Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing

By Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall

When more than 150 women testified in 2018 to the sexual abuse inflicted on them by Dr. Larry Nassar when they were young, competitive gymnasts, they exposed and transformed the conditions that shielded their violation, including the testimonial disadvantages that cluster at the site of gender, youth, and race. In Witnessing Girlhood, Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall argue that they also joined a long tradition of autobiographical writing led by women of color in which adults use the figure and narrative of child witness to expose harm and seek justice. Witnessing Girlhood charts a history of how women use life narrative to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response. Drawing on a deep and diverse archive of self-representational forms—slave narratives, testimonio, memoir, comics, and picture books—Gilmore and Marshall attend to how authors return to a narrative of traumatized and silenced girlhood and the figure of the child witness in order to offer public testimony. Emerging within these accounts are key scenes and figures that link a range of texts and forms from the mid–nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Gilmore and Marshall offer a genealogy of the reverberations across timelines, self-representational acts, and jurisdictions of the child witness in life writing. Reconstructing these historical and theoretical trajectories restores an intersectional testimonial history of writing by women of color about sexual and racist violence to the center of life writing and, in so doing, furthers our capacity to engage ethically with representations of vulnerability, childhood, and collective witness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780823285501

Book 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. Girls in Crisis: Feminist Resistance in Life Writing by Women of Color

2. Gender Pessimism and Survivor Storytelling in the Memoir Boom: Girl, Interrupted, Autobiography of a Face, and Nanette

3. Visualizing Sexual Violence and Feminist Child Witness: A Child’s Life and Other Stories and Becoming Unbecoming

4. Teaching Dissent through Picture Books: Girlhood Activism and Graphic Life Writing for the Child

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

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

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 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 under stand 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 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, self-representational 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 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 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 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. Witnessing 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