UC Santa Cruz

Daughter in Waves is a cross-genre creative critical dissertation exploring female narrative inheritance and mother-daughter subject formation in families organizing around domestic violence. The project asks how bodies inherit, inhabit, and shape the language, memories, and stories that cling to them. It weaves together family stories, speculative memoir, poems, fairy tales, collage drawings, interview transcripts, and academic essays on trauma, memory, and embodiment to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of mother and daughter figures as they slip across time and in and out of realism. The writing is multi-genre, experimenting with unconventional citational practices and making use of forms that seek to mirror or echo the pain, tenderness, and fragmentation of traumatic experience. I work from and write alongside critical theories of trauma, embodiment, girlhood, affect, everyday life, memory, and grief, as well as a host of contemporary memoirists, poets, and experimental writers whose work enacts a poetics of daughterhood. Daughter in Waves’ multivocal form builds surprising passageways between the experiential fragments, deferred emotions, and compromised memories that comprise familial trauma, all the while unsettling false dichotomies such as victim/perpetrator, truth/fiction, and past/present. Daughter in Waves enhances an important conversation around the uses of genre-expansive autotheoretical and fabulist writing to collapse the conceptual binary of research/imagination and reanimate embodied subjectivity in projects engaging histories of trauma.