Bodies, Battlefields and Biographies: Scars and the Construction of the Body as Heritage

Burnett, Kathryn; Holmes, Mary

doi:10.1057/9780230501966_2

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…However, it is a semi-external marker of suffering, forcibly inscribed upon the body from without, and as portrayed dramatically in the ‘tree formation’ on Sethe’s back in Morrison’s (1987) novel Beloved , it takes on a distorted shape and form of protruding and hardened scar tissue. According to Burnett and Holmes (2001: 21), wartime or torture-inflicted scars become ‘heritage sites’ of physically and emotionally traumatic pasts. Once again, their permanence forces their victims to perpetually come to terms with the ambiguity of suffering better forgotten and the body as inescapable testament to survival.…”

Section: The Embodiment Of Memento Morimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As ‘heritage site’, the grandfather’s scars signify even to the young Ethan that they are Holocaust-related wounds, spatially and temporally relocating the victim and the observer in the distant past (Burnett and Holmes, 2001). They are markers of the ‘poisonous knowledge’ of brutality that is silenced and hidden from view (Das, 2007).…”

Section: The Embodiment Of Memento Morimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past

Kidron

2012

Journal of Material Culture

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Deviating from foundational assumptions regarding the semiotic and performative role of material objects, mementos of traumatic pasts are conceptualized as resisting mnemonic re-presentation and inter-objectivity. In keeping with trauma discourse, souvenirs of deathworlds are depicted as incapable of encapsulating sublime suffering or breaching the wall of silence between survivors and descendants, failing to constitute a material legacy. Rather than act as conduits for 'continuing bonds' with the past and the dead, survivors are expected to disentangle the self from souvenirs of difficult pasts facilitating separation and recovery. Ethnographic interviews with descendants depict the way discursive framing elides the semiotic potential of domestic material traces of the Holocaust and parent-child-object relations engendering intimate inter-corporeality and embodied memory. Object relations are central in the passage between life-and deathworlds, allowing survivor families to sustain the lived memory of the past in everyday life. Findings problematize the discourse of genocidal suffering that overshadows micro-moments of lived experience.

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Section: The Embodiment Of Memento Morimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Embodiment Of Memento Morimentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past

Kidron

2012

Journal of Material Culture

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“…(p. 2) Thus, the scarred body of the athlete and the cancer survivor are foregrounded. Talking of the ways in which physical scars are put to work in autobiographies and biographies, Burnett and Holmes (2001) use a heritage site metaphor to explore the promotional opportunities scar accounts provide for the self. Heritage, to them, is understood as a process by which discourses and representations must compete and struggle for favor in relation to a past that is commodified and packaged with a view to constructing a good, interesting, or worthwhile story.…”

Section: Announcing the Body-selfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bodies, Narratives, Selves, and Autobiography

Sparkes

2004

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

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This article focuses on Lance Armstrong’s autobiography titled It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. From a perspective informed by autobiographical studies and the sociology of the body and illness, insights are provided into a variety of bodies, selves, and narratives that circulate within the text. The case is made that early in his sporting career, Armstrong develops a disciplined and dominating body that has an elective affinity for the cyborg narrative. On being diagnosed with cancer, these ideal body types lead him toward a restitution narrative. The illness experience, however, provides an opportunity for a communicative body to emerge that links him to a quest narrative. On returning to elite sport, former body-self relationships are restored and foregrounded. Issues are raised regarding the cultural shaping of Armstrong’s autobiography, and its form and content are problematized.

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“…The ‗good' student in the classroom has the body that walks properly, sits up straight, does not fidget, ties its shoelaces and tucks in its shirt; the older the child, the higher the expectation to have a ‗good' classroom body. In concurrence with feminist-disability critiques of idealized bodies, we see process of judging the interior of the body by its exterior beginning in school, and children are aware of this [56][57][58]. Discourses of ‗good' bodies work alongside ableist discourses of ‗normal' and ‗healthy' bodies, and, through these discourses, children learn the cultural importance of bodywork.…”

Section: The Ideal Body Is Always Young… But the Young Body Is Not Almentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth for Sale: Using Critical Disability Perspectives to Examine the Embodiment of ‘Youth’

Slater

2012

Societies

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‗Youth' is more complicated than an age-bound period of life; although implicitly paired with developmentalism, youth is surrounded by contradictory discourses. In other work [1], I have asserted that young people are demonized as risky and rebellious, whilst simultaneously criticized for being lazy and apathetic; two intertwining, yet conflicting discourses meaning that young people's here-and-now experiences take a backseat to a focus on reaching idealized, neoliberal adulthood [2]. Critical examination of adulthood ideals, however, shows us that ‗youthfulness' is itself presented as a goal of adulthood [3][4][5], as there is a desire, as adults, to remain forever young [6]. As Blatterer puts it, the ideal is to be -adult and youthful but not adolescent‖ ([3], p. 74). This paper attempts to untangle some of the youth/adult confusion by asking how the aspiration/expectation of a youthful body plays out in the embodied lives of young dis/abled people. To do this, I use a feminist-disability lens to consider youth in an abstracted form, not as a life-stage, but as the end goal of an aesthetic project of the self that we are all (to differing degrees) encouraged to set out upon.

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Bodies, Battlefields and Biographies: Scars and the Construction of the Body as Heritage

Cited by 8 publications

References 6 publications

Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past

Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past

Bodies, Narratives, Selves, and Autobiography

Youth for Sale: Using Critical Disability Perspectives to Examine the Embodiment of ‘Youth’

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