, I have chosen to tell the story of the first atomic bomb explosion through my childhood memories, so that young children will be able to relate the story to their lives. Hiroshima is my home town, where I was born. I grew up in a prowar society, never learning the value of peace or imagining the real holocaust of war. It is still frightening to remember that time when even children were trained in war, taught that suicide came before surrender.

Through direct address, Morimoto seeks to teach adult readers how her own lived childhood and that of future children (to whom she dedicates the

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book) are subject to cultural pedagogies designed by adults. She concludes the letter to parents: War, the atomic bomb . . . only human beings have produced them. They are the crimes of adults who forget the precious value of life. I believe it is the duty and the responsibility of adults to teach our children the importance of not repeating these mistakes and to give them the heart to care for and value all life on earth.

Morimoto makes an explicit ethical appeal to her audience by relying on familiar images of the wounded or vulnerable child to elicit action. As Moeller points out, “Children dramatize the righteousness of a cause by having their innocence contrasted with the malevolence (or perhaps banal hostility) of adults in authority.”25 Morimoto ends the book with this plea and has the final word as a child witness and survivor. Morimoto’s act of collective witness seeks to memorialize the dead and open channels of identification that enable others to mourn their loss. Through her repicturing of the dead as beloved family members and as people going about their everyday lives, she offers her relationship to them as a vector of empathy. The performance of grief enacts a politics of commemoration for young audiences.26

Graphic Representations of Child Activism and Resistance I think the women who buy and wear the beautiful clothes do not know how it is for the girl who makes them —what conditions she has— or they would care and would try to help her. —clara lemlich, “The Inside of a Shirtwaist Factory”

In their 2013 picture book biography, Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909, Michelle Markel and Melissa Sweet chronicle the activism of Jewish labor organizer and Ukrainian immigrant Clara Lemlich, who led the largest walkout of women workers in United States history. Specifically, the biography focuses on Lemlich’s involvement in the creation of the union and her leadership during a general strike in 1909, the “Uprising of 20,000.” Markel, a freelance journalist based in the United States, dedicates the book to “workers everywhere,” reminding the audience about the ongoing exploitation of adults and children around the globe who continue to labor under oppressive conditions. Arriving in New York in 1903 as a seventeen-year-old, Lemlich is already a “committed

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revolutionary” who emigrated with her parents because of anti-Jewish violence, specifically the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. Markel’s biography lays out Lemlich’s life story along several axes of identity, including ethnicity, religion, class, and gender. When her family arrives in the United States, companies “are hiring thousands of immigrant girls to make blouses, coats, nightgowns, and other women’s clothing.” Lemlich as well as other young women make only a little money each month and “instead of carrying books to school, many girls carry sewing machines to work.” Lemlich’s individual story is the story of many girls. In an interview Markel states, “Brave Girl didn’t want to be a traditional biography. It wanted to be an account of a woman’s courageous leadership in a collective action—the 1909 strike.” The biography of Lemlich serves as an entry point into a larger collective history of the labor movement in the United States and elsewhere. Moreover, the title Brave Girl attends to the flexibility and contestation of the category “girl”; Lemlich is twenty-three when she agitates for the strike. When the term “girl” intersects with class and ethnicity, as it does here, it reveals how whiteness and privilege often structure a fantasy of girlhood as a period of protected and protracted childhood, one that Markel as well as Morimoto disrupts.27 Specifically, ethnic violence, immigrant status, and oppressive labor practices scramble the temporality of Lemlich’s girlhood. The term “girl” marks her diminutive size, gender, disenfranchisement, and her working-class status. Melissa Sweet’s watercolor, gouache, and mixed media illustrations provide additional testimonial weight to Markel’s narrative. Sweet’s illustrations include fabric stitched onto pages with thread, backgrounds of squared sewing pattern paper, and fragments of vintage time cards. Here, the haptic extends to include the detailed finishing work of the girls. Illustrations visualize how the category “girl” fails to protect Lemlich from violence and details how she regularly experienced physical assault and imprisonment for her activism. The police arrest Lemlich seventeen times, and officers and gangs hired by the factory owners beat her. The physical violence results in six broken ribs. Sweet’s illustrations testify to this brutality. Clubs are pictured, and the needlework that frames the border of the page switches from evenly spaced stitches to jagged and uneven ones. Sweet creates an illustration drawn from a bird’s-eye view above the factory floor to capture the scope and crowded working conditions and to provide readers with a sense of scale. Rows of thirty workers sit tightly together, and Sweet draws two hundred and forty heads working on sewing machines, surrounded by three male bosses who patrol (Figure 11).

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Figure 11. Sweet’s illustration testifies to the crowded and gendered conditions of factory work. Text copyright © 2013 by Michelle Markel. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

The text reads, “From dawn to dusk, she’s locked up in a factory. Rows and rows of young women bend over their tables, stitching collars, sleeves, and cuffs as fast as they can. . . . The sunless room is stuffy from all the bodies crammed inside. There are two filthy toilets, one sink, and three towels for three hundred girls to share.” The critique of gendered working conditions is drawn from Lemlich’s firsthand testimony in an article titled

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“The Inside of a Shirtwaist Factory: An Appeal to Women Who Wear Choice and Beautiful Clothing,” published in Good Housekeeping in 1911. In that article, Lemlich testifies to what she has witnessed as a factory girl to compel upper-class women to action. Lemlich begins by suggesting that consumers must be unaware of how it is for the girl who makes their beautiful garments, “what conditions she has— or they would care and would try to help her.” Lemlich speaks on behalf of a larger collective. She asks, “What good is it to have the rule about the children if manufactures do not have to keep it?”28 Markel and Sweet’s picture book advances Lemlich’s testimony about the conditions in the factory, including the employment of girls as young as six, a reality documented by other visual testimony such as the photographs of child laborers taken by Lewis W. Hine in the early twentieth century.29 Markel portrays the key scene in Lemlich’s leadership as a model of activism. At a meeting at the Cooper Union in New York City, where men debate about whether to strike, Lemlich finally takes the stage and speaks to the crowd in Yiddish: “I am a working girl. I have no further patience for talk. . . . I am one of those who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike . . . now!” The strike included mostly Jewish immigrants and spanned several weeks. The reader sees Lemlich with a fist raised in the air, her other hand holding a ripped time card. A large speech bubble in Yiddish appears on the left side of the page. The crowd pictured is predominantly female and they hold up their fists, too, mouths open in solidarity. “The next morning New York City is stunned by the sight of thousands of young women streaming from factories. One newspaper calls it an army. Others call it a revolt. It’s a revolt of girls, for some are only twelve years old.” The strike helped solidify the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), but was only partially successful. Some factories offered shorter weekdays whereas others, most famously the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, refused. In an illustration (Figure 12) set before the 1909 strike Sweet draws a building with tiny figures shouting “Strike!” in red letters in speech bubbles out of the windows. On this tall factory building hangs a black sign that reads: “Triangle Waist Company.” Sweet provides a visual footnote that testifies to one of the worst workplace disasters in U.S. history. On March 25, 1911, one hundred and forty-six people (mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant girls and women) died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire because the bosses kept doors locked and the workers were unable to exit the building.

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Figure 12. An illustration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York memorializes the victims of the deadly March 25, 1911, fire. Text copyright © 2013 by Michelle Markel. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Sweet’s embedded visual cue exemplifies testimonial pedagogy that fulfills the picture book’s potential as a graphic form of witness. Although the text does not identify the tragedy explicitly, Sweet’s art implicitly references it, as well as Lemlich’s own response. In her editorial written for Good Housekeeping, Lemlich noted that the 1909 walkout was a failure, and that it needed the “lives of a hundred and forty-six girls to show them that a loft needs more than one fire escape; that the doors should not be kept locked, that when girls sit so close they cannot get out? We told them that before, but they did not listen; the boss said it was all right.”30 Depending on the context and on the book’s readers, this image invites questions and opportunities for explicit instruction and discussion. Through the visual reference to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire as well as the inclusion of

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bibliographic information for Lemlich’s Good Housekeeping article that calls for justice on behalf of the victims, Markel and Sweet create the conditions for educating an ethical child witness. Markel conceives of the picture book biography as testimonial pedagogy and promotes that objective when she tells an interviewer that she wanted the book to make “its way into the hands of teachers and children.”31 Like Morimoto, Markel utilizes the didactic potential of the picture book to include a range of educational materials that offer an alternative history. In the author’s note, Markel charts a history of the working class that acknowledges how pogroms and poverty in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other parts of Eastern Europe led to the influx of immigrants into the United States. A selected bibliography includes general sources as well as primary texts for further reading that acknowledge Lemlich’s communist politics and her Jewish heritage, including articles for the socialist New York Call, the New York Evening Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Jewish Currents. The inclusion of these primary historical documents is purposeful: They are easy to access online and open up an archive of materials that foreground a feminist, intersectional history of the working class in the United States. This seemingly straightforward tale of girl power—the title Brave Girl suggests as much—is also a launching-off point for teaching about labor movements in the United States; a critique of capitalism, sweatshops, and child labor; and of youth as political actors against injustice. Although the book ends with an image of Lemlich looking at the Statue of Liberty, she is no singular hero but rather one Jewish immigrant girl alongside the “thousands of brave girls who picketed in the winter of 1909.”32 Brave Girl offers a potentially radical curriculum that centers the child witness as activist within and outside of the picture book.33

A Revolt of Girls: Theorizing a Collective Child Witness Life writing for children recalls Leigh Gilmore’s claim that personal narratives represent politics by other means.34 The graphic life writing in this chapter makes visible a larger history of girls in revolt, and reveals a longer history of activism led by girls of color, Indigenous, and immigrant girls who continue to be at the forefront of fights for equity. Newspaper articles referred to the 1909 strike that Lemlich led as a “revolt of girls,” the “working girls’ strike,” and as “the girl army,” all definitions that gesture to a collective movement. We suggest a “revolt of girls” as a central site of testimony and resistance, a concept that embraces collectivity and eschews neoliberal paradigms that frame contemporary definitions of girl power

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and that defang girls’ political agency.35 The picture books in this chapter suggest girls and young women, instead, as reliable child witnesses who agitate for social justice. One of the interesting tensions in works aimed at a child audience is that these authors—to varying degrees—manipulate the political and rhetorical figure of the wounded or suffering child to make histories of trauma visible. At the same time, these books assume a contemporary child reader who is fundamentally good.36 Morimoto as well as Markel and Sweet suggest that if reached young enough, children can be taught to be ethical subjects. And, yet each is careful to suggest that social violence is an everyday occurrence, a pattern that repeats. The threat of nuclear war, for instance, continues to loom despite the testimony provided by Junko Morimoto, who continued to fight against nuclear weapons until her death. In 2017, worried about nuclear threats from North Korea, Morimoto wrote a public letter urging Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to sign the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty. In her letter dated August 24, 2017, Morimoto writes, “I wrote a children’s book called My Hiroshima, to share my story in the hope that humanity will learn about the horrors of nuclear war. While nuclear weapons exist, we are not safe from this threat.” Each example of graphic life writing in this chapter speaks to a larger revolt of girls, a revolt that the young women in the Larry Nassar trial similarly waged through their collective witness against sexual abuse that was enabled by organizations acting in loco parentis for minors (from Twistars youth gymnastics program to coaches, trainers, and a host of adults associated with Michigan State University, USA Gymnastics, and the US Olympics committee). Thus, My Hiroshima and Brave Girl represent a key strand of the history of feminist resistance we chart in chapter 1, in which women’s “political and moral autonomy develops from their responses to girlhood experience and crisis.” However, picture books are also different in fundamental ways. As they seek out a dual audience of children and adults, they also boldly foreground collective activism as a viable behavior for youth. Morimoto’s autobiographical art foregrounds ongoing fights for peace and Brave Girl situates Lemlich within a larger movement for labor rights that continues into the present.37 The representational practice of collective witness within life writing for children is central to the pedagogical project of offering culturally specific stories of dissent that possess radical potential for education.

epilogue

Twenty-First-Century Formations: Child Witness, Trans Life Writing, and Futurity There is no perception without a subject, but there is no subject without a world. —gayle salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King

