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Women of color and traumatic stress in "domestic captivity": Gender and race as disempowering statuses
... In such a construction, women of color are subject to degradation and dehumanization, victims of "double jeopardy" because of their ethnic/racial and gender statuses (Root, 1996, p. 371). Dominant American culture often subjects women of Asian ancestry to gender and racial myths, portraying them as subservient and docile women, who work without complaint in the service of men (Kawahara & Fu, 2007;Root, 1996) or as sensuous and exotic beings with a subdued sexual prowess (Kawahara & Fu, 2007;Ordañez, 1997). Similarly, women of Filipino descent are often described as "submissive, mail-order brides, prostitutes, and maids or domestic workers" (Tintiangco-Cubales, 2005, p. 143). ...
... Similarly, women of Filipino descent are often described as "submissive, mail-order brides, prostitutes, and maids or domestic workers" (Tintiangco-Cubales, 2005, p. 143). Such stereotypes create negative internalizations, impacting self-esteem and personal identity (Root, 1996). ...
... Furthermore, I believed that certain dimensions of CM would emerge as significant predictors. I hypothesized that cultural and ethnic inferiority and cultural shame and embarrassment would positively predict experiences of racism and sexism as (a) the positive relationship between racism and CMCM has been shown (David & Okazaki, 2006b), and (b) it has been theorized that conscious experiences of racist and sexist oppression relates to negative internalizations (i.e., Root, 1996). It seems theoretically plausible to directly associate the experiences that one has with racist and sexist discrimination with higher internalizations of inferiority, shame, and embarrassment. ...
Oppressive ideologies instilled through Spanish and United States colonization of the Philippines have influenced Filipino American values. In particular, the combination of patriarchic and racist ideologies stemming from colonization has contributed to Filipina Americans' internalization of such oppression despite the years separating them from colonization. This study examined the relationship between colonized thinking and Filipina Americans' experiences of sexist and racist oppression. Separate multiple regression models were developed to examine the relationship between the manifestations of colonial mentality with experiences of sexist discrimination (N = 137) and with racist discrimination (N = 124). Both regression models were found to be significant with 1 factor, internalized cultural and ethnic inferiority, as a unique contributor. Colonial debt also served as an important predictor in the variability of experiences of sexist discrimination. (PsycINFO Database Record
... Yet, much earlier, Black and postcolonial analyses had exposed the social and political rather than purely clinical basis of trauma, documenting the long-term and intergenerational effects of collective experiences of racism, colonization and genocide (e.g. Eyerman, 2001;Fanon, 1953;hooks, 1989;Root, 1996). ...
... Accordingly, survivors' outlook on the world as rife with ongoing danger is understood as rational not distorted, and so rather than look to psychiatry for answers, theorists suggested that we 'rigorously demedicalize' (Burstow, 2003(Burstow, : 1301. In particular, it is the commonness of experiences of gender-based, racist and homophobic violence that challenges assumptions of cohesion or security before or after trauma (Root, 1996). What Brown (1995: 107), drawing on Root's earlier work, calls 'the traumatogenic effects of oppression' for women and nonheteronormative people arises because the perpetrator is often close beside us, rather than a strange other launching an assault from outside (Herman, 1997): 'he is simply exposing a disease which is already latent . . . ...
Geographical interest is growing in psychological trauma from political, social, urban and ecological violences. This paper reviews temporal and spatial aspects of trauma, emphasizing Black, postcolonial, indigenous, feminist and queer analyses. These inform an idea of geotrauma, the ongoing clasping of collective traumas and place. After outlining the multiple temporalities of geotrauma, the paper identifies overlapping placings of trauma by geographers and others: memorial places, retraumatizing places, layered places, hardwired places, mobile places, places of repossession and healing places. Repositioning survivors as experts in narrating and understanding trauma enables recognition of resistance and the mobilization of place in addressing trauma.
... Consistent with this notion, Kearl (2014) found that 24% of the 982 women sampled ceased going to the public place where they were harassed. Furthermore, Root (1996) argues in her insidious trauma framework that due to the chronic nature of these experiences, oppressed individuals are more likely to possess the belief that some fixed aspect of their identity justifies their discrimination. To that end, women may develop negative beliefs about the self in response to stranger harassment, such as taking responsibility for the harassment (e.g., "It was my fault that it happened") or believing they are a bad person (e.g., "I am damaged"), in turn leading to negative emotions such as guilt and shame (Ehlers and Clark 2000). ...
... Because sexual victimization may be experienced as threatening to women's gender self-concept (Weiss 2010), women's conformity to certain feminine gender norms may influence the extent to which they perceive stranger harassment as distressing, in turn compounding the negative effects of stranger harassment on PTSD symptoms. These experiences of harassment may lead women who espouse these feminine norms to conclude that their gender identity justifies their lack of sense of security and safety (Root 1996). To that end, conformity to the feminine gender norms of sweet and nice and sexual fidelity may qualify (a) the direct links between stranger harassment and PTSD and (b) the indirect links between stranger harassment and PTSD via self-blame, shame, and fear of rape. ...
