Inscribed in skin: The marked body as site of witness in contemporary women's literature

"Inscribed in Skin: The Marked Body as Site of Witness in Contemporary Women's Literature" examines scarred bodies within American literature of the past twenty-five years. Building on current theories of traumatic memory, "Inscribed in Skin" investigates texts that rely upon the body to convey intermediary stages of knowing, between the actual traumatic event and the creation of a coherent narrative. Recent women writers have repeatedly turned to the spectacle of the marked, disfigured body as both a site of memory and a site of resistance. They use tangible, visceral images to stake out what has not been fully or convincingly conveyed in words, both in protest against the abjection their protagonists suffer and in an effort to bring together communities of people with similarly horrific yet unacknowledged, perhaps unimaginable, experiences.; Beginning with Audre Lorde's political aim in The Cancer Journals to unite an army of one-breasted women, and moving into women's witnessing literature of AIDS from the 1980s with analysis of mediated and literal representations in the work of Susan Sontag and Jamaica Kincaid, "Inscribed in Skin" examines how failing bodies figure prominently as unsettling evidence of disease. In the 1990s embodied imagery takes on more metaphoric roles as a means of questioning the task of bearing witness in poetry by Marilyn Hacker and essays by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Contemporary African-American novelists, including Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams, have relied upon images of whipmarked bodies of bondswomen as a point of entry into the horrors of slavery, in pivotal scenes of family or community members confronting the scars. These representations of inscribed bodies from the historically removed experience of slavery allow for an empathetic return to the traumatic past.