Witnessing Girlhood

Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing

Leigh Gilmore, Elizabeth Marshall

• Verlag: Fordham University Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780823285501
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Children's Studies in Sociology

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. W itnessing 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.

CHAPTER 1

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

What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death?

—SAIDIYA HARTMAN, “Venus in Two Acts”

Humanitarian campaigns often feature girls in crisis. Vulnerable girls, especially in the global south, appear in campaigns that address trafficking and other harms that span borders and populations. Yet an unintended negative consequence of such campaigns is the valorization of a white savior model and its attendant rescue narrative woven into the representation of girls of color as endangered, with crisis as their endemic lot. Such appeals have both a lengthy history and a contemporary currency. This humanitarian agenda hides neoliberal opportunism within the guise of raising awareness. These rogue rescue missions exemplify what Teju Cole has dubbed the “white savior industrial complex.”¹ Actual girls in crisis make an ethical claim upon our attention, and they should; but the permanently vulnerable girl is a deceptively apolitical and amoral figure that blots out representations of gendered autonomy (political, ethical, and personal) and histories of resistance. The figure of the vulnerable girl is tied to the absent figuration of women as fully human and political agents. A focus on girls as perennially imperiled and helpless prevents seeing women as moral and political agents who, while lodged in material conditions of harm, are capable of analyzing these conditions and proposing means of remediation.² As such, this representation recalls colonial and orientalist histories and the representational politics of racialization. It is in this figuration that the vulnerable and racialized girl in crisis has become the focus of human rights campaigns, corporate philanthropy, and service learning projects based in the United States.

Through an analysis of three life writing narratives—Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood—we seek to bring a historical context to the representational politics of girls in crisis.³ We choose Jacobs’s and Menchú’s works in order to plot two points indicating the historical and transnational scope of women’s interventions in the autobiographical production of girlhood. Jacobs’s slave narrative predates the development of neoliberalism in the West but has significant points of contact with its normative construction of gender and its expansionist view of property and capital, including persons held as slaves and their means for telling and circulating their stories. Menchú provides a resonant example of the Latin American testimonio’s address to a global public at the confluence of Guatemalan politics, the fallout of Western interventionist policy, and the prominence of Indigeneity in human rights discourse. We include Satrapi’s Persepolis as a complicating case that lies between the poles of fictive universal girlhood and a resistant tradition of representing transnational and anything-but-universal girlhood. The struggle between these poles is evident in the reception of Satrapi’s text and enables us to further clarify the stakes around a globally circulating discourse of girls in crisis, as well as to delve more deeply into the rhetorical strategies that are effective in challenging it.

The iconography of the vulnerable girl represents a testimonial site within a politics of global neoliberalism and a practice of postcolonial critique. Although any text within this iconography has a specific history of critical and popular reception, reading them together—often across effaced relations of influence and reference—enables us to chart an understudied genealogy of feminist critique in autobiographical forms. The three texts analyzed in this chapter are first-person accounts prized for both aesthetic and political qualities. They reach across national and geopolitical divides to enlist audiences to take up the authors’ political and social objectives. They do not ask for an analysis of the political crises about which they testify; instead, they use a range of strategies, especially around sympathy, to create authoritative and gendered critiques for diverse audiences. They provide an opportunity to examine the figure of the child as capable of bearing witness. We recognize this figure within autobiographical narratives as both a specific girl and a representative one whose circumstances reveal the political construction of girlhood within a larger project of population control and state terror (of enslaved persons in the plantation economy of the American South and Indigenous Guatemalans, for example) to which the adult autobiographer calls attention. The figure also forms a testimonial site as the adult identifies structural conditions unknowable to her childhood self and draws readers into an ethical mode of engagement that asks them to bear witness rather than serve as a white savior.