Stranger harassment is a prevalent experience for many women but is often trivialized as a social problem (Kearl 2014; Vera-Gray 2016). As a result, there is a lack of knowledge related to understanding women’s lived experiences of stranger harassment. Our study attends to this gap in the literature by examining the relation between experiences of stranger/street harassment and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity among 367 young adult U.S. women. We also examined novel explanatory (i.e., self-blame, shame, and fear of rape), risk (adherence to traditional feminine norms of sweet and nice and sexual fidelity), and resiliency (feminist identification) factors in predicting PTSD symptom severity via a moderated mediation model. We found that stranger harassment was both directly and indirectly related to PTSD symptom severity via more self-blame, greater shame, and more fear of rape along three dimensions—taking rape precautions, fear of men, and safety concerns. In addition, we found a significant conditional indirect effect, in which the indirect effect of stranger harassment on PTSD symptom severity via shame was stronger among women with higher levels of sexual fidelity. Furthermore, the conditional indirect effect of stranger harassment on PTSD symptom severity via self-blame was contingent on feminist identification such that these relations were stronger among women with lower levels of feminist identification. Our results underscore the potential negative impact of stranger harassment experiences on women’s mental health and the importance of targeting self-blame, shame, fear, gender-related norms, and feminist attitudes in intervention strategies.
... Sources of, and responses to, trauma often contain subtle cultural or intersectional differences. Root (1992Root ( , 1996 describes insidious trauma as the devaluation of an individual resulting from an intrinsic identity that differs from the dominant culture (Root, 1996). These forms of trauma must also be considered in traumainformed approaches. ...
... Sources of, and responses to, trauma often contain subtle cultural or intersectional differences. Root (1992Root ( , 1996 describes insidious trauma as the devaluation of an individual resulting from an intrinsic identity that differs from the dominant culture (Root, 1996). These forms of trauma must also be considered in traumainformed approaches. ...
Since the early 1990s, an abundance of research and scholarship has been devoted toward developing “what works” in correctional assessment and rehabilitative treatment, including gender-responsive strategies for women. However, far less is known regarding the effects of such correctional strategies on women with intersectional identities (e.g., racially diverse, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender). Such considerations are important as marginalized women are disproportionately over-represented within the United States correctional population. This article seeks to advance correctional strategies for women through the application of an intersectional lens. First, a brief overview of gender-responsive correctional strategies and current limitations are provided. Next, intersectionality and intersectional criminology are summarized. Finally, recommendations for an intersectionally-responsive approach are presented to help improve correctional supervision and treatment for women at the margins.
... This overwhelming history of trauma is associated with high rates of substance abuse, depression, and suicide (Ross, 2005;. Colonization and racism result in extensive and insidious trauma that wears away its victims' mental and physical health (Root, 1996;Kelm, 1998). ...
... American Indian children and adolescents who experience sexual trauma and multiple traumatic experiences are at high risk for developing PTSD (Gnanadesikan, Novins, & Beals, 2005). The insidious trauma of racism is another cause of these women's emotional distress and disorders (Root, 1996). The severity of the violence in trafficking for prostitution and the length of time the woman was in prostitution are also strongly related to incidence of PTSD (Hossain, Zimmerman, Abas, Light, and Watts, 2010). ...
... בנוסף , תזכורת משמשת מינית להטרדה נשים של חשיפתן לאונס פגיעות להיותן (Pain, 1993) , מאונס פחד לתגובת לתרום כדי בכך ויש ) Fitzgerald, 1990 .( ( חרדה (Roberts, 2000) , בשינה הפרעות , מהחיים נמוכה רצון שביעות נמוכה ואופטימיות (Mohr, 2001;McFarlane & Papay, 1992) . (Root, 1996;Roberts, 2000;Vogel & Marshall, 2001) . ...
... This includes collective trauma from historical violences of colonialism and capitalism and their contemporary traces (Brave Heart, 2000;Fanon, 1963), as well as (often overlapping) traumas from sexual and domestic abuse, racism, gender-and hetero-normativity (e.g. Brown, 1995;DeGruy, 2005;Root, 1996). These forms of chronic trauma differ from the single-event model that western trauma theories have favoured, requiring alternative epistemological and conceptual framings (hooks, 2003;Jones, 2019;Pain, 2020). ...
Every society deploys narratives concerning the phenomenon of domestic abuse which serve to downplay and normalise it. Drawing on qualitative research with survivors in Malaysia, and working from a feminist postcolonial framework, this paper explores how the notion of demonic possession is used by survivors and perpetrators as a metaphor for domestic abuse, and a narrative to make sense of and excuse it. The idea of demonic possession has utility because of its close fit both with perpetrators’ behaviour and the symptoms experienced by survivors with trauma. The research focuses on the intimate dynamics of abuse, including coercive control and intimate captivity, and the pivotal role of possession and trauma in the successful exertion of control and in extending the damaging effects of abuse. We argue that demonic possession reflects another way in which globally endemic practices of domestic abuse are justified and explained; it provides a means for perpetrators to evade responsibility for abuse, and a way in which the pernicious effects of both abuse and trauma on survivors, their families, and wider society are sometimes dismissed. The paper highlights the significance of culturally‐sensitive approaches to domestic violence and trauma as a counterpoint to western‐centric understandings. It also stresses the need for locally generated approaches to awareness raising and support services in Malaysia and elsewhere.
... Hence, the narratives indicate that acid attack intends to degrade and dominate women and serves as threatening examples for other women who might wish to challenge male authority. According to Root (1996), men-directed violence against women restricts the freedom of women to move around safely. Often demands are placed on women to behave in ways thought typical of a woman. ...
