UCLA Center for the Study of Women

How does a woman writer memorialize her own traumatic history, when it happens to be part of a larger history dominated by male narratives (as far as the Holocaust and slavery go), or when it is altogether silenced (as is the case for madness and psychiatric hospitalization)? My dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that tries to answer these questions by applying comparative memory studies to the gendering of traumain contemporary historical and (auto)fictional narratives. It is entitled “Reclaimed Experience: Gendering Trauma in Slavery, Holocaust, and Madness Narratives” and includes eight Francophone, Germanophone, and Anglophone women writers.