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9780823285495

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Witnessing Girlhood brilliantly analyzes the role of childhood to trauma narrative and reader empathy. Working against the cliche of the sentimentalized child, Gilmore and Marshall demonstrate with clarity and determination that the `white savior' trope in life writing about trauma is not the ascendant mode. This book's depth and quality emerge from the authors' profound, long-standing investment in trauma studies and childhood. -- Katharine Capshaw, University of Connecticut Witnessing Girlhood is a tour de force: demanding and authoritative. Gilmore and Marshall articulate a powerful analysis of representations of girls and women on the fraught subjects of domestic violence, rape culture, survivor and victim identity, and persistent concerns about intrinsic female vulnerability. Here is a necessary and eloquent feminist affirmation on issues of gender and violence. -- Gillian Whitlock, author of Soft Weapons and Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions

Through their analyses of multiple texts, the authors challenge the fusion of whiteness with childhood innocence and underscore how these narratives portray the vulnerable child's accompaniment by her adult-survivor self in order to offset white-savior fantasies of empathy and use the affective power of child witnesses to promote political action... Highly recommended. * Choice * Witnessing Girlhood brilliantly analyzes the role of childhood to trauma narrative and reader empathy. Working against the cliche of the sentimentalized child, Gilmore and Marshall demonstrate with clarity and determination that the 'white savior' trope in life writing about trauma is not the ascendant mode. This book's depth and quality emerge from the authors' profound, long-standing investment in trauma studies and childhood. -- Katharine Capshaw, University of Connecticut Witnessing Girlhood is a tour de force: demanding and authoritative. Gilmore and Marshall articulate a powerful analysis of representations of girls and women on the fraught subjects of domestic violence, rape culture, survivor and victim identity, and persistent concerns about intrinsic female vulnerability. Here is a necessary and eloquent feminist affirmation on issues of gender and violence. -- Gillian Whitlock, author of Soft Weapons and Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions

Author Information

Leigh Gilmore (Author) Leigh Gilmore is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of several books, including most recently Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. Elizabeth Marshall (Author) Elizabeth Marshall is Associate Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence.

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