Various researches have been carried out in the past to understand psychological trauma that suggest that gender differences can be observed in the type, prevalence, and impact of trauma. Ample evidence exists that indicates that women are often the target of different kinds of gender-based violence, causing them to experience physical and psychological trauma. However, the trauma associated with one such gender-based crime, acid attack, has been less explored and lacks due representation in media and literature. Moreover, trauma has mostly been studied from a clinical perspective. Hence the present research was conducted on 30 female acid attack victims to explore their experience of the trauma of acid attack from a social constructivist approach. Narratives focusing on their victimization experience and trauma were collected and analyzed with the help of a six-step thematic content analysis approach. Based on the patterns identified in the research, six significant sources of trauma associated with acid attack, with interrelated but mutually exclusive subthemes, were identified. These sources include violence, motive, social statement, betrayal, violation of civil rights, and embodiment. The present study increases the visibility of acid victims in scientific research and contributes to the understanding of psychologists, counselors, and other mental health professionals that might work with them.
... This is because living in vulnerable communities, with high crime and high poverty, places women at increased risk for sexual violence. For women of color, reporting is impacted by the historical race relations in the country, fear of negative stereotypes, abuse of power by authorities, and fear of not being believed (Root 1996). More reasons for not reporting include: being blamed by others, family knowing, others knowing, and having their name made public (Wolitzy-Taylor et al. 2011). ...
... Historical trauma as experienced by AI/AN peoples--both in the form of prostitution and more generally as colonization--has caused PTSD and other mental disorders such as depression (Cole, 2006). The insidious trauma of racism as documented in these interviews is another cause of emotional distress and disorders (Root, 1996). The high prevalence of PTSD in the women we interviewed is consistent with past research that found that AI/AN children and adolescents who experience sexual trauma and multiple traumas are likely to be at high risk for developing PTSD (Gnanadesikan, Novins, & Beals, 2005). ...
We examined social and physical violence experienced by American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) women in prostitution and their impacts on the mental and physical health of 105 women (81% Anishinaabe, mean age = 35 years) recruited through service agencies in three Minnesota cities. In childhood, abuse, foster care, arrests, and prostitution were typical. Homelessness, rape, assault, racism, and pimping were common. The women's most prevalent physical symptoms included muscle pain, impaired memory or concentration, and headaches. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociation were common, with more severe psychological symptoms associated with worse health. Most of the women wanted to leave prostitution and they most often identified counseling and peer support as necessary to accomplish this. Most saw colonization and prostitution of AI/AN women as connected.
... The tendency in Kyrgyzstan to blame mothers for removing a child from the father and breaking up the marriage is widespread internationally. Research has shown that in many collectivist societies, women believe that they are responsible for maintaining family unity and harmony (Roland, 1996), and the notion of a "strong woman" and "good mother" is rooted in the act of a woman sacrificing herself (Ho, 1990;Root, 1996). Studies have found that the majority of women in such cultures view domestic violence as a private issue and are advised by their parents to carefully hide conflict and protect the husband's honor from people outside the family (Hayati, Eriksson, Hakimi, Hogberg, & Emmelin, 2013;Strauss, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). ...
This article develops a grounded theory of help-seeking to investigate the social and cultural determinants of help-seeking among Kyrgyz women who have experienced domestic violence. Results indicate that cultural traditions and social norms—most notably the social construction of marriage, the shame associated with divorce, and the status of daughters-in-law in Kyrgyz society—are used to justify domestic violence and prevent victims from seeking help. The proposed theory and results suggest that scholars, policymakers, and front-line contacts must emphasize dispelling myths, misconceptions, and traditional beliefs about gender and marriage to break the abusive dynamics and provide professional help.
... Often theories address differences between individualistic cultures, which tend to value insight, and collectivist cultures, which tend to value social integration (Draguns, 1996;Hofstede, 1991). Cultural norms may impact not only amount but also benefit of disclosure, with ethnic minorities more likely to receive negative reactions to trauma disclosure (Root, 1996;Ullman & Filipas, 2001). In addition, acculturation may impact disclosure with those more connected to the dominant culture disclosing more similar to the majority culture (e.g., Garcia, Hurwitz, & Kraus, 2005;Rennison, 2007). ...
To explore how factors such as major depressive disorder (MDD) and trauma history, including the presence of childhood abuse, influence diverse clinical outcomes such as severity and functioning in a sample with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In this study, 200 men and women seeking treatment for chronic PTSD in a clinical trial were assessed for trauma history and MDD and compared on symptom severity, psychosocial functioning, dissociation, treatment history, and extent of diagnostic co-occurrence.
Overall, childhood abuse did not consistently predict clinical severity. However, co-occurring MDD, and to a lesser extent a high level of trauma exposure, did predict greater severity, worse functioning, greater dissociation, more extensive treatment history, and additional co-occurring disorders.
These findings suggest that presence of co-occurring depression may be a more critical marker of severity and impairment than history of childhood abuse or repeated trauma exposure. Furthermore, they emphasize the importance of assessing MDD and its effect on treatment seeking and treatment response for those with PTSD.
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
... In a similar vein, although our sample was ethnically diverse (e.g., almost one third non-White participants), our sample size was insufficient to test the results of our study with respect to any specific ethnic group. This is important given evidence suggesting that the experience and appraisal of IPV may differ across ethnic groups (Root, 1996;Sorenson, 1996). It is therefore also important that future studies examine whether the effects of interpersonal style on IPV appraisal differ among women of different ethnicities. ...