Throughout this book we have been interested in analyzing how subjects use representations of childhood in life writing (broadly conceived) to bear witness, encourage new collectivities (of survivorship, of protest, of affiliation) to emerge, and contest cultural and political meanings of childhood. 1 Narratives of childhood and graphic discourses such as comics and picture books provide both an immediate example of personal experience and create new possibilities of empathy. Yet as our readings demonstrate, empathy is difficult to control. Once stirred, its consistent application to those who are routinely denigrated cannot be counted on because feelings follow pathways of hierarchical value: They can even flow to the powerful who, once accused, seek to claim the position of victim. As salutary and rehumanizing as empathy can be, it continues to justify calls for white savior rescue projects, and to amplify the racist and sexist legacies of slavery and colonialism. Although one of the hallmarks of neoliberalism is an apparent openness to first-person accounts about harm and suffering, the public sphere is actually contracting in its tolerance for the new knowledge such testimony demands, reverting, instead, to practiced affective responses of doubting girls and women, blaming 101

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brown men, demonizing mothers, and exonerating police. To illuminate the interplay between self-representation and the discourses in which it seeks to intervene, we have traced a line from Harriet Jacobs’s life writing to twenty-first-century formations emerging around the child in order to highlight the ongoing rhetorical, narrative, creative, and political contestation of childhood in life writing. Those from whom the status of the child is withheld include child migrants and refugees, children rendered stateless by war who cannot rely on international protections, child soldiers, and enslaved children, as well as youth of color in the United States.2 The feminist and antiracist movements of #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName protest not only the expendability of Black boys and girls, but also how these subjects are denied their status as children. Within neoliberalism, some children and youth will fail to gain the privileges and protection of childhood, while others will occupy it as global icons, such as Malala Yousafzai. As Wendy Hesford argues, we “need to consider the hierarchy of children’s suffering because domestic U.S. media tend to represent non-white children outside of its borders in more sympathetic terms than those within.”3 The contradictions define the category’s powers of exclusion. The political interventions of #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName are also saturated in grief and memorialization. They ask, who will speak for the dead? For these beloved children, in particular, what forms of witness and life writing will serve, given that those who are mourned cannot write their own stories? It doesn’t take much to dislodge the commonplace notion that writing (or drawing or otherwise creating) an autobiography is relatively straightforward. Although “you lived it, you remember it, you write it” has a commonsense appeal, on the seeming simplicity of self-representation, theorists and practitioners, if not all reviewers and readers, agree: Even the aspects that seem the most straightforward are not. Life writing typically entails telling the stories of others along with the self. Family members often experience some variance in memory, but in the case of trauma, those differences can become acute, spilling over into litigation and prompting memoirists to issue disclaimers.4 The reputations of men, for example, can mask their abuse of women and children, including their own children. And when these children speak out, either at the time of abuse or decades later, those in power are often passionately defended. Who is granted the authority to challenge those reputations? Who adjudicates the ongoing cross-referencing that renders the correspondences between the autobiographical subject and the world she inhabits legible in her terms? Whose experience will rise to a level of sufficient value and credibility that it will

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persuade those who are predisposed to doubt? That depends on how subjects are read, not simply on who they are (i.e., who they experience and name themselves as being) or are becoming. For children, the temporalities that include the processing of experience as memory (i.e., as time passing) also bear the developing awareness of identity (i.e., as growing up and coming of age). The limitations of normative stories of childhood, along with the heteronormative models of kinship they derive from, however, are brought into sharp relief by the lived experience of trans children.5 Tey Meadow asks, “What is a trans child?” in order to observe how recently such a question has been posed about this “new social form.”6 Meadow studies how adults since the 1990s have begun to “label” trans children, how parents, doctors, schools, and other authorities navigate available language and categories, including gender and childhood, and improvise new ones, including care, protection, and responsibility. How do trans adults theorize and narrativize the temporalities of trans childhood? What forms of recognition and witnessing, of self-knowledge and self-representation, about trans children and trans childhood are emerging in contemporary life writing? What forms of critical witness will be necessary to engage with these specificities?7 Parents, as witnesses, represent and define trans childhood from an understandably invested position and, as such, manifest the constraints institutions place on how trans children can access protection. Although parents have emerged as advocates since the early 2000s, a scholarly consensus acknowledges the limitations of their positionality to advance understandings of trans people: “The affective politics of parent advocacy . . . operates through dominant frames of gendered, classed and racialized normativity, limiting both who can become a parent advocate and potentially narrowing the focus of the struggle.”8 Given the importance of queer kinship to trans lives, the linkage of parent and child, including parent and trans child, represents one form among many for accompanying the trans child into self-representation. Historically, scenes of trans self-representation have been rife with crises of witnessing. Medical experts and a host of authorities require trans people to identify according to outdated diagnostic criteria that dress bias up in terms steeped in histories of pathologizing gender diversity.9 “The power of naming that has fallen to doctors and psychologists, social workers and academics,” writes Jack Halberstam, “commands the authority of scientific inquiry and joins it to a system of knowledge that invests heavily in the idea that experts describe rather than invent.”10 Authorities narrow the dynamic process by which names and identities sync up, and they

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can withhold care. Hence the scene of self-determination is charged with gatekeeping. The gender/sexual regulation by authorities of trans people is part of the history of racial domination in which scientific and pseudoscientific discourses are leveraged in the service of population control. Practices of racist violence within medicine combine with cultural constructions of people of color as gender/sexual deviants to define the interface with science as especially dangerous for trans people. Black trans women, for example, fight with institutional gatekeepers for recognition, and also contend with racialized gender constructions to which they have been denied access.11

The Life and Death of Latisha King In The Life and Death of Latisha King, philosopher Gayle Salamon observes: “First-person experience is the zero-point of phenomenology, to which it constantly and repeatedly returns.”12 Salamon fashions a “critical phenomenology of transphobia” through which to read the murder trial of Brandon McInerney, a white teenager whose capacity for violence found a lethal target in Latisha King, a Black transgender girl, at E. O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, in 2008. As Salamon describes the trial, it became a contest over who could claim the status of child; toward whom feelings of benevolence, compassion, tolerance, and care would be directed; and to whom they would be denied. Latisha King was in English class working on an essay assignment for a unit on tolerance when she was interrupted by the shots that killed her. She had opened a document to begin writing and signed her name: Latisha King. Although she is referred to as “Larry” throughout the trial and by teachers at E. O. Green, many of Latisha’s friends understood her to be trans. Salamon reorganizes her reading of the interlocking worlds of the school, neighborhood, and court around this pivotal knowledge to describe the violence directed at Latisha King as transphobic. For Salamon, the trial was never primarily about “what happened.”13 McInerney’s guilt was never disputed. The entire class witnessed the shooting. Salamon’s interest turns on how Latisha’s expression of gender was misread—by the media, McInerney’s defense team, several witnesses, and, ultimately, the jury—as the expression of her sexual identity: how a trans girl who identified as Black was read as a gay boy and what this reveals in the social world and juridical imaginary alike about gender and violence. Latisha was read as a gay boy, one whose dress and manner signaled a

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sexual interest in other boys. Boys, presumably, that included McInerney. This strategic misreading made both Latisha’s gender and her age illegible. As a queer youth, her choice of clothing, makeup, and her comportment all made her seem sexually advanced, old for her age, more grown up than she was. She was denied the status of a girl on the cusp of adolescence who was experimenting with clothes and makeup as she felt her way into her feminine embodiment. Salamon’s reading demonstrates how Latisha’s multiple marginal identities made her especially vulnerable to being stripped of her status as a child and read through sexual identity categories that aged her inappropriately.14 Salamon investigates the scene of childhood from which the contested meanings at trial emerged, with special attention to how members of the community manipulated the facts in the case in order to enable sympathy for McInerney as a child, how they placed him in that category in order to render him available to sympathy, and also deny that sympathy to Latisha, whose girlhood they were encouraged not to see. If life writing is, in part, a bulwark against the invisibility to which one has been socially assigned, then a “critical phenomenology of transphobia” extends the discourse of self-representation to include life writing scholarship that can provide representation to those who have died on the cusp of adulthood, with the potentiality of youth and the hope of survival interrupted by lethal violence, by the adults who tell their story. In this way, Salamon’s extraordinarily moving account of the trial enacts accompaniment, in which a caring adult holds an account of childhood harm and provides a container for a new narrative to emerge that was otherwise barred. Salamon does not do this by speaking for Latisha, but through amplifying the testimony of Latisha’s friends who describe her as trans. Salamon says Latisha’s name.

Redefining Realness Janet Mock’s first autobiography, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More is a coming-of-age memoir that blends an account of trans childhood, youth, and young womanhood with a feminist analysis of gender and sexuality.15 Mock has written for a broad audience, and she is committed to offering a positive trans story and to educating her readers. She teaches readers to see her trans girlhood in the scenes of growing up mixed race in Hawai‘i as she is chastised for her femininity and forced, with varying degrees of insensitivity, toward gendered lessons in boyhood. Rather than begin in childhood, Mock begins in the

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present in order to establish her identity as a heterosexual woman who is trans. Whereas Harriet Jacobs reminded her readers that “my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage,”16 Mock invokes the marriage plot as her narrative frame. She tells the story of falling in love in New York in 2009 with a man named Aaron and the story ends happily: with Mock showing how she learns to tell her story with the complexities in the right places and, also, on the brink of a happily ever after. As with all life writing as politically attuned as Mock’s, the choice of how to frame her story is strategic and is offered as an explicit counternarrative to tragic trans life narratives and the distortion of those narratives by antagonistic audiences. It takes multiple beginnings before Mock entrusts the reader with that frame and with her life story. The first beginning is an “Author’s Note” that responds proactively to the ready-made judgments lying in wait for women’s self-representation, for women of color and trans women in particular. Echoing Rigoberta Menchú, Mock asserts that this is “my truth and my personal story.”17 Although she has used her personal story to speak to and about “the shared experiences of trans women and women of color,” she is not speaking for them and insists that “there is no universal women’s experience.”18 She states that “I have recalled facts, from events to people, to the best of my ability” and when others dispute that recollection, she has sided with her memory.19 The second beginning is an “Introduction” that narrates her disappointment with a Marie Claire profile that recycles tropes from the model of the neoliberal life narrative to present her as a can-do American boot-strapping heroine whom Mock is tempted to applaud, but does not recognize as herself. Shockingly, the title of the profile shows not only how ravenously capacious neoliberal life narrative is, but how it can contain trans life stories only by distorting them. Marie Claire offers as a headline a faux quotation by Mock: “I Was Born a Boy.”20 Mock’s “Author’s Note” teaches readers how to see her. The “Introduction” clearly teaches them how not to. When the narrative begins, Mock has already prepared readers to take her on her own terms, and the terms concern the stakes of intimacy for trans women. On their first date Aaron says, “I see the little girl in you.”21 Thus the site of girlhood is invoked at the beginning of her narrative as complicated for Mock: “I wished I could see her. She didn’t have the chance to just be, to frolic, to play.”22 What is the time of trans childhood? Is it contemporaneous with childhood? Does it begin with the awareness of difference from assigned gender, with the dawning of a consciousness

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of gender, of the sense of dissonance between one’s becoming and one’s world? Does it arise from the articulation of “I am”? And also, or equally, of “I am not”? Or just as much from the spaces before, under, and within the formation of such questions? When these existential questions arise in the chronological narrative account and in the context of conflicts in her life story, Mock the adult steps in to frame them. When her grandmother punishes her for wearing a dress, or when her father forces her to learn to ride a bike without training wheels, young Janet’s shame, fear, and pain are narrated, but adult Janet is quick to step in and supply analysis and interpretation. She explains to the reader: “Children who behave in line with their prescribed gender roles are cisgender or cissexual (throughout, I will use the prefix cis, which means ‘on the same side of,’ while trans means ‘across’ or ‘on the opposite of ’) a term used for people who are not trans and more likely to identify with the gender that correlates with the sex they were assigned at birth.”23 She writes with teacherly fluency about the gender binary, supplying information for a broad readership, but also about the violence of denying trans children the right to exist and grow up. The silencing and shaming—“don’t wear a dress,” “don’t act like a girl”—impose distrust and fear on children and, as Mock shows, provide an environment in which sexual abuse can hide. Derek, the son of her father’s girlfriend, sexually abuses Mock; she describes Derek as a sexual predator who “dragged” her across “a threshold out of childhood.”24 Her shame and sexual abuse are intertwined with childhood: “It took me years to recognize, label, and acknowledge Derek’s actions as molestation. I made excuses for him, from blaming my femininity to blaming his age.”25 This chapter interweaves statistics about sexual abuse with a narrative account of the abuse and a declaration of her survivor identity. Mock contextualizes the experience within an analysis of it, explicitly addressing how confusing and destructive sexual abuse is for trans children. When she narrates other experiences, older Mock swiftly intervenes to accompany her younger self, to supply context, offer analysis, educate readers, and, as her title suggests, to “redefine” her womanhood as secure and legitimate. The romance frame of the memoir strategically centers Mock as a heterosexual woman; the narrative offers an interpretation of trans childhood by an adult transwoman; and the context for reading her is enriched by quotations and analysis of literary and academic writing by women of color, images of Beyoncé, and quotations from Oprah. In this way, Mock both accompanies her younger self and performs the collective witness necessary to interpret her on her own terms.

