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Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma

Online ISBN:
9780748653041
Print ISBN:
9780748618163
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma

Published:
18 April 2007
Online ISBN:
9780748653041
Print ISBN:
9780748618163
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

During the late 1970s and 1980s speaking out about the traumatic reality of incest and rape was a rare and politically groundbreaking act. Today it is a ubiquitous feature of popular culture and its political value uncertain. This book explores the complexity and consequences of this shift in giving first-hand testimony by focusing on debates over recovered memory therapy and false memory syndrome, the spectacle of talkshow disclosures, discourses of innocence and complicity, as well as the aesthetics and effect of shock. In counterpoint to the frequently cynical readings of personal narrative politics, it advances an alternative reading built around the concept of unrepresentability. Key to this intervention is the stress placed by the text on the limits of representing sexually traumatic experiences and how this requires both theoretical and methodological innovation. Based on close readings of survivor narratives and artworks, the book demonstrates the significance of unrepresentability for a feminist understanding of sexual violence and victimisation.

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