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a common type of violence that is associated with a number of psychological problems among women who experience it. Recent research suggests that interpersonal style may influence the degree to which women exhibit psychological problems following IPV exposure. One possible mechanism through which interpersonal style may exert its effects is by influencing appraisals of the violence they experience, although this has not yet been tested empirically. In this study, we examined the effects of dimensions of interpersonal style (dominance and warmth) on IPV appraisals in a sample of young adult women (N = 219) who reported experiencing physical and/or sexual violence from their romantic partner in the past year using a Bayesian approach to multiple linear regression. Our results indicated that both dominance and warmth were associated with less negative (i.e., less betrayed, self-blaming, fearful, alienated, angry, and shameful) appraisals of IPV, exhibiting small- to medium-sized effects when controlling for severity of violence. However, this effect was more prominent for dominance than for warmth. These findings shed light on the role of interpersonal style in the response to IPV and indicate directions for future research.
© The Author(s) 2015.
... The RTS model was subsumed under the diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), introduced in the 3rd edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III; American Psychiatric Association, 1980), following pressure from feminist organizations and Vietnam veterans to have the diagnosis officially recognized (Jones, Fear, & Wessely, 2007). It was the first diagnostic category to incorporate findings from the feminist literature on violence against women and offered validation for the psychological distress experienced by rape survivors (Root, 1996). ...
This article examines the experiences of nine rape survivors who participated in the Silent Protest, an annual protest march at Rhodes University that aims to highlight the sexual abuse of women, validate the harm done, and foster solidarity among survivors. Participants responded to a semi-structured interview focusing on the context of their rape and its impact, and their experiences of participation in the Protest. In the first phase of data analysis, synoptic case narratives were written. In the second, themes from participants' experience were identified using interpretative phenomenological analysis. In the third, the data were examined in light of questions around the extent to which participation contributed to healing. Participants reported experiences of validation and empowerment but the majority were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. In some cases, participation had exacerbated self-blame and avoidant coping. Recommendations are made about the provision of psychoeducation and counseling at such events.
© The Author(s) 2015.
In the broader field of trauma theory, trauma is often characterised as an event that is physical, violent, and sporadic. However, feminist trauma theorists have argued that there are other forms of trauma inflicted by ideological systems such as patriarchy, resulting in less transparent versions of the traumatic. Fantasy literature, particularly children’s fantasy, has a potential to construct new visions of society that transcend these patriarchal systems for their young female heroines, and to reveal the functions of patriarchal trauma. By applying feminist trauma theory to children’s fantasy literature, this article exposes the subtler and more nuanced ways in which trauma operates, extending beyond understandings of physical and overt violence. The article offers a close reading of Jessica Townsend’s Nevermoor books (2017-2020)—a seminal Australian series that has risen to acclaim for its inclusivity, unconventional representations of gender, and creative world-building since its debut. I argue that Townsend repurposes the tropes of the fantasy genre in the Nevermoor series to hold a mirror to the harmful effects of patriarchy and the gendered violence it perpetuates. As a result, it rejects the common characterisation of trauma as overtly physical, violent, and sporadic. Rather, the series suggests that the representation of trauma in children’s literature, especially middle-grade fiction, is also gendered, and the direct consequence of patriarchy.
A large body of research has demonstrated that experiencing abuse by an intimate partner is associated with a wide range of mental health consequences. Some are the direct results of violence, others are related to the traumatic psychophysiological effects of ongoing abuse. Less well researched, however, are the ways that people who abuse their partners engage in coercive tactics related to their partner’s mental health or substance use as part of a broader pattern of abuse and control – tactics known as mental health and substance use coercion. For survivors of ongoing Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), responding to trauma raises another set of concerns, particularly when the trauma is unremitting, and symptoms reflect a response to ongoing danger and coercive control. At the same time, many survivors experience multiple types of trauma over the course of their lives, including structural violence and marginalization. While more research is needed on IPV-specific treatment interventions, evidence indicates that interventions that are adapted to meet the specific needs of survivors of IPV are most effective. This chapter provides an overview of the impact of IPV on survivors’ mental health and a framework for treatment in the context of IPV, including IPV-specific treatment strategies and suggestions for incorporating an IPV- and trauma-informed approach.
The discipline of psychology has historically been based upon Western, Eurocentric perspectives on human behavior. Critical theory has played a central role in pushing psychology out from its insularity and perceived objectivity. This chapter examines the role of critical pedagogist Paolo Freire and liberation psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró in the shaping of a multicultural perspective within psychology that has revolutionized the way that psychologists understand and treat mental health conditions. Freire and Martín-Baró gave voice to the marginalized and disenfranchised and pushed psychologists to engage in their own conscientization of their history and complicitness in perpetuating oppression. Implications of their work are examined in light of their contributions to theoretical underpinnings, clinical diagnosis, and treatment approaches.
