Abstract
In this chapter, I explore trauma and its normalizing effects in my own childhood. I also examine the ways that my experience reflects the larger normative culture as described by the radical feminist movement of the 1970s. In my childhood, violence normalized. It worked to gender me as a normative girl. I became quiet, accepting, submissive, disembodied and disassociated from my body, without sexual feeling, and ashamed. Along with violence, trauma saturated my childhood. And the sexual clung to and burst from my gendered experiences of both. For me, becoming girl meant succumbing to another’s sexuality. Being-girl was a matter of no-longer-mattering, in both senses of the word. My girl-experience was that of no-longer-being-embodied. Instead my form became the surface for the pleasure of another.
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Notes
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: BasicBooks, 1992).
see Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975)
Cassandra Wilson and Noreen Connell, eds., Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women (New York: NAL Plume, 1974)
Diana E. H. Russell, The Politics of Rape: The Victim’s Perspective (New York: Stein and Day, 1974)
Diana E. H. Russell, The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
Jean Halley, Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 7.
Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011)
Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 16.
Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 133.
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© 2012 Jean O’Malley Halley
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Halley, J.O. (2012). The Production of Girl Life and the Lives of Girls. In: The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows. Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071699_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071699_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29651-4
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