Abstract
Recollection of child sexual abuse involves complex issues of agency—both in the past and in the present. Adult women survivors face the further obstacle of ingrained cultural tendencies to question women’s testimony. Ambiguity and ambivalence are found in adult women’s accounts of their past abuse and present particular dilemmas. Drawing on social remembering approaches developed in memory studies, it is argued that recollections have to negotiate issues of incidence and intentionality in the past as well as the potential contribution made by non-human participants (e.g. objects, spaces, bodies). Using examples from interviews with survivors of child sexual abuse, we illustrate how objects (largely domestic objects and spaces) emerge in the memories as a way of posing and subsequently disposing ambiguity. Objects, as well as humans, ‘modify the state of affairs’ (Latour, 2005) and serve as the means to punctualize recollected episodes. An analytic approach sensitive to the role of objects in recollection, which is grounded in material-semiotics, is offered.
Highlights
Memory, agency and child sexual abuse During one of the many detours into the past that WG Sebald makes in the course of his perambulations detailed in The Rings of Saturn, the musings of the Vicomte de Chateaubriand on the relationship between memory and agency are discussed
Through detailed examinations of qualitative data, involving interviews with women who have experienced child sexual abuse, we have found that one of the organising features of these memories are not clear cut presentations of the past, where a traditional narrative of the male villain and female victim shape readings of agency, but a tremendous dilemma over how to read self agency and the agency of others
In this paper, we have argued that objects and spaces provide us with a further analytic with which to make sense of the ways in which adult women manage issues of agency in relation to recollections of child sexual abuse
Summary
Agency and child sexual abuse During one of the many detours into the past that WG Sebald makes in the course of his perambulations detailed in The Rings of Saturn, the musings of the Vicomte de Chateaubriand on the relationship between memory and agency are discussed. Women seemingly have little to gain by invoking ambiguity and indeterminacy in their recollections of child sexual abuse It does not apparently assist with creating either personal or collective cohesion in relation to a remembered past (i.e. my own abusive history, my place in women’s historical role as victims). The propensity of objects, how they lend themselves to a collective sense of self-sufficiency, domestic order and moral worth, can and does make a difference to how this past comes to matter in the present This is not to say that objects somehow determine memory, rather that the way they ‘authorise, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible [and] forbid’ particular actions has concrete resonance in recollection (Latour, 2005: 72). What is noteworthy is the manner in which the material mediators (writing and the door) both make it possible to raise the issue of ambiguity surrounding the events (as aspects of pleasure creep in) whilst they enable an attribution of intentionality to the abusive actor
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