This article explores the relationship between hermeneutical injustice in religious settings and religious trauma (RT) and spiritual violence (SV). In it I characterize a form of hermeneutical injustice (HI) that arises when experiences are obscured from collective understanding by normatively laden concepts, and I argue that this form of HI often plays a central role in cases of religious trauma and spiritual violence, even those involving children. In section I, I introduce the reader to the phenomena of religious trauma and spiritual violence. In section II, I describe the role normatively laden concepts play in shaping our social experience. I then elucidate how they can contribute to HI. In section III, I provide a brief overview of the history of some significant identity prejudices in the history of Christianity and argue that children can properly be understood as victims of HI within some religious communities. I then return in section IV to the examples of religious trauma and spiritual violence offered throughout the article and demonstrate that HI plays an important causal role in each of them. HIs sometimes constitute spiritual and religious harms; at other times they create an epistemic environment conducive to spiritual abuse.
The discipline of psychology has historically been based upon Western, Eurocentric perspectives on human behavior. Critical theory has played a central role in pushing psychology out from its insularity and perceived objectivity. This chapter examines the role of critical pedagogist Paolo Freire and liberation psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró in the shaping of a multicultural perspective within psychology that has revolutionized the way that psychologists understand and treat mental health conditions. Freire and Martín-Baró gave voice to the marginalized and disenfranchised and pushed psychologists to engage in their own conscientization of their history and complicitness in perpetuating oppression. Implications of their work are examined in light of their contributions to theoretical underpinnings, clinical diagnosis, and treatment approaches.
In order to test the limits and possibilities of trauma theory's applicability to films by African directors, and also to examine how trauma, woundedness, and precarity are projected in film, this chapter contemplates trauma, woundedness, and precarity in Mahamat‐Saleh Haroun's 2013 film Grigris. It starts with the premise that when blows to the body and the psyche are insidious, and when security and health must be purchased at an overwhelming price, trauma is not a reliving of a prior, shattering event as if it is occurring in the present, but a continuous puncture, an entrapment in a genre marked by the anticipation of future blows. Possibilities for escape, in this film, are imagined through poetic, somatic interludes. Traumatic looping is encoded in the eponymous Grigris's body, and then transformed through dance.
This chapter explores how African sex workers’ rights activists are confronting political opponents who try to silence them. It highlights the nature, tactics, and resulting harms of anti-prostitution advocacy in Africa, including rehabilitation programs that seek to “save” sex workers but only perpetuate shame and stigma concerning sex work and divert resources from empowerment programs that could actually address the abuses sex workers face; fundamentalist religious leaders who target sex work as a threat to the moral fabric of African societies; and African government officials who wield “political whorephobia,” a strategy that seeks to publicly shame sex workers, denounce sex work advocacy, and crack down on what’s perceived as sexual and gender nonconformity. This chapter also showcases, particularly through a case study of a high-profile political attack against sex worker activists in northern Uganda’s Gulu district, how advocates bravely confront this opposition and hold firm to just assertions that sex workers’ rights are, indeed, human rights.
It is not clear that any of the sex workers interviewed came from the less vulnerable sectors (i.e. independent indoor workers, or brothel workers in countries where they have labour, health and safety rights). The large majority clearly did not. Some of them were selected from agencies that cater to people wishing to leave prostitution, which is a bit like selecting people at a jobs fair to find out if they’re looking for work…. In short, this study does not tell us how sex workers feel about their work. At most, it may tell us how sex workers in particularly vulnerable sectors feel about their work. That 89 percent figure simply cannot be generalised to sex workers as a whole. Wendy Lyons, “What is a ‘representative’ sex worker?” Feminist Ire, November 13, 2011, http://feministire.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/what-is-a-representative-sex-worker/, accessed May 13, 2014.
In this study, we examined the relations between multiple forms of oppressive experiences (i.e., racism, sexism, and sexual objectification) and trauma symptoms among Women of Color (WOC). In addition, self-esteem was explored as a partial mediating variable in these links, and ethnic identity strength was proposed to buffer the negative relationship between multiple forms of oppression and self-esteem, and the positive relationship between oppressive experiences and trauma symptoms. Results suggested that self-esteem partially mediated the positive relationship between racist experiences and trauma symptoms, such that racism was related to lower self-esteem, which was then related to more trauma symptoms. Sexism and sexual objectification were directly linked with trauma symptoms. Moreover, average and high levels of ethnic identity strength buffered the positive link between racism and trauma symptoms. Consistent with an additive intersectionality framework, results demonstrate the importance of attending to multiple forms of oppression as they relate to trauma symptoms among WOC. (PsycINFO Database Record
Healing begins when there is no more silence about the atrocities done to women—when that silence is filled with the sounds of human connection and the recognition of human dignity across the abyss of suffering and loss.
William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike.
William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike.
William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike.
William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike.
It is increasingly the case that students in my Southern literature classes at Emory don’t always know who is “black” and who is “white” in William Faulkner’s work. I recall, in particular, a conversation about “A Rose for Emily” (1930), in which it became clear to me that the student – an African American student – thought the story was about an upper-class, town-bred, somewhat repressed African American woman. It was not only her relationship with her male house servant that persuaded him that she too was African American, but the family relationships, the presence of the powerful patriarch determined to protect his daughter’s status, and especially the predicament of an upper-class African American woman in the South, meaning the isolation, the repression, and her susceptibility to the charms of the working man (Homer Barron was also envisioned as black) with his loud-talking ways. Maybe this student was influenced by Toni Morrison’s portrait of the Dead sisters in Song of Solomon (1977), but truthfully he could have encountered this depiction of upper-class African American women from any number of African American texts and, as a student in a major Southern university in the early 21st century, he was quite familiar with African American literature as a category, certainly more familiar with African American literature than with “Southern” writing or William Faulkner. Anyway he was surprised to learn that most people have read Emily Grierson as “white.” And as we (a white, working class, Southern woman born in the 1950s and a young upper middle class black man born in the late 1980s, not himself Southern but with Southern antecedents) sat looking at each other, I was most aware not of the disconnect of age or gender or background or race, not so much of a moment of recognition, but that this moment of recognition, if that is what it was, was surprising for him.