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Self-Representation and the Question of Genre, Again We have resisted declaring the texts we study in this book as a separate genre. Proposing that “memoirs about girlhood” or even “political selfrepresentation about childhood by adults” ought to be considered a genre distorts their disruptive purposes and their capacities to reference the traditions they understood themselves to be challenging, extending, or revising, as well as the effects of these disruptions that have enabled their work not to become immured within a museum of static forms.26 We find these texts to be testimonial and self-representational. They leverage the capacities of many life writing forms in ways that prompt new engagements with injury, harm, and survival. Our questions are not about how or whether a particular text really is or is not one kind of discourse or another, but rather how the available forms of slave narrative or testimonio, memoir or comics, picture books or even life writing scholarship can create new collectivities of witness. We could have begun almost anywhere to theorize the perplexities of self-representation and found ourselves doubling—at least— our framing suppositions. For life writing does not map onto stable dualities of, say, past and present, in which consciousness can be represented through a narrative of the past. Experience, even one’s own, can be recalled, of course, and documented, too, but its textures and intensities, its many meanings, are in motion. Meanings move. Perspective shifts. Secrets are partially kept or told. Information vanishes: You rarely know what you don’t know. The transitivities of life writing are amplified by the return of adult autobiographers to scenes of childhood. No less so than when those childhoods hold the promise of ethical witnessing for diverse audiences. Issues of witness—who can be recognized, by what state or institutional authorities, and with what restrictions—are often theorized in terms of adult subjects and child subjects. Yet whether or not adult subjects can claim the benefits and privileges of lawful, liberal citizen-subjects depends on possession of specific bodily status: white, cisgender, male, heterosexual, and propertied.27 Persons who are women, poor, racially minoritized, queer, trans, foreign, or ill—who have histories of dependence and oppression, who have been the property through which the propertied achieve status, or placed into a legally subordinate status out of which they cannot simply grow—highlight the fundamental paradoxes of childhood at the center of this book. We have argued that life writing provides a flexible form and authoritative social position for the project of witnessing childhood. Yet the histories

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of form create crises of witnessing as diverse, distant, ambivalent, or even hostile readers evaluate the truth claims and respond to the elicitations of affect in unpredictable ways. We have described this as at times taking the form of a credibility battle between subjects within the narrated events of the text, but it also describes the struggle between authors and readers. Although we can readily see that the crux of the testimonial endeavor is contestatory and justice-seeking, it also invites new alliances, intimacies, and proximities to take shape.

Temporalities of Witness Throughout this book, we have asked three questions: How does selfrepresentation about childhood create new pathways of identification and witness? How does an autobiographical account of childhood place readers in new relations to events and knowledge? How might the interruption of dominant constructions of racism and gender violence in life writing open new possibilities for justice? We have looked at how self-representation becomes for many women a means through which to reengage with traumatic experience, to shift how we know and represent experiences and memories of suffering by supplying new forms for their expression. We have identified the trope of accompaniment to describe the relation between the adult narrator and the narrated/narrating child witness. We have traced a genealogy of life writing that holds open the possibility of transforming past and current harms into new forms of knowledge through practices of witness and the formation of new collectivities (abolitionist, activist, antiracist, feminist). Mock’s pedagogical orientation toward readers and Salamon’s tender use of phenomenology to honor Latisha King locate a space of affiliation that enables audiences to witness and to accompany rather than to rescue or demagogue. As intransigently problematic and stubbornly violent as the entanglement of misogyny, racism, and the structures through which they are reproduced are, life writing—in its myriad forms— offers something akin to freedom. Freedom is both an aspiration and a demand. Whether created as a warning, a memorial, or a call to action, the life writing we study in this book assails the “self-evident” justification of violence against the powerless and its exculpatory twin “if only we’d known.” Sometimes such an assertion is as simple as signing your own name and asserting the right to be called by it. Sometimes it means saying yes to a future for the selves that Janet Mock and Latisha King felt and knew themselves to be as children. Saying yes to the possibility of survival and transformation. As

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Sara Ahmed writes: “We say yes to . . . the possibility of things not staying as they are, or being as they stay.”28 Not staying as they are points toward change. Not being as they stay represents the refusal to accept default cultural narratives of girls in crisis as needing a white (male) savior or of the benevolence of patriarchal institutions (including the family). Thus, the rhetorical dimensions of life writing, in no small part, concern the choices authors make about the contexts in which they hope they will be read. Readers navigate these three domains—the life experience, the process of creating the text, and the formal elements of the text—and grasp the identity and story of the subject in a single gesture as if they were one. As if they can touch a body when they hold a text. As if they can offer a gesture of protection as part of a material practice of care, as if to materialize care itself through the present tense evocation of a time yet to come for a past filled with harm. Life writing exceeds previous scholarly framings of it to offer new temporalities of witness and of life. Childhood is a space of projections: This child will have that future. It is also a space in which fantasized futures are imagined as real. This is what many find most dangerous about it: most cloying and sentimental, to be sure, but also most insidious in its teleologies of normativity.29 Survivorship as a form of futurity imagines an elsewhere and another time than that of normativity. It connects the temporalities of “might have been” with the politics of “what we must work to make possible.” It is fair to call this sentimental, if by that, one means a way of feeling for the possible. Gayle Salamon takes seriously the possibility offered by Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better Campaign,” launched in 2010 as an anti-suicide campaign aimed at queer youth at risk. Notwithstanding the well-placed critiques of this movement, the positing of a future as better resonates for Salamon in the context of José Esteban Muñoz’s insistence in Cruising Utopia that the future matters.30 Muñoz’s gesture of “leaning toward a utopian future that can be imagined even if it cannot yet be materially realized” represents “an engagement with politics and not simply a flight from politics.”31 Such a stance may also be consoling when it does not get better. As Salamon insists, “Hope is sometimes predicated on an incipient future that exceeds the grasp of the pragmatic, and queer practices of art-making and worldmaking are sometimes the best way to lean toward that future.”32 Salamon concludes her discussion of queer futurity with a coda that enacts the work of queer memorialization and performs grief for the trans girl for whom it did not get better. Salamon writes in praise of Latisha’s resilience in the face of the soul-crushing bullying directed at her. She lets us see Latisha’s joy in her gender expression and in her friendships with other girls. She

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holds up Latisha as present and fierce. Salamon accompanies Latisha as she narrates her last moments, gives her dignity and love, and enables us to see what she sees in her last moments of life. Latisha is working on her essay assignment. She has written two words: “She had given herself a name, and she wrote it out, so that everyone huddled around the computer screen, some laughing, some pointing, some with hands covering their mouths, could see. Latisha King. I am here.” The last three words written by Gayle Salamon share the italics of the autobiographical signature, extend and guard it, so that they and Latisha are not alone. Here at the site of child witness, we find a writing over of crisis and hope, of violence and grief, as well as the desire for revenge, restoration, and justice.33 Here, too, are survivor voices, collectivities conjured through histories of violence but unsanctioned by state forms, gathering force across social media and public space alike in the movement for Black lives, the survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, the gymnasts who condemned Larry Nassar, and the #MeToo movement. The empty rhetoric of “no child left behind” exemplifies the strategic blankness of a category that some children and not others can be said to embody for the purposes of protection. By returning to childhood without attempting to disappear into it, adults enact the opposite of the cynical bromides of dubious care. For the child who is left behind in the space of traumatic experience, traumatic memory freezes them as endlessly endangered. The use of an adult perspective and narratorial presence prevents the story from devolving into traumatic repetition and reenactment.34 Because the authors we study cannot rely on compassion or identification from their readers, the doubling of the narratorial “I” ensures that the narrative will evade the built-in danger of revictimization that comes from replaying trauma after the fact at sites and in scenes where it will not be witnessed. Yet, as we have observed, accompaniment is a gesture of care that insists on the possibility of ethical witness, imagines solidarities in the face of violence, and holds the space for the survivor signature: I am here.

acknowledgments

We published the article that represents the seed of this book almost a decade ago. In the intervening time, we have developed our interest in childhood, self-representation, visual culture, and trauma through conversations with colleagues in the fields of life writing, children’s literature, and feminist studies. For their engagement, inspiration, and support of this project and us, we thank William Andrews, Caroline Bicks, Katharine Capshaw, Chris Castiglia, Hillary Chute, Carol Dougherty, Kate Douglas, Anna Mae Duane, Quinn Eades, Cynthia Franklin, Joss Taylor Greene, Gillian Harkins, Craig Howes, Marlene Kenney, Kenneth Kidd, Marilee Lindemann, Amulya Mandava, Sharon Marcus, Julia Mickenberg, Claire Moses, Tahneer Oksman, Eden Osucha, Anna Poletti, Chris Reed, Theresa Rogers, Gayle Salamon, Martha Nell Smith, Susan Squier, Gillian Whitlock, and John Zuern. We gratefully acknowledge research support from Wellesley College and the rapid response publication fund awarded by Simon Fraser University. Our thanks to Richard Morrison and John Garza at Fordham University Press for the care they took with the manuscript, and to the anonymous reviewers whose insights were invaluable in the final revision. We are especially grateful to Una and Phoebe Gloeckner for graciously allowing us to reproduce images from their work gratis. Thanks to Oliver McPartlin and Brian Lam at Arsenal Pulp Press for their help with images from Becoming Unbecoming. We thank the editorial board of Feminist Studies for their support of our first co-written article, “Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance” (Feminist Studies 36.3, Fall 2010: 667–690), and are honored that it received the inaugural Claire Goldberg Moses Award for the Most Theoretically Innovative Article of the Year. We have coordinated our co-writing across distance and time zones. In making all of this work, we have relied on our families, and we thank Tom Pounds and Michael Meneer for their unflagging support. We

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dedicate this book to our beloved children and the inspiration of their resilience. Finally, through this book, we memorialize Wellesley student Sama Mundlay for her blazing intellect and passionate feminist commitment to the lives of girls and women.

notes

introduction: witnessing girlhood 1. “Rachael Denhollander’s Full Victim Impact Statement about Larry Nassar,” CNN, January 30, 2018, https://www.cnn.com /2018/01/24/us/ rachael-denhollander-full-statement /index.html. 2. Denhollander’s testimony was key to a high-profile court case in the United States in 2018 in which hundreds of girls and women offered victim impact statements about Dr. Nassar’s sexual abuse. The scope of the abuse and Judge Rosemarie Aquilina’s decision to welcome victim impact statements make it a watershed moment of child witness. Jessica Thomashow, age seventeen, and Emma Ann Miller, age fifteen, were the youngest to offer statements. Thomashow testified to being molested at age nine and twelve. Miller was likely Nassar’s last victim before he was arrested. She was thirteen years old the last time he sexually abused her. 3. When confronted by police with allegations that he had digitally penetrated girls with his ungloved finger, Larry Nassar insisted they misunderstood this “medical” treatment. The misrepresentation of sexual assault as legitimate treatment was echoed by Kathie Klages as early as 1997 when two teenage athletes reported Nassar’s actions to her in her official capacity as Michigan State University head gymnastics coach. One of the athletes, Larissa Boyd, described Klages’s reaction to the 1997 complaint in Boyd’s January 19, 2017, victim impact statement: “Instead of notifying authorities or even my parents, we were interrogated. We were led to believe we were misunderstanding a medical technique. . . . I was humiliated and told that I was the problem.” Transcripts of the victim impact statements document the ways in which authorities shielded Nassar’s abuse and enabled it to continue. 4. Nassar had already received a sixty-year sentence following a conviction on child pornography charges. 5. This formulation draws on Leigh Gilmore’s theorization of jurisdictions as legal and cultural forums of judgment in which a range of publics assemble informally and by law. Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Leigh

