| Abstrakt: |
The life-writing genre, and more specifically the memoir subgenre, are fertile ground for survivors of sexual violence wanting to share their plight and/or to raise awareness about rape. Chanel Miller is an Asian American artist educated in California. In 2015 she attended a Stanford campus party and was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, a White undergraduate student and athlete. Four years later, she wrote a memoir about her experience entitled Know My Name. Building on previous works on Miller's text from the field of trauma studies, and acknowledging the memory turn in lifewriting scholarship, this article tackles the dialectic between the presence and absence of memories in the narrative, and the gendered implications of this dialectic. It analyses how the book critically exposes the workings of rape culture and illustrates how Miller creates a counternarrative where the absence of memories of the rape triggers alternative narratisation strategies. I argue that Miller activates an authoritative voice that can be inserted in the feminist tradition of life writing, while at the same time building an alternative frame of justice that stems from the author-reader relationship rather than from a particular understanding of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
