| Using the methodology of autobiography, this thesis explores my experience as a daughter of a radical U.S. leftist family and my own emergence as both a lesbian and a leftist activist. Drawing on my own body as a source of knowledge along with memory-work, oral narratives of family members, and government documents, I patch together my own story in the context of family stories of radicalism and isolation, silence and resistance. Contextualizing these narratives within a feminist tradition of autobiography and the growing field of trauma studies, I examine how my disconnections and reconnections with my own embodied experience and desire have integrally informed my relationship with collective visions of social change. |