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Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 6. On May 17, 2018, Michigan State University reached a settlement with 332 survivors for $500 million. 7. Taylor Ballantyne photographed Aly Raisman and other women for a #MeToo-themed segment of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. Photos can be accessed online, “Aly Raisman 2018: In Her Own Words,” Sports Illustrated, https://www.si.com /swimsuit /model/aly-raisman /2018/specials#1. 8. The #MeToo movement started in 2006 in Baltimore, Maryland, by Tarana Burke, an advocate for girls and women of color in underserved communities who are victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence. Burke’s grassroots program empowers survivors through shared experience and empathy, hence the shared token of survivor identification: “Me too.” In reaction to the breaking story in October 2017 about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual predation, actor Alyssa Milano asked women on social media to share #MeToo in order to demonstrate the scale of sexual abuse in women’s lives. The power of a feminist collective witness assembling virtually overnight across the globe is still being registered as we write this introduction. For analysis of #MeToo, see Leigh Gilmore, “He Said/She Said: Truth Telling and #MeToo,” Forum: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Arts and Culture 25 (2017): 1–5. 9. Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 400. 10. The power of collective feminist witness has traveled beyond Michigan State and gymnastics. Former Ohio State University wrestler Nick Nutter describes how watching the women testify brought up his memories of being sexually abused by team doctor and physician Richard Strauss and, in the context of their testimony, raised his hope for justice. He reached out to former teammates and discovered that many of them, too, had been abused. Over 100 men have come forward and at least three lawsuits are pending against those at Ohio State University, who, like authorities at Michigan State, were aware of sexual abuse and covered it up. Accused enablers include Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio; see Catie Edmondson and Marc Tracy, “ ‘It Can Happen Even to Guys’: Ohio State Wrestlers Detail Abuse, Saying #UsToo,” New York Times, August 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com /2018/08/02/us/ politics/ohio-state-wrestlers-abuse-me-too.html. 11. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Phoebe Gloeckner, A Child’s Life and Other Stories, rev. ed. (Berkeley: Frog, 2000); Junko Morimoto, My Hiroshima (Sydney: Lothian Children’s Books, 1987/2014).

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12. For more on the construction of race and childhood innocence, see Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 13. When writers from dominant groups do not acknowledge the gender, race, age, and class of readers, their work is not more universal; rather, it partakes of the privilege through which universality is constructed. 14. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 15. In her one-woman show Nanette, comedian Hannah Gadsby frames her self-representation of trauma as a farewell to comedy, specifically the genre of stand-up. Amid a controversy about what genre Nanette belonged to and whether her show should be classified as stand-up comedy, Gadsby tweeted on November 12, 2017: “I’ll Settle This: my show is Not standup comedy because I got jack of an art form designed by men for men. Female artists often defy genre.” 16. Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s SelfRepresentation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 42. 17. See Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 18. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books), 28–32. 19. Laura S. Brown, “A Feminist Critique of the Personality Disorders,” in Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals, ed. Laura S. Brown and Mary Ballou (New York: Guilford Press, 1992), 206 –28. 20. Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties (Albany, N.Y.: Kitchen Table Press, 1986). For the juridical roots of the term, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241– 99. We refer readers to Jennifer C. Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), which studies the “contentious relationship between intersectionality and women’s studies” (2) and the ongoing negotiation between intersectionality’s roots in Black feminist studies and its generative power as it is taken up broadly. 21. Gilmore takes a feminist intersectional approach to life writing in The Limits of Autobiography and Tainted Witness. 22. Jacobs, Incidents; Rigoberta Menchú, I Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (New York: Verso, 1984); Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 2003).

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23. Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (New York: Random House, 1993); Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995); Hannah Gadsby, Hannah Gadsby: Nanette, directed by Madeleine Parry and Jon Olb, June 19, 2018 (Sydney, NSW: Guesswork Television, 2018). 24. Gloeckner, A Child’s Life; Una, Becoming Unbecoming (Brighton: Myriad, 2015). 25. Morimoto, My Hiroshima; Michelle Markel, Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909, illus. Melissa Sweet (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2013). 26. Monique W. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: New Press, 2016). 27. Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More (New York: Atria, 2014); Gayle Salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 1. girls in crisis: feminist resistance in life writing by women of color 1. Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” Atlantic, February 23, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com /international/archive/2012/03/ the-white-savior-industrial-complex /254843/. The critique of humanitarianism’s political efficacy by Cole Fassin and Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), for example, examines the centrality of its particular version of sentiment and the widespread influence of its vision of aid. Although this contemporary critique often identifies neoliberalism as the social and historical context of the formation, its development and duration as a colonial, antifeminist, and modern phenomenon represents the longer history with which our present book engages. 2. For an account of how the sentimental image of the suffering child generates sympathy that does not extend to women, and that minimizes or moots seeing women in scenes in which girls suffer as political or moral agents, see Wendy Hesford, “Spectacular Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Politics of (In)visibility,” in Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). In particular, in a scene of brothel rescue, “Mothers are shown as irresponsible and self-centered” (165). Hesford argues that this is a strategic and purposeful choice that underwrites the legitimacy of rescue narratives. 3. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Rigoberta

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Menchú, I Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (New York: Verso, 1984); Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 2003). What to call the texts we discuss in this chapter is an interesting question. We have adopted the umbrella term of life writing as inclusive of a range of self-representational texts, from slave narratives to testimonio to graphic memoirs and comics. For contrast, see James Olney, “ ‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” Callaloo, no. 20 (1984): 46 –73. For Olney, slave narratives are constrained to represent the facts of slavery and, as such, are less able to demonstrate the imaginative self-fashioning that defines true autobiography. We consider that Incidents challenges this critical canon in two ways: One, Jacobs’s text conforms to enough of the genre’s characteristics to be considered an autobiography (i.e., it is a retrospective account of a life as told by the person who lived it; it is narrated by a person of historical significance; and it features reflection of a philosophical nature in addition to offering an account of events. By these measures, Incidents is an autobiography. Yet Olney’s hesitance to describe slave narratives as autobiography asks for further reflection on the centrality of freedom in his definition as primarily a property of the imagination rather than the charged category for persons who have been enslaved. This challenge to the use of freedom in the definition of autobiography, broadly, is reproduced in scholarship that sees slave narrators’ explicitly and faithfully abolitionist life writing as more political and less imaginative, hence less an example of autobiography. See Nolan Bennett, “To Narrate and Denounce: Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Personal Narrative,” Political Theory 44, no. 2 (2014): 240 –64, for an example of the reproduction of this claim. 4. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 100. 5. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 124. 6. Jacobs, Incidents, 5. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. When James Olney suggests that slave narratives are not real autobiographies because they are compelled to focus on the “objective reality” (“I Was Born,” 52) of slavery rather than on a “particular and individual life” (52), he fails to observe both the differences among ex-slave narrators (e.g., Jacobs’s focus on gender and the complexities of sexuality in the presence of sexual violence) as well as the sameness of the (typically) white male subjects to whom he imputes individuality and creativity. Paradoxically, Olney

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discounts freedom and agency in autobiographical texts that are intimately engaged in the representation and crafting of both. 10. Janet Neary, Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 4. 11. This is also an issue for how any marginalized person can claim the legitimacy of the autobiographical “I” in conditions of vulnerability to erasure. See Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), who uses contractual language to define the relationship between writers and readers of autobiography as an “autobiographical pact.” Although few who write can access this authority, the pact guarantees readers that life writers are representing verifiable fact. Scholars who adopt Lejeune’s language have not identified this conflict as salient. Yet for intersectional feminist analysis, the conflict is notable. If the genre is defined by what those who are most socially free and privileged choose to write, then it actively demotes how and what those who are least free write. For life writers like ex-slave narrators or Indigenous peoples or women, the categories associated with personhood and subjugation must be reworked and redeployed to new audiences, or developed from other materials altogether. 12. Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,” American Literature 53, no. 3 (1981): 484. 13. See Albert H. Tricomi, “Harriet Jacobs’s Autobiography and the Voice of Lydia Maria Child,” ESQ 53, no. 3 (2007): 217–51, for analysis of Child’s role in preparing Jacobs’s narrative for publication. He suggests Child is responsible for selecting the title and for the subsequent distortion it introduces into readers’ responses to a text largely devoted to chronicling Jacobs’s adult life not as a series of childhood incidents, but as a fully developed life narrative written by a free woman. Tricomi considers her narrative an autobiography. Tricomi’s analysis of Child’s and Jacobs’s letters is indebted to and extends Yellin’s archival work. This work, as distinct from the debate about whether or not slave narratives are autobiography, takes slave humanity and white humanist projects enjoined by Childs as complex scenes of relation and fracture rather than stability. The attribution of a stable identity to a form (something is or is not an autobiography) as dynamic as life writing is constructed in relation to the judgments that some lives and some life writing must negotiate for admission over a threshold of genre. The humanism of autobiography and the abjection of slavery are not two sides of a stable sign; they are thoroughly incorporated into each other. Whatever autobiography or life writing is, it certainly includes slave narrative as co-productive of the categories on which such generic exclusion depends: life, humanism, and imagination among them. 14. Jean Fagan Yellin, “Text and Contexts of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself,” in The Slave’s Narrative, ed.

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Charles T. Davis, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 262–82. 15. See Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Basic Civitas Books, 2004); Melvin Dixon, “Singing Swords: The Literary Legacy of Slavery,” in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press), 298–317; Valerie Smith, “ ‘Loopholes of Retreat’: Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Reading Black. Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 212–26; Frances Smith Foster, “ ‘In Respect to Females . . .’: Differences in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Female Narrators,” in Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), xxix–xli. 16. Jacobs, Incidents, 5. 17. Ibid., 54. 18. Ibid., 64. 19. Ibid., 19. 20. Ibid., 55. 21. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852); Fredrick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, An American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Society, 1845). 22. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 1. 23. Caroline Levander, “Witness and Participant: Frederick Douglass’s Child,” Studies in American Fiction 33, no. 2 2005): 184, distinguishes between the sentimental presentation of mother-child bonds in woman-authored narratives and Frederick Douglass’s use of the child as witness and participant. We read Jacobs as aligned with Levander’s analysis of the child in Douglass. 24. Neary, Fugitive Testimony, 158–61. 25. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 26. Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 400. 27. Jacobs, Incidents, 335. 28. Ibid. 29. For analysis of the context and scandal, see Leigh Gilmore, “Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss, and Scandalous Self-Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 2 (2003): 695–718; Arturo Arias, ed., The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

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30. For an account of the many ways in which the term “transnational” has become part of academic discourse, see Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” GLQ 7, no. 4 (2001): 663–79. We use “transnational” to describe networks through which people, ideas, goods, and across local and global boundaries, often shedding relevant contexts, but also reaching distant audiences. Our reference to feminist transnationalism means to capture how testimony travels and how notions of the child are caught up in a “universalizing” discourse of humanitarianism. For research on girls and transnationalism, see Lisa Weems, Staging Dissent: Young Women of Color and Transnational Activism (New York: Routledge, 2018). 31. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, introduction to I, Rigoberta Menchú (New York: Verso, 1984), xix. 32. Menchú, I, Rigoberta, 1. 33. John Beverly, Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 70. 34. Menchú, I, Rigoberta, 34. 35. Ibid., 37. 36. Ibid., 49. 37. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 152. 38. Greg Grandin, “Rigoberta Menchú Vindicated,” The Nation, January 21, 2015, https://www.thenation.com /article/rigoberta-menchu -vindicated/. 39. See Hillary Chute, “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 1–2 (2008): 92–110; Nima Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley, “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Satrapi’s Persepolis,” English Studies in Canada 31, nos. 2–3 (2005): 223– 48; Theresa M. Tensuan, “Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi,” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (2006): 947–64; Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 40. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (New York: Pantheon, 2005). 41. Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2003). 42. Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, ii. 43. Miriam Cooke, “Saving Brown Women,” Signs 28, no. 2 (2002): 468–70, analyzes the post 9/11 moment in detail. 44. Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, 130 –31.

