Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons

THREE: Between a Politics of Pain and a Politics of Pain's Disavowal

chapter three Between a Politics of Pain and a Politics of Pain’s Disavowal There are many ways to victimize people. One way is to convince them that they are victims.—karen hwang, The Humanist It started as anger about what happened to other women. Then I learned that I was worth being angry about what happened to me.—karimah, State Correctional Institution at Muncy Bookseller Magazine recently adopted the term “mis lit”—short for “misery literature ”—to describe the growing number of memoirs that recount their authors ’ experiences of abuse and trauma. A paradigmatic example of mis lit is Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It”: One Child’s Courage to Survive, which chronicles Pelzer’s struggle to come to terms with having been beaten, starved, stabbed, burned, and poisoned by his alcoholic mother. The “public exposure of psychic suffering [has become] central to the account of oneself,” Eva Illouz argues, noting that even autobiographies of “successful and glamorous” women are told as “tales of past wounds” in which the author “is perpetually overcoming her emotional problems.”1 Mis lit has become immensely popular in the United States and Britain, with women accounting for 80 to 90 percent of its consumers. The genre is also highly popular in women’s prisons; indeed, several women involved in my study have read A Child Called “It” and its two sequels.2 The popularity of so-called mis lit has sparked considerable cultural debate in both popular and academic contexts. Fears that readers are indulging in “voyeurism , even salaciousness” in “snapping up” such memoirs dovetail with broader cultural concerns that Americans’ preoccupation with victimization has created a culture of dependency and attachment to suffering.3 Some feminist theorists 84 | pain and pain’s disavowal have also expressed concern that the “cult of victimization” reifies women as victims and has led to a “mass infantilization of women.”4 In fact, although “breaking the silence” and “coming to voice” were touchstones of second-wave U.S. feminism, the recent proliferation of mis lit has increased concern among some feminist theorists that speaking out about sexual victimization produces negative effects.5 For instance, noting that survivor discourse “is accessible every day on television talk shows, on talk radio, and in popular books and magazine articles,” Linda Martin Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendale caution that “survivor speech” has become “a media commodity that has a use value based on its sensationalism and drama.” Within such a context, the victim of physical, sexual, or emotional violence gets “reified as pure object, in need of expert interpretation , psychiatric help, and audience sympathy.” Moreover, “the discussion of the survivor’s ‘inner’ self and feelings” eclipses discussion of how to transform the sociohistorical, political, economic, and institutional forces that undergird practices of gendered violence. Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale contend, therefore, that “the primary political tactic for survivors should not be a simple incitement to speak out, as this formulation leaves unanalyzed the conditions of speaking and thus makes us too vulnerable to recuperative discursive arrangements.”6 Influential essays by such theorists as Wendy Brown, Renee Heberle, and Sharon Marcus likewise foreground the danger of reification: the risk of reifying women as victims and reifying suffering as the foundation of one’s subjectivity . In “Freedom’s Silences,” an essay from her 2005 collection titled Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Brown cautions that it is “possible to make a fetish of breaking silence.” This “ostensible tool of emancipation” not only “establishes regulatory norms” and “coincides with the disciplinary power of ubiquitous confessional practices,” Brown argues; “confessing injury” can also “become that which attaches us to the injury, paralyzes us within it, and prevents us from seeking or even desiring a status other than that of injured.” Citing Primo Levi, who argues that “a memory evoked too often, and in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype . . . installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense,” Brown then contends: Many contemporary narratives of suffering would seem to bear precisely this character; rather than working through the “raw memory” to a place of emancipation, discourses of survivorship become stories by which one lives, or refuses to live, in the present. There is a fine but critical distinction here between, on the one hand, reentering a trauma, speaking its unspeakable elements, and even politicizing it, in order to reconfigure the trauma [18.118.31.247] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 01:53 GMT...