William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike.
William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike.
In the following senses, William Faulkner was like a postcolonial writer. He was born into a region that was underdeveloped economically, delimited in its political agency, and sharply divided socially among its various communities and classes. Its culture, art, and literature underwent scrutiny from outsiders who controlled and distributed the nation’s aesthetic production. While the issues affecting the US South’s various communities were diverse, all were pervaded by an acute awareness of dependency on a more powerful and prosperous neighbor that had no compunction about controlling local events for its own advantage. Culture could not escape this sense of dependency. If Faulkner felt a deep – albeit ambivalent and complicated – affinity for his native region, he was also one of its most ambitious artists when it came to importing from the North and Europe innovative strategies as a writer and artist. Over the course of his career, he lived – with striking complexity and innovation – the contradiction of embracing to the point of transcending northern culture’s literary avant-gardism, even while he blatantly deviated from it by taking seriously Southern socio-historical realities as the subject of his fiction. The paradox that Faulkner confronted was already in the process of becoming a global pattern for writers, artists, and thinkers of the postcolonial world when Faulkner was born. Thus, when his fame rode the wave of both his Nobel Prize and American post-World War II global hegemony to a new generation of writers from places where culture was partially shaped by European colonialism, he was almost immediately recognized by many of them as a fellow traveler, even as many in the United States continued to regard him as something of an eccentric with obscurantist aesthetics and suspicious politics.
William Faulkner is rightly remembered as a writer of small town and rural life in Mississippi. However, while he remained a permanent resident of Oxford and Lafayette County, he also spent significant amounts of time in cities in the United States and beyond. These exerted various levels of influence on his art, and he used them as settings in multiple texts. The two cities most often associated with him are New Orleans and Paris, but several urban centers figured largely in his life and shaped his aesthetic principles. Though often overlooked, cosmopolitan culture is an essential part of Faulkner’s oeuvre, making it important for readers to be aware of his relationship with key cities and the ways he depicts them. The earliest and most enduringly prominent urban area in Faulkner's life was the nearby city of Memphis. As a north Mississippian he was acquainted with the city from an early age, and it would be the one against which others would be measured when he first began to make forays away from home into the larger world. Most of Faulkner's earliest trips to Memphis occurred during childhood whenever his father's drinking grew so self-destructive it required his being taken to the Keeley Institute just outside the city limits for treatment. During these times Faulkner and his brothers would ride the streetcar into town for the thrill of seeing the big city. By the time he was a young man, his engagement with the city was less savory, as he and his friend Phil Stone would go to the gambling dens and brothels on Beale, Gayoso, and Mulberry Streets. The city was renowned for its vice, and Faulkner watched and learned of its culture of prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging. These criminal modes of big income brought with them a mob presence, and the 1920s saw such characters as "One thumb" John Revinsky, who murdered the prominent prostitute Mae Goodwin, and a gangster named "Popeye" Pumphrey.
The world into which Faulkner was born in the 1890s experienced the increasing codification and standardization of ‘normal’ sexual identities. As Michel Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality first showed, the late nineteenth century oversaw the emergence of a binary assignment of sexual preferences, behavior, and acts, to a normative system of identities defined by the object of sexual desire (as opposed to one recognizing that a spectrum of sexual activities might be practiced by anyone). ‘Appropriate’ heterosexual gender identities for men and women became normalized in medical and psychological discourse, as well as in legal and political ideology: women were understood to desire men naturally, men to desire women. Those who deviated from such norms were increasingly classified as possessing distinct (and deviant) identities. Individuals who desired or practiced sexual relations with others of the same gender were understood to be homosexuals. At this historical moment of increasing agitation by women for political, economic, and social equality with men, normative gender roles for the sexes helped to defend male privilege in masculinist societies. Correspondingly, the pathologization of same-sex behavior as an aberrant identity also contributed to the stabilization of a sex-gender system favoring those already holding power. Each identity required a binary opposite to make its distinctness intelligible, resulting in polarities of male and female genders, heterosexual and homosexual selves.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (RN 73). These lines from Requiem for a Nun (1951) have come to emblematize a way of thinking about the US South as a gothic space saturated in loss and haunted by history. Bound to compulsively repeat the past, the region, so this narrative goes, exists askew from the progressive temporality of the nation-at-large, with its distinctiveness resting on a melancholic attachment to past trauma. While recent work has historicized such representation within the context of a national ideology wherein Southern “backwardness” not only coexisted with but was a necessary component of the United States’ emerging identity as a liberal democracy, the region, in many ways, is still positioned problematically in the popular cultural imagination as a gothic space filled with loss that will “never [be] dead.” As Teresa Goddu, Joan Dayan, and Harry Levin have noted, the gothic, as an elastic concept, plays a special role in representing the historically oppositional identity of “the benighted South,” to use George Tindall’s term, framing it as a dark other, a spatial repository for cultural contradictions that must be disavowed to enable a national mythology of innocence. Early responses to Faulkner's work, such as those by Henry Seidel Canby and Henry Nash Smith, called attention to his gothic obsession with decay and insanity and drew on its logic as "a way to understand southern culture and to distance it," as Leigh Anne Duck notes, "both spatially and temporally from national culture" (Nation's Region 147). As she argues, Depression-era critics, who viewed Faulkner's obsession with the regional past as a gothic anachronism, preferred instead a progressive approach to the nation's problems, while mid-century readers viewed his retrospection as a virtue, positioning it against a homogenizing mass culture.
Teaching The Great Gatsby in Tehran during the Islamic revolution in 1979, Azar Nafisi admonished her students as she left her classroom for a demonstration: A novel is not an allegory…It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. Nafisi does not list a novel by William Faulkner among the books she taught to her students in Tehran. Trained in modern fiction in the United States, she must have encountered several. Perhaps Faulkner, like James Joyce and other high modernists, proved only marginally useful in a time of revolution. The godlike distance, “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails,” seems irrelevant when, like some of Nafisi’s students, you are carried off by the Ayatollah’s police. Faulkner's remarks about writing and reading seem to reach us from the same distance. His memory of ecstatic breakthrough in The Sound and the Fury, "Now I can write. Now I can just write" (ESPL 293) was countered by a valediction to reading thirteen years later (1933 and 1946) in a second unused introduction to the novel: "With The Sound and the Fury I learned to read and to quit reading, since I have read nothing since" (ESPL 297). Among the many things The Sound and the Fury means, it seems to have meant, to Faulkner, the difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer. Reading Faulkner-the-writer might induce the kind of dis-empathic distance we hear in Stephen Dedalus of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a would-be writer who imagines an ideal of authorial impersonality.
The publication in 1946 of The Portable Faulkner by Viking Press, edited by Malcolm Cowley, is commonly understood to have transformed Faulkner’s career: it supposedly saved Faulkner from obscurity by making evident the scope of his grand plan. Within a few years Faulkner’s reputation was such that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, solidifying his place in the public’s consciousness and the canon of modern literature. Cowley’s promotion of Faulkner is a cornerstone in the edifice of Faulkner’s late career, so much so that another seminal event goes unheralded despite the fact that it is perhaps as important. This was the March 1947 publication by Penguin Books America of Sanctuary, Faulkner’s first commercial paperback. Faulkner’s career in paperbacks provided him with income between his stints in Hollywood, and they garnered him an entirely new audience since paperbacks went places hardcovers couldn’t: drugstores, newsstands, and neighborhoods with a high African American and immigrant demographic. Yet this aspect of Faulkner’s publishing career has gone largely unnoticed. By 1948, Penguin America broke from its British parent company to become the New American Library (NAL), Faulkner's paperback publisher under the imprint of Signet Books. The reason for this break had much to do with Faulkner, or at least the sensational, risqué, and immoral fiction that he was often identified with before Cowley's volume – "pseudo-Faulkner," as Leslie Fiedler called it in 1950, "derived mostly from the potboiling Sanctuary." Books like Sanctuary, Pylon, and The Wild Palms had made Faulkner infamous for pushing the boundaries of both style and morals; what was incest or bestiality in Absalom, Absalom! or The Hamlet but just another color in Faulkner's familiar gothic palette? The last title reprinted as a Penguin paperback was Faulkner's The Wild Palms, a novella dealing with adultery and a botched abortion.
The publication of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) closely follows the end of the American occupation of Haiti and of the Dominican Republic (respectively 1915–34 and 1916–24). In the novel, the planter and patriarch Thomas Sutpen abruptly appears in Jefferson, Mississippi in 1833 flanked by a French architect from Martinique and a horde of enslaved Africans supposedly acquired in Haiti in the 1820s. These examples seem to demonstrate that the West Indian historical and political context directly shaped the fictional representation of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. However, readers inevitably realize that the function of the Caribbean in Faulkner’s work escapes mere contextual and political influence, and betrays basic rules of historicity.Indeed, Sutpen could not have acquired slaves in a country that proclaimed radical emancipation and independence following the Haitian Revolution in 1804. This historical incongruity should not be attributed to Faulkner’s error, however, but rather to the very function that the Caribbean plays in his work, which, through the ambiguity of the region’s representation, opens up a space of dialogue with New World history. Faulkner’s Caribbean is more complexly poetic and structural than simply contextual. In Absalom, Absalom!, for instance, there are not one but many Caribbeans: the land of riches of young Sutpen’s fantasy; the dark and fatal land associated with “Sutpen’s negroes”; the sophisticated Martinique of the French architect; the womblike synthetic Porto Rico/Haiti of Charles Bon; and the voluptuous city of New Orleans, its northernmost outpost. Further, I contend that Faulkner performs a Caribbean poetics akin to creolization, which, in turn, generates a full-fledged movement of Faulknerian writing in the Caribbean.
William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike.
In 1954, as he prepared a series of lectures on Southern US race relations to be delivered at the University of Virginia, historian C. Vann Woodward – raised in Arkansas, tenured at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – illustrated his argument through comparison with a society 8000 miles away. Citing a South African traveler to the US South in 1915, Woodward explained that, at that time, the two societies shared an absolute “‘separation of the races in all social matters’…the same separate schools, the same disfranchisement, and the same political and economic subordination of” black people. Woodward’s point, concerning his home region, was hopeful. While the South African government – dominated, as of 1948, by the Nationalist party – was systematically removing what rights that nation’s non-white residents had, the US Supreme Court had pronounced school segregation unconstitutional months before, and white Southerners’ open defiance of this verdict had not yet begun. At this moment, accordingly, Woodward could argue that “the two great regions might be traveling in opposite directions” (121). Though the US struggle over civil rights would soon become more intense and violent than he initially wanted to imagine, this transnational approach – incorporated into his bestselling The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) – aided the historian in depicting race itself as a dynamic concept, which varies across space and time. Such an awareness also shaped, albeit more ambivalently, the work of William Faulkner.
Nathanael West, in his great Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust (1939), famously described the motion picture capital as “a dream dump” F. Scott Fitzgerald similarly declared Hollywood “a dump – in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich; full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement” The troping of Hollywood thus – as both producer of and magnet for trash – has unfortunately also characterized scholarly attitudes to the screenwriting careers of West and Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, too, all of whom were among those authors who migrated to the west coast on the advent and development of sound film in the late 1920s through the early 1930s. Only in the last five years or so have scholars begun in earnest to situate Faulkner’s screenplays, so long figured as the detritus of his “real work,” within the Faulkner canon. His screenwriting career, sustained over four accumulative years between 1932 and 1955, was thought to have distracted him from his real work, or at best, merely subsidized it. That Faulkner received screen credit for only six of the approximately fifty properties he worked on and that less than a third of these are in circulation does little to aid scholarly attempts to salvage his screenwriting career. Tellingly, however, in a handful of letters from the 1930s in which he describes his work as “trash,” in every instance, it is the short stories and not the movie work to which he refers.
William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike.
Although the first translation of Faulkner’s work (“A Rose for Emily”) appeared in a high-quality literary magazine in Japan as early as 1932, his introduction to the general Japanese public had to wait until after World War II. Faulkner’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 drew considerable attention, and the translations of Sanctuary and The Wild Palms that same year started the continuous publication of his novels in Japan. Even though the number of Japanese who could read Faulkner in English was limited, the Civil Information and Education (CI & E) Section (later renamed as American Cultural Centers), established in major cities in early postwar Japan, offered Japanese intellectuals easy access to American literature and culture in English. In addition, Japanese readers' interest in Faulkner was much strengthened by the example of French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Albert Camus, who were quite popular in the 1950s in Japan as well as in the West. The existentialists' emphasis on the responsibility of the individual for his/her own way of living appealed to the Japanese, who had been taught to live and die for the nation and for the Emperor. Sartre's important essay review, "Time in Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury," translated into Japanese in 1948, had a strong influence on Japanese writers and readers. Even André Gide was called in to provide a complimentary blurb for The Wild Palms, published in 1950: "French writers absolutely praise the problem novel!! Gide says Faulkner is the most brilliant of the new constellation."
At the end of the outrageous Sutpen saga in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) Quentin says to Shreve, “You cant understand it. You would have to be born there” (289): the South as at once what “you can’t understand” unless you were “born there” and what Faulkner’s great work tirelessly seeks to convey – to convey, not to explain. “Born there” in 1897, Faulkner does not explain the South. Instead, he enlarges the stakes of his culture’s flash points of distress and makes them more lucidly unbearable. Take actual Oxford and Lafayette County away from Faulkner, and fictional Yoknapatawpha vanishes. How should we describe the tensile relationship obtaining between this writer and his place? It may be best to begin with a capsule history of the place. In every way it precedes the writer, spurs him – by its recalcitrance – to his most remarkable fictional moves. White settlers populated, and the US government founded, Lafayette County (in the northwest corner of Mississippi) in 1836. They did so by way of a sustained act of violence, the expulsion of native Chickasaw Indians to the "Indian Territory" (which would become Oklahoma). Over the next decades the Indians were replaced, inexorably, by imported slaves indispensable to a cotton economy that depleted the land (cotton was a non-rotating crop) as aggressively as it enriched the planters. The young state of Mississippi prospered; its university was founded in 1848, and the city of Oxford boasted 1000 citizens by 1860. The racial politics of city and county were indistinguishable. Blacks had to be seen as subhuman animals requiring white surveillance and care, inasmuch as they were required to do the subhuman labor in the fields that made the cotton economy work. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Mississippi's gleeful leap into secession occurred only a few weeks after South Carolina’s initial break.
When she was very young, Irene Kacandes knew things about her father that had no plot, no narrator, and no audience. To her childhood self these things resembled beings who resided with her family, like the ancestresses who'd thrown themselves off cliffs rather than be taken by the Turks, or the forefathers who'd fought the Trojans. For decades she thought of these cohabitants as Daddy's War Experiences and tried to stay away from them. When tragedy touched the adult life she had constructed for herself, however, she realized she had to confront her family's wartime past. Kacandes begins with what she did know: that her immigrant grandmother returned to Greece with four young children-and without her husband-only to get trapped there by the Nazi occupation. Though still a child himself, her father, John, helped feed his younger siblings by taking up any task possible, including smuggling arms to the Resistance. Kacandes painstakingly uncovers a complex truth her father chose not to tell, a truth inextricably entwined with the Holocaust, discovering, too, a common but little-told story about how the telling of such memories is negotiated between survivors and their children. Daddy's War brings new understanding to how trauma, like the revenge of Greek gods, can visit each generation and offers a model for breaking the cycle.
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