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45. Ibid.,133. 46. James Poniewozik, Review of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Time, August 25, 2003, 57; Review of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Publishers Weekly, July 14, 2003, 58; Susan Perren, Review of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, The Globe and the Mail, May 17, 2003, D15. 47. Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, 1. 48. Luc Boltanski. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics, trans. Graham D. Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 49. Wendy Hesford, “Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering,” Biography 27, no. 1 (2004): 130. 50. Whitlock, Soft Weapons; Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 51. Rosie Walters, “ ‘Shot Pakistani Girl’: The Limitations of Girls’ Education Discourses in UK Newspaper Coverage of Malala Yousafzai,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 18, no. 3 (2016): 650 –70. Walters provides a feminist discursive analysis of the shooting, recovery, and activism of Yousafzai in 223 UK newspaper articles and concludes that journalists tell her story because it fits “perfectly into already existing discourses of how the West perceives its own position in the world and in relation to a Muslim ‘other’ ” (665). 52. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 296. 53. Ibid., 275. 54. Whitlock, Soft Weapons; Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 55. Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Genders, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Arundhati Roy, The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (London: Flamingo, 2004). 56. Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 54, 134, 136. 2. gender pessimism and survivor storytelling in the memoir boom: girl, interrupted, autobiography of a face, and nanette 1. Leigh Gilmore, “Limit Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity,” Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 134. 2. Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (New York: Random House, 1993); Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995); Hannah Gadsby, Hannah Gadsby: Nanette, directed by Madeleine Parry and Jon Olb, June 19, 2018 (Sydney, NSW: Guesswork Television, 2018).

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3. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Janet Neary, Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 79. 4. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), xxii. 5. Carol Gilligan, Nona Lyons, and Trudy Hanmer, Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); See also Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) in which the authors interview one hundred girls over a five-year period and argue that girlhood is a journey into silence and disconnection; they also provide a method for listening to and affirming girls’ voices. 6. For analysis of conditions that propelled the memoir boom, see Leigh Gilmore, Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001): 16 –18. 7. Popular considerations of girlhood and trauma in the media in the 1990s include Francine Prose, “Confident at 11, Confused at 16,” New York Times, January 7, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com /1990/01/07/magazine/ confident-at-11-confused-at-16.html; Suzanne Daley, “Little Girls Lose Their Self-Esteem on Way to Adolescence, Study Finds,” New York Times, January 9, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com /1991/01/09/education /little -girls-lose-their-self-esteem-way-to-adolescence-study-finds.html. For an analysis of media coverage, see Sharon R. Mazzarella and Norma O. Pecora, “Girls in Crisis: Newspaper Coverage of Adolescent Girls,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2007): 6 –27. The idea that girls are in crisis became mainstream in part due to clinical psychologist Mary Pipher’s bestselling book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), which was published the same year as Grealy’s memoir. See Elizabeth Marshall, “Schooling Ophelia: Hysteria, Memory, and Adolescent Femininity,” Gender and Education 19, no. 6 (2007): 707–28, for a reading of the work of Carol Gilligan, Lyn Mikel Brown, and Mary Pipher as self-representational projects, as well as Elizabeth Marshall, “Borderline Girlhoods: Mental Illness, Adolescence, and Femininity in Girl, Interrupted, Lion and the Unicorn 30 (2006): 117–33, for an analysis of how Kaysen’s memoir and the 1999 film intersect with discourses of girlhood as a period of crisis. 8. Christina Hoff Sommers, “The War against Boys, Atlantic, May 2000, https://www.theatlantic.com /magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war-against -boys/304659/.

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9. See, for example, Julie Bettie, Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity, 2nd ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014); Meda Chesney-Lind and Nikki Jones, eds., Fighting for Girls: New Perspectives on Gender and Violence (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); Monique W. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: New Press, 2016); Yasmin Jiwani, “Erasing Race: The Story of Reena Virk,” Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme 19, no. 3 (1999): 178–84. 10. See, for example, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1991); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Dominick La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 11. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 7. 12. Suicide and gender are linked, and this link deserves increased research and attention in order to diagnose risk and prevent harm to girls and women: “One of the most consistent findings in suicide research is that women make more suicide attempts than men, but men are more likely to die in their attempts than women. Despite this, remarkably few studies have focused upon suicidal behavior in women or attempted to explore the complex relationships between gender and suicidal behavior. One reason for the lack of investment in female suicidal behavior may be that there has been a tendency to view suicidal behavior in women as manipulative and nonserious (despite evidence of intent, lethality, and hospitalization), to describe their attempts as ‘unsuccessful,’ ‘failed,’ or attention-seeking, and generally to imply that women’s suicidal behavior is inept or incompetent,” Lakshmi Vijayakumar, “Suicide in Women,” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 6, no. 57 ( 2015): 233. 13. Marissa Korbel, “The Thread: Actual Bodily Harm,” Rumpus, January 16, 2018, http://therumpus.net /2018/01/the-thread-actual-bodily-harm /. 14. Kaysen, Girl, 85. 15. Ibid., 41. 16. Ibid., 21. 17. Gilmore, Limits of Autobiography, 23. 18. Kaysen, Girl, 150. 19. Ibid., 157. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid.,158. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 71.

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Notes to pages 47–57

24. Ibid., 72. 25. Ibid. 26. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25. 27. Dolores Kong, “At McLean Lives Interrupted—And Healed,” Boston Globe, January 17, 2000, C1. 28. Michael Kenney, “The Naked Truth,” Boston Globe, April 8, 1997, E1. 29. Nancy Sharkey, “Two Years in the Bin,” New York Times, June 20, 1993, BR24. 30. Kaysen, Girl, 154. 31. Ibid., 105. 32. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920 –1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 65–144. 33. Ibid., 120. 34. See Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 105. “Dark barns proved especially perilous places. The candle knocked from her hand, a Newbury girl informed her assailant who lured her into the stable that ‘she would as soon be gored by the cows as to be defiled by a rogue such as he.’ ” 35. For a discussion of chronic pain and vibrant matter in pain memoirs, see Leigh Gilmore, “Agency without Mastery: Chronic Pain and Posthuman Life Writing,” Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): 83–98. 36. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 3rd ed., trans. Alfonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), 66. 37. See Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/ Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (London: Routledge, 1993), 307–20. 38. Grealy, Autobiography, 7. 39. Ibid., 44. 40. In Nanette, Hannah Gadsby defines “gender normal” as hierarchical, normative, and rife with judgment. On being misgendered as a man, she comments satirically that such moments of misrecognition afford a fleeting experience of being “top drawer gender normal.” 41. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 42. See Leigh Gilmore, “Boom|lash: Fact-Checking, Suicide, and the Lifespan of a Genre,” a/b: Auto/biography Studies 29, no. 2 (2014): 211–24. 43. We note here that both Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement have traveled globally. For analysis of neoliberal life narrative (includ-

Notes to pages 60 – 64

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ing its transnational scope) and its place in the memoir boom, see Gilmore, Tainted, 85–118. 44. Hannah Gadsby concurs with the insights of feminist rape culture critics like Sharon Marcus, whose “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York, Routledge, 1992), 385– 403. See also Susan Brison regarding the importance to survivors of storytelling, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 45. Kaysen, Girl, 166. 46. Ibid. 3. visualizing sexual violence and feminist child witness: a child’s life and other stories and becoming unbecoming 1. Jennifer Doyle and Amelia Jones, “Introduction: New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31, no. 3 (2006): 607–15. Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge, UK; Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2007); Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998); Michele Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press). 2. Phoebe Gloeckner, A Child’s Life and Other Stories, rev. ed. (Berkeley: Frog, 2000); Una, Becoming Unbecoming (Brighton, UK: Myriad, 2015). 3. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials (Los Angeles; London; New Delhi: Sage, 2012), 188. 4. Wendy S. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 8. Hesford is concerned primarily with how these multimodal texts function in human rights campaigns, including those on behalf of the child. See especially her chapter 5. 5. Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 141. 6. Leigh Gilmore, “Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony,” in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael A. Chaney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 160. 7. Hesford, Spectacular, 151. 8. Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 18.

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Notes to pages 65– 66

9. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Lauren Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). 10. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press), 6 –7; 45. 11. Preserving the province of boyhood as perennial exculpatory defense for white men is tied to denying the category of childhood to black children. See Wendy S. Hesford, “Surviving Recognition and Racial In /Justice,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 48, no. 4 (2015): 543. 12. Leigh Gilmore, “Stanford Sexual Assault: What Changed with the Survivor’s Testimony,” The Conversation, June 16, 2016, https://theconversation .com /stanford-sexual-assault-what-changed-with-the-survivors-testimony -60913; Katie J. M. Baker, “Here is the powerful letter the Stanford victim read aloud to her attacker,” Buzzfeed News, June 30, 2016, https://www .buzzfeed.com /katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim -read-to-her-ra?utm_term=.qh3BGlyY5#.yhRQaKBpm. In terms of the visual manipulation of Brock Turner by his defense team, his mug shot shows a glassy-eyed Turner with grown-out bleached blonde hair. In court, his closely cropped brown hair and suit afforded him the appearance of masculine anonymity. 13. “Judge Persky’s Other Cases,” Recall Judge Aaron Persky, https://www .recallaaronpersky.com /judge_persky_s_other_cases. 14. Robyn Doolittle, “Unfounded: Why Police Dismiss 1 in 5 Sexual Assault Claims as Baseless,” Globe and Mail, February 3, 2017. https://www .theglobeandmail.com /news/investigations/unfounded-sexual-assault-canada -main /article33891309/ 15. U.S. Department of Justice, “Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department,” August 10, 2016, https://www.documentcloud.org/ documents/3009982-DOJ-Baltimore-Police-Department-Report.html# https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3009982-DOJ-Baltimore -Police-Department-Report.html. 16. Battered Women’s Justice Project, “Domestic Violence and Firearms,” November 2011, http://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource -results/domestic-violence-and-firearms.html. 17. Ann J. Cahill, Rethinking Rape (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Rachel Hall, “ ‘It Can Happen to You’: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management,” Hypatia 19, no. 3 (2004): 1–19; Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 2002), 385– 403.The experience of trans women is important in the gendered construction of risk and rape as their vulnerability is heightened

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by being read as female in some contexts and by being denied this identity in other contexts. 18. Peggy Orenstein, “A Graphic Life,” New York Times, August 5, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com /2001/08/05/magazine/a-graphic-life.html. See also Phoebe Gloeckner, The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2002), which was adapted for the stage in 2010 and screen in 2015 by Marielle Heller. 19. Chute, Graphic, 6. 20. Gillian Whitlock, “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics,” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (2006): 966. Whitlock theorizes that “the unique vocabulary and grammar of comics and cartoon drawing might produce an imaginative and ethical engagement with the proximity of the other,” mapping possibilities for new “affective engagements and recognition across cultures” (978). Hillary L. Chute’s Graphic Women and Disaster Drawn as well as Michael A. Chaney’s Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016) press further to note how the hand-drawn image creates new pathways for identification and engagement with trauma. 21. Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s SelfRepresentation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 42. 22. Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, “Self Regarding-Art,” Biography 31, no. 1 (2008), v–xxiii. 23. Critique of autobiography as a genre was an early feminist critical intervention at the moment autobiography was entering English departments through claims about its status and legitimacy as a literary genre. See Caren Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects,” in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 115–38. 24. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, “Three Little Men In the Woods,” accessed August 12, 2018, https://www.pitt.edu /~dash/grimm013 .html. 25. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, “Tale Spinners: Submerged Voices in Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” New German Critique 27 (Autumn 1982): 147. 26. Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 55. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 57. 31. Ibid. 32. Chute, Graphic, 68.

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Notes to pages 73–77

33. Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 67. 34. Chute, Graphic, 81. 35. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994). 36. Whitlock, “Autographics,” 970. 37. Michael A. Chaney, Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 5. 38. Gary Groth, “The Phoebe Gloeckner Interview,” Comics Journal, February 6, 2011, http://www.tcj.com /phoebe-gloeckner-2/. 39. “Case Study: The Diary of a Teenaged Girl,” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, 2018, http://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-the -diary-of-a-teenage-girl/. 40. Orenstein, “A Graphic Life.” 41. Paul Gravett, “My Top Ten Comics of 2015: Graphic Novels, Manga & More,” Paul Gravett, January 1, 2016, http://www.paulgravett.com / articles/article/my_top_ten_comics_of_2015; Douglas Wolk, “The Season’s Best New Graphic Novels,” New York Times, December 2, 2016, https:// www.nytimes.com /2016/12/02/books/review/the-seasons-best-new-graphic -novels.html; Lucy Westcott, “ ‘Becoming Unbecoming’ and the Unspoken Horror of Gender Violence,” Newsweek, October 12, 2016, http://www .newsweek.com /becoming-unbecoming-una-graphic-novel-sexual-violence -509265. 42. Una, Becoming, 10. 43. Joan Smith, “The Yorkshire Ripper Was Not a ‘Prostitute Killer’— Now His Forgotten Victims Need Justice,” Telegraph, May 30, 2017, https:// www.telegraph.co.uk /women /life/yorkshire-ripper-not-prostitute-killer -forgotten-victims-need/. 44. See Elizabeth Marshall, Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence (New York: Routledge, 2018), 113 for a reading of Una’s Becoming Unbecoming as an example of “graphic feminist pedagogy.” 45. Una, “Women Making Comics: Interview with Una,” interview by The Turnaround, The Turnaround Blog, February 8, 2016, https://theturn aroundblog.com /2016/02/08/women-making-comics-interview-with-una/. 46. Una, Becoming, 112. 47. Ibid., 203. 48. Una writes that “triggers can be sights, sounds and sensations. For example . . . the feel of mohair” (85). A black-and-white mohair sweater worn by one of the men who sexually assaulted Una in a car is made material on the page (its unique textures and fibers recalled from memory) as a backdrop (85; 89) and a landscape for an extended visual sequence (94 –101). 49. Una, Becoming, 124.

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50. Ibid., 125. 51. Edmund Zagorin, “Book Review: Becoming Unbecoming by Una,” Los Angeles Review, 2015, http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-becoming -unbecoming-by-una/. 52. In this strategy, Una shares an affinity with Lynda Barry—who suggests sexual abuse rather than draws it explicitly. See Chute, Graphic, for more on Barry. 53. Una, Becoming, 31. 54. Una cites Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 2003) as the visual inspiration for her own work. 55. Joanna Whitehead, “Overcoming Adversity, Becoming Brilliant,” The F Word: Contemporary UK Feminism, October 26, 2016, https://www .thefword.org.uk /2015/10/becoming-unbecoming-review/. 56. Una, Becoming, 160 –63. 57. Ibid., 82. 58. Gilmore, Tainted Witness, 5. 59. Una, Becoming, 108. 60. Ibid., 69. 61. Ibid., 36. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 205. 64. Whitehead, “Overcoming Adversity, Becoming Brilliant.” 65. Una, Becoming, 202. 66. Leigh Gilmore, “Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss, and Scandalous Self-Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma,” Signs 28, no. 2 (2002): 695–719. 4. teaching dissent through picture books: girlhood activism and graphic life writing for the child 1. Children’s picture books and comics communicate meaning through word and image, and the forms share similarities. Picture book creators often work “through the comics medium” (Nathalie op de Beeck, “On ComicStyle Picture Books and Picture-Bookish Comics,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37, no. 4 [2012]: 470). For more on the differences and similarities between picture books and comics, see Elisa Gall and Patrick Gall, “Comics Are Picture Books: A (Graphic) Novel Idea,” Horn Book Magazine 91, no. 6 (2015): 45–50, as well as Charles Hatfield and Craig Svonkin, “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books: Introduction,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 37, no. 4 (2012): 429–35. 2. Leigh Gilmore, “Limit Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity,” Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 134. Kenneth Kidd,

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Notes to pages 86 – 87

“‘A’ Is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the Children’s Literature of Atrocity,” Children’s Literature 33 (2005): 120 – 49, also reads picture books as a testimonial form. With few exceptions, autobiographical accounts in picture books about trauma and social violence remain undertheorized in the field of life writing. Studies on picture books, trauma, and self-representation appear in scholarship in education and children’s literature studies. For examples, see Elizabeth Marshall, “‘The Random Brushing of Birds’: Representations of African American Women in Biographies,” in Embracing, Evaluating, and Examining African American Children’s and Young Adult Literature, ed. Wanda M. Brooks and Jonda C. McNair (Lanham, M.D.: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 30 – 49; Elizabeth Marshall, “Counter-Storytelling through Graphic Life Writing,” Language Arts 94, no. 2 (2016): 79–93; Elizabeth Marshall, Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence (New York: Routledge, 2018); Elizabeth Marshall, “Life Writing and the Language Arts,” Language Arts 96, no. 3 (2019): 167–78; Yoo Kyung Sung, “Hearing the Voices of Comfort Women: Confronting Historical Trauma in Korean Children’s Literature,” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 50, no. 1 (2012): 20 –30; Adrienne Kertzer, “Cinderella’s Stepsisters, Traumatic Memory, and Young People’s Writing,” The Lion and the Unicorn 40, no. 1 (2016): 1–21. Assumptions about children’s texts, especially picture books, often exclude them from serious scholarly attention. In the field of life writing, see Rocío G. Davis’s analysis of how ethnic autobiographies for youth expand representations within the canon of children’s literature in “Metanarrative in Ethnic Autobiography for Children: Laurence Yep’s The Lost Garden and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing,” MELUS 27, no. 2 (2002): 139–56, as well as “Asian American Autobiography for Children: Critical Paradigms and Creative Practice,” The Lion and the Unicorn, 30, no. 2 (2006): 185–201. We focus here on books for children written by adults. See Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti, Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) for a focus on life writing by youth. 3. Kyo Maclear, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 73. 4. Junko Morimoto, My Hiroshima (Sydney: Lothian Children’s Books, 1987/2014); Michelle Markel, Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909, illustrated by Melissa Sweet (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2013). 5. Markel, Brave Girl. This archive of autobiographies by and/or about activist girls and women is vast and continues to grow, especially with the Common Core State Standards that took effect in public schools in the United States beginning in 2013. Exemplary titles include Duncan Tonatiuh’s, Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez & Her Family’s Fight For Desegregation (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2014); collective biographies include

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examples such as Andrea Davis Pinkney’s Let it Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters, illustrated by Stephen Alcorn (San Diego: Gulliver Books/ Harcourt Brace, 2000); Susan Hood’s picture book anthology Shaking Things Up: 14 Young Women Who Changed the World, illustrated by Sophie Blackall et al. (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). 6. Maclear, Beclouded, 10. 7. Natasha Hurley, Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 36. 8. Susan D. Moeller, “A Hierarchy of Innocence: The Media’s Use of Chilren in the Telling of International News,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 7, no. 1 (2002): 38. 9. For more scholarship on the representation of the wounded and suffering child, see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Anna Mae Duane, Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998); Kidd, “ ‘A’ Is for Auschwitz”; Moeller, “A Hierarchy.” 10. Kidd, “ ‘A’ Is for Auschwitz,” 137. Children’s tolerance for images and narratives of trauma is a perennial debate in studies of the picture book and childhood. See Janet Evans, Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks: Creative and Critical Responses to Visual Texts (London: Routledge, 2015); Horst Künnemann, “How Much Cruelty Can a Children’s Picturebook Stand? The Case of Wolf Erlbruch’s Die Menschenfresserin,” Bookbird 43, no. 1 (2005): 14 –19; Carole Scott, “A Challenge to Innocence: ‘Inappropriate’ Picturebooks for Young Readers,” Bookbird 43, no. 1 (2005): 5–13. 11. In education, life writing is contextualized within the larger framework of nonfiction, a genre that has received increasing attention since the implementation of the U.S. Common Core nonfiction reading standards in 2013. However, educators have long employed life writing to teach parallel histories and to spark social action within and outside of the classroom. Children’s nonfiction, and life writing specifically, plays an important part in this alternative education because these texts often challenge the bias and official history of American social studies textbooks, and their lack of representation or misrepresentation of women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, and/or the use of exceptional individuals to provide examples that sustain the myth of American progress. For more, see James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told

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Notes to pages 88–90

Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New Press, 1995); Yonghee Suh, Sohyun An, and Danielle Forest, “Immigration, Imagined Communities, and Collective Memories of Asian American Experiences: A Content Analysis of Asian American Experiences in Virginia U.S. History Textbooks,” Journal of Social Studies Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 39–51. 12. Francis E. Kazemek, “ ‘Two Handfuls of Bone and Ash’: Teaching Our Children about Hiroshima,” Phi Delta Kappan 75, no. 7 (1994): 532. 13. Julia Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Mickenberg, “Civil Rights, History, and the Left: Inventing the Juvenile Black Biography,” MELUS 27, no. 2 (2002): 65–93. 14. Mickenberg, “Civil Rights,” 66. Although referring to the power of narrative to convey suffering more effectively than visual displays like graphs and charts, Paul Farmer’s analysis that “the ‘texture’ of dire affliction is better felt in the gritty details of biography” accounts for the central place of life writing in analyses of structural violence. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 2. 15. This is not to idealize life writing for the child. Herbert Kohl, “The Politics of Children’s Literature: What’s Wrong with the Rosa Parks Myth,” in Rethinking Popular Culture and Media, 2nd ed., ed. Elizabeth Marshall and Özlem Sensoy (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2016), 81–88, points out in his reading of nonfiction biographies for children about Rosa Parks that these picture books reproduce myths of the exceptional individual at the cost of erasing collective action and histories of resistance. For more on radical children’s literature, see Julia Mickenberg and Philip Nel, Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 16. See Kidd, “ ‘A’ Is for Auschwitz,” for this history. For other examples of testimony in graphic life writing for the child about Hiroshima, see Toshi Moruki, Hiroshima, No Pika (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1980); Betty Jean Lifton, Return to Hiroshima (New York: Atheneum, 1970); Tatsuharu Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, trans. Kazuko Hokumen-Jones, illus. Noriyuki Ando (London: Walker, 1995). 17. Leigh Gilmore, “Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony,” in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael A. Chaney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 159. 18. Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 130.

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19. Ibid., 125; see chapter 4 in Disaster for more on Nakazawa, nonfiction comics, and witness. 20. My Hiroshima and Brave Girl do not have page numbers, and thus all following quotations will not have notes. 21. Maclear, Beclouded, 18. 22. Molly Bang, Picture This: How Picture Books Work, anniversary ed. (New York: Chronicle Books, 2016). 23. Leigh Gilmore, “Covering Pain: Pain Memoirs and Sequential Reading as an Ethical Practice,” Biography, 38, no. 1 (2015): 112. 24. Chute, Disaster, 125. 25. Moeller, “A Hierarchy,” 39. 26. For a discussion of how family members can bear witness to and rehumanize the dead in the context of gender violence and the murder of trans teenager Gwen Araujo, see Cynthia G. Franklin and Laura E. Lyons, “ ‘I Have a Family’: Relational Witnessing and the Evidentiary Power of Grief in the Gwen Araujo Case,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 3 (2016): 437–66 27. The graphic disruption of girlhood in picture books form parallels the use of the child witness in the life writing of Harriet Jacobs and Rigoberta Menchú discussed in chapter 1. 28. Clara Lemlich, “The Inside of a Shirtwaist Factory,” Good Housekeeping 54, no. 3 (1912): 369. 29. See Russell Freedman’s photobiography of Hine, Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade against Child Labor (New York: Clarion Books, 1994). 30. Lemlich, “Inside,” 369. 31. Michelle Markel, “Interview: Michelle Markel,” interview by Barbara Bietz, The Prosen People: Exploring the World of Jewish Literature, October 17, 2013, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople/post / interview-michelle-markel/. 32. See Annelise Orleck, “Clara Lemlich Shavelson,” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, March 20, 2009, https://jwa.org/ encyclopedia/article/shavelson-clara-lemlich, who points out that Lemlich was denied a pension by the ILGWU in 1954, and thus never received “a pension from the union she helped to found—and which hails her as a pioneer on every major anniversary.” 33. Resources for critical literacy and complementary texts for contemporary labor statistics are available at https://www.nytimes.com /topic/subject / child-labor. For a discussion of the uses of life writing in the classroom in relation to activism see Marshall, “Counter-Storytelling through Graphic Life Writing,” and Marshall, “Life Writing.”

