Silence: Hiding a Father's Abuse (original) (raw)
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vii from its various cultural representations, representations that are themselves driven by cultural anxieties and desires" (3). One such cultural anxiety and desire is precisely, as Roy describes, that of silencing, voicelessness, and access to a means of representation. However, as Roy argues, if there is no such thing as the "voiceless," but rather only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard, I wonder if there also ways in which silence can be used productively. Whether or not we view the work of literature as equivalent or necessarily connected to activist work, public policy, or even public opinion, examining our responses and relationships to sexual violence-particularly at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and institutional power (including that of literature)-seems more pressing than ever. While it is not my aim to suggest that literature is merely mimetic, and while the focus of this dissertation is the representation of sexual violence in literature (rather than as the object of sociological study), I am nevertheless compelled to consider the manner in which sexual trauma continues to haunt Canadian cultural and historical contexts, from the crimes of predators like Paul Bernardo, Karla Homolka, Robert Pickton, and Russell Williams, to the survivors of sexual abuse perpetrated by clergy members in residential schools, to the large number of murdered and missing Indigenous women, particularly in Western Canada. Even as I conducted the research for this project, incidents of sexual violence in Canada sparked widespread national conversations. In the fall of 2013, several prominent Canadian universities, including my own, were revealed to have longstanding histories of violent and degrading rape chants within various student organizations. These instances of violence through language prompted post-secondary institutions to assemble task forces to deal with sexualized violence and rape culture on campuses. In the context of security, rather than education, allegations of sexual assault and harassment within the ranks of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been making national headlines for several years. Since 2011, female members of the RCMP-including 336 members of a class-action lawsuitare continuing to demand answers and an investigation into sexism and abuse within the national police force (Clancy, n.p.). In early 2014, Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Canada mourned the loss of a young Inuk researcher, Loretta Saunders, and as I write, continue to place pressure on the federal government to conduct a thorough inquiry into the deaths and disappearances of more than 1000 Indigenous women. Later that year, allegations and charges against former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi sparked what was seen as a watershed moment in national discussions about sexual violence. Yet, despite these events, tensions still remain: how do such conversations keep going? Who is in charge of speaking, and how? Acknowledging that literary production is not exempt from considering these questions, I argue that the specific "cultural anxieties and desires" (Sielke) that drive the representations of sexual violence in contemporary Canadian literature are threefold: first, texts which claim to represent any form of trauma are influenced by a series of generic conventions and discourses, which are sometimes contested, deconstructed, or appropriated; second, both Canadian literary and social configurations of community maintain specific investments in (and, frequently, divestments from) narratives which reflect violence within social and historical networks; third, material and historical conditions are shifting the conversations about sexual violence towards a transnational and global conversation, as reflected by the increasing deregulation of narrative production in an age of digital media and access. Contemporary Canadian authors thus face a considerable number of challenges: how can they continue to address the complex representational qualities of sexual trauma, and how can they do so in a manner that resists easy appropriation? How can narratives about sexual violence reveal the deep fissures and inequalities in Canadian society without disengaging the reader, especially given the histories of censorship
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