https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9116-3950
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ABSTRACT
The life-writing genre, and more specifically the memoir subgenre, are fertile ground for survivors of sexual violence wanting to share their plight and/or to raise awareness about rape. Chanel Miller is an Asian American artist educated in California. In 2015 she attended a Stanford campus party and was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, a White undergraduate student and athlete. Four years later, she wrote a memoir about her experience entitled Know My Name.
Building on previous works on Miller’s text from the field of trauma studies, and acknowledging the memory turn in life-writing scholarship, this article tackles the dialectic between the presence and absence of memories in the narrative, and the gendered implications of this dialectic. It analyses how the book critically exposes the workings of rape culture and illustrates how Miller creates a counternarrative where the absence of memories of the rape triggers alternative narratisation strategies. I argue that Miller activates an authoritative voice that can be inserted in the feminist tradition of life writing, while at the same time building an alternative frame of justice that stems from the author-reader relationship rather than from a particular understanding of the law.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 Gilmore applies Ahmed’s term sticky judgment to narratives of sexual violence in Tainted Witness (2017, 6). The process is exemplified through my case study.
3 Kirkpatrick and Kanin published an article about campus rape in Citation1957, with a sample of 291 subjects from one institution. Warshaw’s was the first large-scale study and a turning point in American society’s interest in the problem.
4 See Reeves Sanday Citation2007 or Minister Citation2018 for academic production, End Rape of Campus (https://endrapeoncampus.org/) or Know Your Title IX (https://www.knowyourix.org/) for advocacy, California Senate Bill 967 for law reform and Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Project for artistic work.
5 Unless otherwise stated, the emphasis in the quotations is always in the original. To avoid unnecessary repetition, I will use page numbers only below when citing the primary text.
6 Persky was recalled in 2018. After the sentence, volunteers collected over one million signatures to put him on the ballot.
8 I use the term as defined by Allison (Citation1994, 123), differentiating narrating as the act of telling from narratising as the process of making life events meaningful by giving them structure.
9 About the interdisciplinary dialogism between trauma studies, memory studies and feminist studies, see Hirsch and Smith Citation2002.
10 With performative understood as per Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (Citation1955): a performative utterance is constitutive because it brings forward the reality that it refers to.
11 An interesting line of research to pursue is the appearance of autobiographical texts where memories do exist, but the author chooses not to share them and finds ways to communicate that choice. A case in point is Cecily Strong’s This Will All Be Over Soon (Citation2021), where eleven blank pages substitute her memories of an abusive relationship because her ex is embarrassed about his actions and asks her not to disclose them. This voluntary(?) silencing of the violence and the personal, political, and formal implications that it has for the memoir genre is material for another paper.
12 In Roland Barthes’ work on photography, the punctum is the element that jumps out at the viewer, pricking and disturbing her (Citation1990, 65). I adapt it to refer to the elements that stand out in Miller’s portrayal of unbroken youth.
13 I have used the Kindle version, whose introduction provides positions instead of page numbers. The same applies to Gornick Citation2012.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marta Fernández-Morales
Marta Fernández-Morales, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer at the University of Oviedo, Spain, where she teaches American literature and gender studies at the BA and MA levels. Her research explores contemporary American cultural products, in particular literature, film, and television. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Atlantis, Television and New Media, Feminist Theory, Auto/Biography Review, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, and American Drama, among others. She is the author of four books and the editor of eight scholarly volumes, the most recent one being Rethinking Gender in Popular Culture in the 21st Century. Marlboro Men and California Gurls (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017; co-editor). She is currently a member of the research team in a project about illness narratives funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and developed by the Research Group ‘HEAL’ at her home university (https://www.unioviedo.es/heal/). More information at academia.edu.