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Notes to pages 99–102

34. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press), 34. 35. Lemlich’s Jewish heritage and communist activism have been elided in other works for children, such as Chelsea Clinton’s She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World (New York: Philomel Books, 2017); see Haley Kossek, “Dear Chelsea Clinton: Clara Lemlich Was a Communist—and a Jew,” July 26, 2017, https://www.lilith.org/blog/2017/07/dear-chelsea -clinton-clara-lemlich-was-a-communist-and-a-jew/. 36. This contradiction also organizes children’s rights discourses. See Jacqueline Bhabha, “The Child: What Sort of Human?” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1526 –35 37. As the AFL-CIO, “The Lessons of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Are Still Relevant 107 Years Later,” March 25, 2018, https://aflcio.org/2018/3/ 25/lessons-triangle-shirtwaist-fire-are-still-relevant-107-years-later, argues “the problems that led to the Triangle fire are still present today. It was just five years ago, for instance, that the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh killed more than 1,100 garment workers.” epilogue. twenty-first-century formations: child witness, trans life writing, and futurity 1. Our thinking is informed by theorizations of the child in queer studies and the historical and political formations that work reveals. See, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Julian Gill-Peterson, Rebekah Sheldon, and Kathryn Bond Stockton, “Introduction: What Is the Now, Even of Then?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 4 (2016): 495–503; Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 2. Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old who was visiting his father and his father’s fiancée at her townhouse in Sanford, Florida, was stalked and murdered by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in February 2012. Zimmerman claimed self-defense and was not initially charged. The failure to charge Zimmerman ignited the formation of #BlackLivesMatter by Alicia Garza, Opel Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors. Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old resident of Ferguson, Missouri, who had recently graduated from high school, was killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014. Like Zimmerman, Wilson claimed the killing was motivated by his fear of a young Black man. The egregious violence directed at an unarmed young man for walking in the street inspired street protests and calls for an investigation into policing in Ferguson. Tamir Rice, the youngest of the three

Notes to pages 102–3

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victims at age twelve, was killed by police in December 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio, responding to a call about a Black man repeatedly pulling a gun out of his pants and pretending to shoot. The caller described the gun as “probably fake” and the “man” as “a juvenile.” The audio of the call was published by the Los Angeles Times staff, “Hear the 911 Call About Tamir Rice: Gun Is ‘Probably Fake,’ Caller Says,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2014, http://www.latimes.com /nation /nationnow/la-na-nn-tamir-rice-911-call -20141126-htmlstory.html. 3. Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 152. See also Susan D. Moeller, “A Hierarchy of Innocence: The Media’s Use of Chilren in the Telling of International News,” Harvard International Journal of Press/ Politics 7, no. 1 (2002): 36 –56. 4. Memoirist Augusten Burroughs, who wrote about childhood abuse in his best-selling Running with Scissors (New York: St. Martins Press, 2002), was sued by the family of his legal guardian who objected to their depiction in his memoir. As part of that settlement, the press agreed to use the term “book” rather than “memoir,” but Burroughs stood by the legitimacy of his memory and representation of his experience. See Rodrique Ngowi, “ ‘Running with Scissors’ Family Settles Defamation Suit,” Seattle Times, August 31, 2007, https://www.seattletimes.com /nation-world/running-with-scissors-family -settles-defamation-suit /. 5. We thank Quinn Eades for conversation about the generational complexity of trans coming-of-age and trans families, including the demonization of the very trans elders that trans kids need to see and know in order to experience cross-generational support. 6. Tey Meadow, “Child,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 57–59. 7. For an analysis of how family members offer memories of trans teen Gwen Araujo in an effort to rehumanize her in the face of transphobic violence and erasure, see Cynthia G. Franklin and Laura E. Lyons, “ ‘I Have a Family’: Relational Witnessing and the Evidentiary Power of Grief in the Gwen Araujo Case,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 3 ( June 2016): 437–66. 8. Kimberley Ens Manning, “Attached Advocacy and the Rights of the Trans Child,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 2 ( June 2017): 579–95. See Tey Meadow, Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 9. For a history of childhood, gender, and medicalization, see Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

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Notes to pages 103– 8

10. Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 8. 11. We thank Joss Taylor Greene for his insights on this nexus of issues. On the conjunction of race, lethal violence, and memorialization in trans lives, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). On the racialization of sexual identities, see Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 12. Gayle Salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 16. 13. For an account of the trial, see Ken Corbett, A Murder Over a Girl: Justice, Gender, Junior High (New York: Henry Holt, 2016). 14. We thank Quinn Eades for underlining how trans youth with multiple marginal identities are especially vulnerable to losing their status as children when they are seen through sexual identity categories. 15. Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More (New York: Atria, 2014). 16. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 156. 17. Mock, Redefining Realness, xi. 18. Ibid., xii. 19. Ibid., xi. 20. Ibid., xiv. 21. Ibid., 1. 22. Ibid., 7. 23. Ibid., 23. 24. Ibid., 44. 25. Ibid., 45. 26. Not all who are forced into dependency are children. Not all children are read as constitutively incapable of independence and selfsovereignty. Thus categories like “girlhood” are freighted with histories uneasily acknowledged through reference to the temporality of coming-of-age. Indeed, the ideological work of coming-of-age is both carried and masked by narrative traditions of the bildungsroman. Scholarly debates about whether slave narratives qualify as autobiography or whether memoir about the traumatic experiences of women are worthy of standing as representative or whether those who write in political forms like testimonio are “lying”— all speak to the stakes of self-representation and to why its risks are worth running.

Notes to pages 108–11

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27. This list is not exclusive and it also includes neuro-typicality, in conjunction with other categories, including disability, and a range of assumptions about whose lived experience is “normal.” 28. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010): 197. 29. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 30. Salamon, Life and Death of Latisha King, 98. See José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 31. Salamon, Life and Death of Latisha King, 99. 32. Ibid. 33. Especially apposite to discussion of queer and trans futurity is the notion, raised by C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, of necropolitics and the use of black trans death. See their “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection of Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 66 –76. 34. For an example of the use of an adult narrator in the self-representation of childhood trauma that is especially attentive to how storytelling can avoid revictimizing those who experienced abuse, see Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir (New York: Flatiron, 2017).

index

abuse. See sexual violence accompaniment, 3, 109, 111; audience and, 109; comics and, 85; Kaysen on, 61–62; Mock and, 106 –7; picture books and, 88; Salamon and, 105; Una and, 79 adolescence: Grealy and, 54; Kaysen and, 49; memoirs on, 38–62. See also girlhood affect, 65; Gloeckner and, 73; life writing and, 4; visual media and, 63 agency: girls and, 13–14, 28, 99–100; Jacobs and, 19, 23–24; Menchú and, 25; Satrapi and, 29; women of color and, 35 Ahmed, Sara, 65, 110 Anger: gender pessimism and, 40 Aquilina, Rosemarie, 2 Araujo, Gwen, 135n26, 137n7 audience: and accompaniment, 109; Kaysen and, 49; Morimoto and, 93–94; picture books and, 87–88 authorities: Nassar case and, 1–2, 115n3; teacher, Kaysen and, 42– 43, 61–62; and trans self-representation, 103– 4; and white savior model, 15–16. See also credibility autobiographics, 6, 67 autobiography: and authority, 35–36; comic, Gadsby and, 57–61; complexities of, 102–3; values associated with, 4. See also life writing Autobiography of a Face (Grealy), 38–39, 53–57 autographics, term, 67 Baldwin, James, 86, 88 Ballantyne, Taylor, 116n7 Bartky, Sandra Lee, 38– 40

Becoming Unbecoming (Una), 63–66, 75–84, 77f, 80f, 85 Berlant, Lauren, 22, 65 Beverly, John, 25 bildungsroman, 138n26; Jacobs and, 18 biographies: picture books on, 89, 132n5 #BlackLives Matter, 102, 136n2 blame: rape culture and, 65; Una and, 80 –81 bodies: as form of protest, 3; Grealy and, 56 borderline personality: Kaysen and, 44 – 46, 48 Boyd, Larissa, 115n3 Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909 (Markel and Sweet), 86 –87, 94 –99, 96f, 99–100 Brown, Laura S., 7 Brown, Michael, 136n2 Brown, Tracy, 78 Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth, 24 –25 Burke, Tarana, 116n8 Burroughs, Augusten, 137n4 Bush, Laura, 30 Butler, Judith, 48 capitalism, racial: Jacobs and, 21, 23, 33 care, narrative of: accompaniment and, 111; Nassar case and, 2; trans children and, 103– 4 Caron, Bob, 91 Chaney, Michael, 73 Child, Lydia Maria, 17, 21, 120n13 children’s books, 86 –100 A Child’s Life and Other Stories (Gloeckner), 63–75, 69f, 71f–72f, 85 child witness, 2–6, 14 –15; accompaniment and, 62; in comics, 63–85; functions of, 4, 101; and futurity, 110;

141

142 child witness (continued) Gadsby and, 57–61; Gloeckner and, 66 –75; Grealy and, 53–57; Jacobs and, 16 –24; Kaysen and, 41–51; Markel and Sweet and, 94 –99; memoirs on, 38–62; Menchú and, 24 –28; Morimoto and, 89–94; Satrapi and, 28–32; trans child as, 101–11; Una and, 75–84. See also witness Chute, Hillary, 64, 73, 91 closure: comics and, 73 clothing: Una and, 81–83, 83f Cole, Teju, 13 collective action: Markel and Sweet and, 94 –99 Combahee River Collective, 7 comedy: Gadsby on, 52–53, 57–61, 117n15 comics, 63–85, 131n1; Becoming Unbecoming, 75–84; A Child’s Life and Other Stories, 66 –75; Persepolis, 28–32; Una on, 75–76; Whitlock on, 129n20 coming-of-age narrative, 27, 138n26; Mock and, 105–7; picture books and, 87; Una and, 75, 79 community: life writing and, 49 compassion: Berlant on, 22; Satrapi and, 29. See also empathy; sympathy complexity: in autobiography, 102–3; Menchú and, 27–28 confession: Jacobs and, 23; versus testimony, 23, 61 controversies: over A Child’s Life and Other Stories, 74; over I, Rigoberta Menchú, 24, 27; over memoirs, 137n4; over Nanette, 117n15 Couser, Tom, 53 credibility, 102–3; autobiography and, 4, 35–36; girls and, 51–53; Kaysen and, 41, 45– 47; Lemlich and, 98–99; Menchú and, 24, 27; Mock and, 106; Nassar case and, 1–2, 115n3; rape culture and, 65; slave narratives and, 17; and trans self-representation, 103– 4; Una and, 76, 78–80, 80f, 81; women of color and, 34 Cullors, Patrisse, 136n2 defamiliarization of childhood objects: comics and, 64 –65; Gloeckner and, 68, 72; Una and, 75, 81, 83f

Index Denhollander, Rachael, 1–2, 115n2 Depersonalization: Kaysen and, 49–50 Derrida, Jacques, 35 disability studies, Grealy and, 53 disidentification: Jacobs and, 18–20; women of color and, 35 dissent. See resistance dissociation: Gloeckner and, 73 documentation: Kaysen and, 41, 46 – 47; Morimoto and, 93 doubt: Grealy and, 56; Una and, 81, 82f Douglass, Frederick, 21, 23 empathy, 15–16. See also compassion; sympathy ethical claims: autobiographical narrative and, 36 ethical witness, formation of: Morimoto and, 94; picture books and, 87 experience: autobiography and, 4 face: Grealy and, 53–57; Levinas on, 54 fairy tales: Gloeckner and, 68 Farmer, Paul, 134n14 femininity: discipline of, 39– 40; Freud on, 51–53; racialization of, 6 feminist trauma theories, 7 feminization: of childhood, 64 Foucault, Michel, 23 freedom: Jacobs and, 17, 23; life writing and, 110 Freud, Sigmund: and gender pessimism, 51–53; on trauma, 7, 40 Fugitive Slave Law, 19, 21 futurity, 110 –11 Gadsby, Hannah, 38–39, 57–61, 117n15, 126n40 Garza, Alicia, 136n2 gaze: Gloeckner and, 73; masculinist, 64; politics of, 63; Una and, 75. See also looking gender: Butler on, 48; coming-of-age stories and, 35; epistemology of, comics and, 65; and psychiatric care, 41–51; and suicide, 125n12 gender normal, term: Gadsby on, 126n40 gender pessimism, 39– 41; Freud and, 51–53; Gloeckner and, 70; Kaysen and, 41–51