How women of color use life writing to talk back to the construction of the vulnerable girl marks an important practice of feminist resistance. Through their use of autobiographical forms including slave narrative, testimonio, and graphic memoir, women narrate a life from girlhood to adulthood in order to argue that political and moral autonomy develops from their lived responses to girlhood experience and trauma. In contrast to salvation narratives embedded in humanitarian campaigns that position the rescuer as the active protagonist in relation to the girl’s helpless suffering, Jacobs’s, Menchú’s, and Satrapi’s projects of self-representation re-center the narrator and displace the fictions on which the rescue paradigm depends. By doing this, they also reject the politics of rescue and its grounding in the insufficiencies and incapacities of vulnerable girls who never quite become women /citizens. No longer representative of static subaltern silence, girls emerge in these narratives as figures of sympathy represented by politically active women autobiographers. Sympathy here is not simply the achievement of new sentimental attachments that emerge through the gradual awakening in white audiences of the knowledge of shared humanity with girls and women in crisis; instead, it exposes feeling as a political realm in which the ugly and the exalted are unstable and intermingled.

Our focus on female subjects, then, takes their autobiographical practices as exemplary of what Saidiya Hartman calls “resignification”: a generative practice through which women of color exercise symbolic power through centering the female body not only for evidence of violence and social death, but for signs of life.⁴ Resignification takes place on a shifting historical field. The life stories of girls in crisis are vulnerable to cooptation and can become proxies through which white male saviors advance their own stories.⁵ Their stories can be used to elicit empathy in ways that do little to further an understanding of the complexity of their lives. Moreover, the assignation of authority to the white male savior’s version of girls’ lives works primarily to amplify his role as interpreter of their experience. More problematically, empathy can as easily attach to heroic personalities who mediate for distant audiences an engagement with vulnerable and even unsympathetic girls. Life writing can resist campaigns that tug at the heartstrings by offering accounts that confront aversive affects, compromised subjects, and entrenched forms of oppression.

As such, these texts belong to a discourse of feminist political representation of girlhood by women of color. Further, in complex and specific ways, autobiographical accounts by Jacobs, Menchú, and Satrapi interrogate a rescue politics of the permanently vulnerable girl that has obscured the economic, political, legal, and cultural formations, institutions, and crises that imperil specific communities. In her place, they present a girl as a site of testimony and a figure who testifies. In what follows, we cast new light on the ongoing dangers of a politics based on a universal girlhood and the appeal of rescue by centering the resistance strategies raised within women’s autobiographical accounts of girlhood.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 narrative is the first extant slave narrative by a woman, and it begins in girlhood. “I was born a slave,” the first words of the narrative, are separated by a balancing semicolon from the words that complete the sentence: “but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.”⁶ Jacobs was “so fondly shielded by a benevolent family” that “I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise.”⁷ The narrative does not present girlhood as an idyllic state in order to mourn its loss; rather, she describes happy childhood as illusory. Jacobs is protected from the consciousness of slavery by a family composed of “all slaves,”⁸ while her status follows the condition of the mother. Learning about her status means learning about the centrality of women, reproduction, and rape to enslavement. This knowledge marks the threshold white women readers must cross in order to enter her narrative and learn a form of identification for which they have no adequate model. Jacobs’s narrative provides that model by redefining childhood itself as radically conditioned by race and gender for the differently positioned white women and those who are subjected to enslavement.

The “happy childhood” that “passed away” and the illusory category of freedom on which it rested are represented as dying a mutual death for Jacobs’s testimony to begin. The “incidents” she narrates from the “life of a slave girl” are as much about the pedagogy of white girlhood and white womanhood within the master’s household as they are about the enslavement of Black girls and women. Although Jacobs initially centers on the racial and gendered construction of childhood, she does so in order to examine the complex affiliations and antagonisms that arise among women within conditions of slavery. This strategy connects the betrayal of Jacobs’s mother, whose female owner promised her manumission, to Jacobs’s resistance later in life to having her freedom purchased by sympathetic white friends. Slavery, she argues, is enabled by white saviors. Although Jacobs has been read as offering an episodic narrative based on incidents within the temporality of enslaved girlhood, this reading effaces Jacobs as adult author, narrator, and subject of the majority of the text. The text is structured through direct address to white women readers, which emphasizes Jacobs’s status as an adult, and dispatches with a narrative of girlhood in the early chapters. Yet Jacobs’s status as adult abolitionist and author keeps getting re-forgotten.⁹

