Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gq7q9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-20T19:44:24.245Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Subjectification and Confession in Contemporary Memoirs of Abduction and Prolonged Captivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Heather A. Hillsburg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A striking trend is emerging in the Canadian and American literary landscape, and memoirs with the following narrative trajectory are now widely read: a stranger abducts a young woman, and holds her captive for years. She endures sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, eventually escapes, and returns to her former life. The sole scholarly discussion about these memoirs frames them as empowering for the authors, but the social and economic factors that inform these texts remain unaddressed. Drawing from Michel Foucault's discussion of the confession, this article complicates and extends this analysis. First, it situates memoirs by Elizabeth Smart, Amanda Berry and Gena DeJesus, Jaycee Dugard, Michelle Knight, and Josefina Rivera as examples of the Foucauldian sexual confession. It then maps the ways memoirs enable the authors to voice their understanding of the social and economic factors that both gave rise to their plight and inform media discussions that blame them for their suffering. I will ultimately argue that memoirs function as a public venue to resist or reject dominant interpretive frames that shape a survivor's experiences, while simultaneously reaffirming the ubiquity of these lines of thinking.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , Fall 2017 , pp. 833 - 848
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Apostolidis, Paul. 2011. Sex scandals, racial domination and the systemic correlation of power‐modalities in Foucault. Journal of Political Power 4 (2): 179–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The queen of America goes to Washington city: Essays on sex and citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berry, Amanda, and DeJesus, Gina. 2015. Hope: A memoir of survival in Cleveland. New York: Viking Books.Google Scholar
Davies, Bronwyn. 2006. Subjectification: The relevance of Butler's analysis for education. British Journal of Sociology of Education 27 (4): 425–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dugard, Jaycee. 2011. A stolen life: A memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Fejes, Andreas. 2008. To be one's own confessor: Educational guidance and governmentality. British Journal of Education 29 (6): 653–64.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality, volume I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Parthenon Books.Google Scholar
Haug, Frigga. 2001. Sexual deregulation or, the child abuser as hero in neoliberalism. Feminist Theory 2 (1): 55–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hengehold, Laura. 1994. An immodest proposal: Foucault, hysterization, and the “second rape.” Hypatia 9 (3): 88–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heyes, Cressida J. 2006. Foucault goes to Weight Watchers. Hypatia 21 (2): 126–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knight, Michelle. 2014. Finding me: A decade of darkness, a life reclaimed: A memoir of the Cleveland kidnappings. Los Angeles: Weinstein Books.Google Scholar
Laycock, Joseph. 2012. Carnal knowledge: The epistemology of sexual trauma in witches' sabbaths, satanic ritual abuse, and alien abduction narratives. Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 1 (1): 100–29.Google Scholar
Mills, Ros. 1995. The confession as a “practice of freedom”: Feminism, Foucault, and “elsewhere” truths. Law Text Culture 2: 100–17.Google Scholar
Moscowitz, Leigh, and Duvall, Spring‐Serenity. 2011. “Every parent's worst nightmare”: Myths of child abduction in US news. Journal of Children and Media 5 (2): 147–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rivera, Josefina. 2013. Cellar girl. London: Ebury Press.Google Scholar
Roudinesco, Elisabeth. 2009. Our dark side: A history of perversion. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Seigel, Jerrold. 1990. Avoiding the subject: A Foucaultian itinerary. Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (2): 273–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shoos, Diane. 2003. Representing domestic violence: Ambivalence and difference in “What's love got to do with it.” NWSA Journal 15 (2): 55–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. 2013. Dark places. New York Times, June 9.Google Scholar
Smart, Elizabeth. 2009. My story. New York: St Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Smart, Tom. 2005. In plain sight: The startling truth behind the Elizabeth Smart investigation. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.Google Scholar
Turner, James T. 1985. Factors influencing the development of Hostage Identification Syndrome. Political Psychology 6 (4): 705–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wanzo, Rebecca. 2009. The suffering will not be televised: African American women and sentimental political storytelling. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar