Keeping It in the Family: Domestic Violence and Spectral Testimony in Contemporary American Memoir
Summer Sutton
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 1
Abstract | This essay considers how the cultural valuation of transparency within life writing prohibits the state to recognize and address the harm against marginalized subjects. To do so, this essay turns to two recent memoirs of childhood stricken by domestic violence: Rachel Sontag’s House Rules (2008) and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy (2018). House Rules documents Sontag’s childhood growing up with an emotionally abusive father in an upper middle-class white, Jewish household, while Heavy documents Laymon’s childhood experiences of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse in a single parent, Black Southern household. The essay focuses, in particular, on how much of the violence Sontag and Laymon depict traces back to the nuclear family’s role as a state disciplinary technology that enforces white supremacist and patriarchal kinship structures. It shows disruption of the private-public binary by excavating how Sontag and Laymon’s accounts of violence in the home entangle the dysfunction at the heart of the U.S. nuclear family with the dysfunction at the heart of the U.S. nation-state. Ultimately, it proposes a life writing hermeneutic of spectrality that focuses on the structural realities that exceed the boundaries of the individual memoir.
Keywords | Life Writing, Domestic Violence, Trauma, Discipline, Legibility
Summer Sutton (ssutt004@ucr.edu) is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of California, Riverside, USA. Her research examines the role of discursive structures in both consolidating and troubling the hegemony of Western modernity. She brings together scholarship within life writing studies, critical legal studies, Black feminist thought, decolonial theory, and affect studies to consider the forms of writing that may facilitate the undoing of the state.