143

Index genre: life writing and, 133n11; selfrepresentation and, 108–9 Gilligan, Carol, 39 Gilmore, Leigh, 44, 99; on autobiographics, 6, 67; on graphic memoir, 64; on hands, 92; on jurisdictions, 115n5; on shame, 81 Girl, Interrupted (Kaysen), 38–39, 41–51 girlhood: as category, 138n26; Gadsby and, 57–61; Gloeckner and, 66 –75; Grealy and, 53–57; Jacobs and, 16 –24; Kaysen and, 41–51; Markel and Sweet and, 94 –99; memoirs on, 38–62; Menchú and, 24 –28; Mock and, 105–7; Morimoto and, 89–94; Satrapi and, 28–32; trans women on, 101–11; Una and, 75–84; witnessing, 1–11; women of color on, 13–37. See also value of girls; vulnerability of girls girls of color: gender pessimism and, 40 globalization, 33–34, 36 Gloeckner, Phoebe, 63–75, 69f, 71f–72f, 85 graphic novels. See comics Gravett, Paul, 75 Grealy, Lucy, 38–39, 53–57 Grewal, Inderpal, 36 gutter: comics and, 64 –65, 73; Gloeckner and, 72–75, 72f, 74; Una and, 78 Halberstam, Jack, 103 hands, Morimoto and, 91–92, 92f Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (Gadsby), 38–39, 57–61, 117n15 Hartman, Saidiya, 6, 13, 15 Herman, Judith, 7, 42 Hesford, Wendy, 64, 102, 118n2 Hine, Lewis W., 97 Hiroshima, Morimoto and, 89–94 homophobia, Gadsby on, 57–61 hope, Salamon on, 111 Hurley, Natasha, 87 hysteria: Kaysen and, 44, 48; Una and, 81; visibility and, 7 I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú), 14 –15, 24 –28, 32–37 “I”: and child figure, 62, 111; Jacobs and, 18; marginalized persons and, 120n11 identification: child figure and, 5–6; Freud on, 51; women of color and, 35

illness, Grealy and, 53–57 images. See visual media Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ( Jacobs), 14 –24, 32–37 innocence, of childhood: as construct, 5; picture books and, 88 intersectionality: Jacobs and, 21–22; term, 117n20; trauma and, 6 –8 “It Gets Better” campaign, 110 Jacobs, Harriet, 14 –24, 32–37 Jordan, Jim, 116n10 Judaism: Lemlich and, 95, 97 justice, 2; autobiography and, 4; rape culture and, 65 Kaysen, Susanna, 38–39, 41–51 Kidd, Kenneth, 88, 131n2 King, Latisha, 101, 104 –5, 111 Klages, Kathie, 115n3 Kohl, Herbert, 134n15 labor, 136n37; Markel and Sweet and, 94 –99, 96f Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, 53 Lejeune, Philippe, 120n11 Lemlich, Clara, 86 –87, 94 –99, 135n32 Levinas, Emmanuel, 54 –56 The Life and Death of Latisha King (Salamon), 101, 104 –5, 111 life writing, 2–6, 108–9; comics, 63–85; genealogy of, 4 –5, 14, 36, 86, 109; genre and, 133n11; memoirs, 38–62; picture books, 86 –100; term, 119n3; by women of color, 13–37. See also autobiography Maclear, Kyo, 86 male privilege: Gadsby and, 60 –61 male violence, ordinariness of: Una and, 78, 84 Marcus, Sharon, 3, 24 Markel, Michelle, 86 –87, 94 –99, 96f, 99–100 marriage: Kaysen and, 45, 50; Mock and, 106 Martin, Trayvon, 136n2 Marx, Karl, 35 McCloud, Scott, 73 McInerney, Brandon, 104 McLean Hospital, 41– 47

144 Meadow, Tey, 103 medicalization, Grealy and, 53–57 memoirs, 38–62; Autobiography of a Face, 53–57; comics as, 63–64; controversies over, 137n4; Girl, Interrupted, 41–51; Nanette, 57–61 memory: Burroughs on, 137n4; and trauma, 7; trauma and, 102 Menchú, Rigoberta, 14 –15, 24 –28, 32–37 metalepsis: Grealy and, 54; Kaysen on, 48–51 #MeToo movement, 3, 42– 43, 116n8; Gadsby and, 57–61 Mickenberg, Julia, 89 Milano, Alyssa, 116n8 Miller, Emma Ann, 115n2 Mintz, Susannah, 54 Mock, Janet, 105–7 Moeller, Susan D., 94 Morimoto, Junko, 86 –94, 90f, 99–100 Mundlay, Sama, 114 Muñoz, José Esteban, 110 My Hiroshima (Morimoto), 86 –94, 90f, 99–100 Nafisi, Azar, 28, 32 Nakazawa, Keiji, 91 Nanette (Gadsby), 38–39, 57–61, 117n15 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass), 21, 23 Nassar, Larry, 1– 4, 115n2–115n3 Neary, Janet, 17 neoliberalism, 33–34, 101; Menchú and, 27; Mock and, 106; Satrapi and, 29–32, 31f; and vulnerable girl image, 14 –15 nonfiction, 133n11; trade books, for children, 88–89 Norcom, James, 19–20 Nutter, Nick, 116n10 Olney, James, 119n3, 119n9 ordinariness of male violence: Una and, 78, 84 Orleck, Annelise, 135n32 pain: Grealy and, 53–54; as un /representable, 40 – 41. See also trauma pedagogy: Baldwin on, 86; child witness and, 5; picture books and, 87–89, 133n11. See also political pedagogy

Index Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Satrapi), 14 –15, 28–32, 31f, 32–37, 67 picture books, 86 –100, 131n1; as alternative pedagogy, 88–89, 133n11; issues in, 134n15; literature on, 132n2; Tan on, 87; and trauma, 87–89 Podesto, Gary, 74 Poletti, Anna, 67 political pedagogy, 34; Jacobs and, 20, 22–24; Menchú and, 26; picture books and, 87; Satrapi and, 29 Post, Amy, 17, 21 posttraumatic stress: Una and, 76 precarity, 65; Gloeckner and, 68, 74 psychiatric care, gender and, Kaysen and, 41–51 race and racial issues: and childhood, 5, 16 –17, 21, 102; and femininity, 6; Jacobs and, 16 –24; Menchú and, 24 –28; and vulnerability, 14 Raisman, Aly, 3, 116n7 rape culture, 65, 66 Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More (Mock), 105–7 representation: meanings of, Spivak on, 26, 35–36; of trauma, 39– 41, 44. See also self-representation rescue narrative, 13, 32–37; Jacobs and, 20 –22; Menchú and, 25–26; Satrapi and, 29–30, 32 resistance: gender pessimism and, 40; life writing and, 110; Menchú and, 25–26; picture books and, 88–89; Satrapi and, 29, 32 Rice, Tamir, 136n2 Rose, Gillian, 64 Roy, Arundhati, 36 Salamon, Gayle, 101, 104 –5, 110 –11 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina, 27–28 Salem witch trials, 52 salvation narratives, 13–15 Satrapi, Marjane, 14 –15, 28–32, 31f, 32–37, 67 Savage, Dan, 110 Sawyer, Samuel Tredwell, 19–20, 23–24 #SayHerName, 102 scale: comics and, 64 –65; Gloeckner and, 68–70, 69 f ; Una and, 84

Index Scarry, Elaine, 40, 54 self-representation, 2–3; Gadsby and, 57; and genre, 108–9; Grealy and, 56; in slave narratives, 17; trans, 103– 4; and trauma, 109. See also autobiography; life writing self-representational acts: definition of, 6 sentimental novel: Jacobs and, 18, 21–22 sexual violence: dominant representations of, 65–66, 76; feminist critique of, 42; Gloeckner and, 66 –67, 72–75, 72f; Jacobs and, 18–20; #MeToo movement and, 42– 43; Nassar and, 1–2; not-seeing of, 65; reasons for not reporting, 78; statistics on, Una and, 77–78, 77f; and trans women, 107; Una and, 75–84; under-investigation of, 66; value of girls and, 43; in visual media, 63–85 shame: Gadsby and, 60; Grealy and, 55; Nassar case and, 1–2, 115n3; and trans women, 107; Una and, 79–81, 82f silencing: Grealy and, 55; Nassar case and, 1–2; versus representations of trauma, 44; and trans women, 107; Una and, 79, 80 –81 skepticism. See credibility issues slave narrative: categorization of, 119n3, 119n9, 120n13; Jacobs and, 16 –24 Spiegelman, Art, 67 spiritual autobiography: Jacobs and, 18 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 26, 34 –36 Sports Illustrated, 3, 116n7 state violence, 26, 34; Satrapi and, 32 Stoll, David, 27 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 21 Strauss, Richard, 116n10 Subversion: picture books and, 88–89, 132n5 suicide: fans of Kaysen and, 49; gender and, 125n12; Kaysen and, 41– 42 survival/survivorship, 3, 49; Gadsby and, 57–61; Mock and, 107; Una and, 84 Sutcliffe, Peter, 75, 78, 84 Sweet, Melissa, 86 –87, 94 –99, 96f, 99–100 sympathy, 14 –15, 33; disidentification and, 35; Jacobs and, 18, 20, 22; misapplied, 105. See also compassion; empathy

145 Tan, Shaun, 87 temporality: comics and, 64 –65; Gloeckner and, 69f, 70 –72, 71f; Grealy and, 53; Kaysen and, 46 – 47; and life writing, 108; and memory, 103; Menchú and, 25; Morimoto and, 89, 93; trans women and, 106 –7; Una and, 76, 78–79, 84; and witness, 109–11 testimonio: definition of, 25; Menchú and, 24 –28 testimony, 3–6, 32–37; child witness and, 15; versus confession, 23, 61; Denhollander and, 1–2; Gadsby and, 61; Jacobs and, 22–23; #MeToo movement and, 42– 43; picture books and, 87–89; slave narratives and, 17; and trauma, 7 Thomashow, Jessica, 115n2 Tibbets, Paul, 91 Tometi, Opel, 136n2 trans childhood, 101–11 transnational feminism, 14, 24, 27, 34, 37, 122n30 transphobia, 104 –5 trauma: comics and, 67, 75–76; definition of, 6 –8; feminist trauma theories, 7–8, 38–39; Freudian theory on, 7, 40; Gadsby and, 57–61; language on, 56; life writing and, 4 –6; literature on, 132n2; and memory, 102; Morimoto and, 89–94; picture books and, 87–89; self-representation and, 109; Una and, 76, 79; as un /representable, 39– 41, 44 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, 97, 98f Tricomi, Albert H., 120n13 truth telling: life writing and, 4; Menchú and, 24; Nassar case and, 2 Turner, Brock, 66, 128n12 Una, 63–66, 75–84, 77f, 80f, 85, 130n48 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 21 Vermeer, Johannes, 61 Vijayakumar, Lakshmi, 125n12 violence: Gadsby and, 60. See also sexual violence visibility: of sexual violence, 65, 74; and trauma, 7, 42 visual media, 131n1; comics, 63–85; dominant practices in, 65–66, 76; picture books, 86 –100; and sexual

146 visual media (continued) violence, 63–85; strategies in, Gloeckner and, 68 visual pedagogy, 86 –100; Satrapi and, 29 voyeurism: visual media and, 63 whiteness: and child figure, 5–6 white privilege: Gadsby and, 60 –61 white savior model, 13; and slavery, 17; versus witnessing, 15 Whitlock, Gillian, 36, 67, 73, 129n20 Wilson, Darren, 136n2 witness, witnessing, 108–9; conditions for, 2; ethics of, 38; Gadsby and, 57–61; Gloeckner and, 66 –75; Grealy and, 53–57; Jacobs and, 16 –24; Kaysen

Index and, 41–51; Maclear on, 86; Markel and Sweet and, 94 –99; memoirs on, 38–62; Menchú and, 24 –28; Morimoto and, 89–94; Nassar case and, 1–11; Satrapi and, 28–32; temporality and, 109–11; term, 7–8; Una and, 75–84, 80f; visual media and, 63–66; versus white savior model, 15. See also child witness Yellin, Jean Fagan, 17–18, 21 Yorkshire Ripper, 75, 84 Yousoufzai, Malala, 102, 123n51 Zimmerman, George, 136n2

Leigh Gilmore is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, and most recently, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives. Elizabeth Marshall is Associate Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence.