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.