Long-term, in-depth interviews with 11 abused lesbians and 10 domestic violence advocates reveal how lesbian victims struggle to define the relationship's abuse, their lesbian identity, and their own understanding of gendered violence in the context of cultural and institutional stigmatization of lesbians. By understanding abused lesbians’ silence as constitutive of their definitional dialogues about their relationships and the abuse, researchers and advocates can begin to determine who asserts definitional hegemony in the relationship. The author concludes by suggesting practical strategics that researchers and advocates can deploy to include abused lesbians in domestic violence theory, praxis, and services.
This article explores how three modalities of writing dissertation, memoir, and autoethnography negotiate the tensions between poststructuralist and psychoanalytic notions of truth as experienced by survivors of trauma. Although the nebulous nature of truth contrasts with the healing powers of speaking one's truth, this article argues that autoethnography in its experimentally analytic potential to produce meaning in and out of original contexts allows the writer to unearth the multiple truths of trauma. In doing so, the writer/survivor can heal while sharing with others the politics and hope of speaking about our traumatic truths.
AFTER MINA HARKERawakens from Count Dracula's vampiric embrace, she asks the men around her, but more pointedly herself, “What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days?” (285, ch. 21). As she recounts this perverse seduction in her own words, however, she contradicts her earlier disavowal: “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (284). These conflicting statements capture the peculiar double bind with which Mina struggles throughout Bram Stoker'sDracula(1897). Many critics concentrate on Dracula himself and the men who do battle with him; interestingly, the novel also develops Mina's complex subjectivity through her unspoken but deep affinity with the vampire. Van Helsing's paranoid observation, “Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina, is changing” (319; ch. 24), epitomizes shifting cultural anxieties at the moment when a long-standing ideological conception of proper femininity comes under suspicious attack. Although nothing seems more natural to Mina than her desire to help her husband in the public sphere while maintaining an intimate friendship with Lucy Westenra in the private, these familiar roles become estranged by the new taxonomies of deviancy popularized during the late nineteenth century.
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