Witnessing the unspeakable: Sexual trauma and erotic desire in twentieth-century American fiction

The purpose of this study is to read the juxtaposition of female erotic desire and sexual trauma at the intersections of race, class, ethnicity, and nation. In the three contemporary American novels I analyze---Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, and Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman---the sexuality or the female characters is the locus of gender oppression as well as of the social oppression of disenfranchised subjects. While the novels' compelling stories of sexual trauma offer critiques of the systems of oppression that engender sexual trauma and shroud it in shame and silence, they do not render women's pleasure invisible. Arguing that there has been a split in critical literature regarding female sexuality---the focus is on either sexual abuse or female erotic desire---I perform a reading of the female characters' sexuality constructed at the concurrence of desire and violence.;In this study I posit the characters' "creative re-enactments" as the restaging of sexual trauma with a difference. Re-enactment is symptomatic of their fidelity to trauma. However, it is through the performative reliving of their painful pasts that the characters engage with a loss. As they invoke the site of violence in their creative re-enactments, the characters bear witness to the unspeakable. I read how the main protagonists utilize distinct languages of trauma, such as fantasy, blues singing, and shamanism, in order to speak their traumatic memories. Through the re-enactments, they not only find an empathic community, but they also find their bodies emerging as sites of both political and sexual agency.;Creative re-enactments of trauma are not limited to the characters. Whereas the characters' creative re-enactments take place in the confines of home and thus their testimonies have little or no access to public venues, I argue that the novels perform public memories of the unspeakable, utilizing these languages of trauma. I read Bastard as a carefully crafted story that uses fantasy to implicate the reader in its performance of sexual trauma. Corregidora is a blues rendition of the legacy of the historical and sexual trauma of slavery. Comfort Woman performs a shamanic ritual that both brings forth silenced comfort women to speak and also remembers them.