Self-representation in slave narratives is fraught. As Janet Neary explains, “Confronted by and actually acutely aware of the skepticism directed at black narrators, ex-slave narrators developed sophisticated and resourceful ways of satisfying the authenticating conventions of the genre while undermining the underlying racial implications and motivations of those conventions.”¹⁰At pains to present their authorship as legitimate at a time when their literacy was a crime, authors of slave narratives amplified the testimonial dimension of life writing—namely, its claim to tell the truth from the perspective of the eyewitness. Authentication of this genre has a perilous history for ex-slave narrators, including Jacobs. The black testimonial voice is vulnerable to the false accusation that its true speaker is the white abolitionist who appropriates it in order to propagandize.¹¹ In an undated letter to the white abolitionist and Quaker Amy Post, Jacobs insists that her personal perspective is critical to the persuasive force of her text: “It must be the slave’s own story—which it truly is.”¹²

In addition to relying on the convention of the white sponsor to establish the veracity of the narrative, a role Lydia Maria Child played in Incidents, Jacobs drew from a wide range of literary and cultural forms, not only to lend her experience authority but also to demonstrate her literary fluency.¹³ Jean Fagan Yellin compounds what we consider mutually supportive but distinguishable objectives in her description of the narrative’s unprecedented characteristics:

Incidents is, to my knowledge, the only slave narrative that takes as its subject the sexual exploitation of female slaves—thus centering on sexual oppression as well as on oppression of race and conditions; it is, to my knowledge, the only slave narrative that identifies its audience as female; it is, to my knowledge, the only slave narrative written in the style of sentimental fiction; and my work suggests that it may be the first full-length slave narrative by a woman to be published in this country.¹⁴

Scholars have identified the many literary forms Jacobs adapted, as well as the specifically gendered quality of her revisions. Through her uses of Garrisonian abolitionism, the seduction novel, spiritual autobiography, and the sentimental novel, Jacobs develops an account of the gendered violence of slavery that distinguishes her text within the archive of primarily male slave narratives.¹⁵

Within this formal web of adaptation and mediated testimony, Jacobs balances the risks of the sentimental novel (with its incitement to rescue) against the sympathy necessary to her alternative political pedagogy by modeling some aspects of her narrative on the bildungsroman, the novel of development associated with a national framing of the education of the narrator and itself an autobiographical discourse allied in U.S. literature with the rags-to-riches plot. The traditional “I” of the bildungsroman confers the authority of experience central to Jacobs’s understanding of the power of her antislavery polemic, yet Jacobs does not turn this authority solely toward crafting an autonomous “I.” Instead, she insists on a “we” as the subject of cross-racial solidarity against brutal forms of subjection. Such a subject understands that “rescue” would at best offer partial and temporary relief for the “the two millions of women at the South, still in bondage.”¹⁶ Jacobs develops a “we” from the “I” through her use of direct address. Although her readership certainly included African Americans, women and men, and white men, Jacobs addresses her narrative to white women of the North and explicitly enlists their political sympathy. Her audience is called to witness and is thereby constituted as having a particular relation to the author:

But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely! If slavery had been abolished, I, also, could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws; and I should have been spared the painful task of confessing what I am now about to relate.¹⁷

Jacobs acknowledges disidentification (“do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely!”) as she continues to invoke girlhood as both shared and wildly different. Jacobs’s use of direct address reminds readers of the adult woman narrating the “incidents” and not only the “slave girl.” Jacobs foregrounds the gendered dimensions of the struggle for freedom by claiming: “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”¹⁸ She details scenes of trauma familiar to slave narratives. However, Jacobs is distinctive in representing sexual violation and the inability to protect herself and her children as the grounds of an ethical appeal premised on the belief that her readers would sympathize as women, that this feeling would not only arise as second nature, but could also become political such that women would feel as women with her and act as citizens on behalf of those still enslaved. Thus, she offers her girlhood as a stage of female identification not to provoke a rescue sensibility but to incite antislavery activism. She does this by guiding the reader through direct address to identify with the girl’s vulnerability but not to become absorbed in the spectacle of her suffering. She does not await rescue in some textual locale...