"Who are you doing this for?" Narrating Sexual Violence in Kirsty Eagar's Raw Blue

Abstract

"Who are you doing this for?" Narrating Sexual Violence in Kirsty Eagar's Raw Blue Robyn Dennison (bio) Rape Rhetoric: Victims and Survivors In her 1975 book Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller writes, "Women are trained to be rape victims…To talk about rape, even with nervous laughter, is to acknowledge a woman's special victim status. We hear the whispers when we are children: girls get raped" (309; italics in original). Brownmiller, along with other feminist anti-rape critics of the 1970s, played an important role in exposing the high incidence of sexual violence against women in Western societies, which until then had been drastically under-recognized (Gavey 59). These feminist critics challenged victim-blaming rhetoric—which suggested that women subjected to sexual violence somehow deserved or invited the attack—and used the "language of victimization" to emphasize instead the powerlessness of victims and to acknowledge the harm that sexual violence inflicts on one's life and identity (59). While this move was an attempt to ensure that the responsibility for sexual violence lay solely on the shoulders of perpetrators, it had the unintended effect of preemptively constituting all women as victims (Mardorossian 752).1 As victim rhetoric became ubiquitous in discussions of sexual violence, the notion of victimhood became increasingly characterized by passivity, harm, and an inability to defend or assert oneself. Being labeled a victim denoted the compromising of one's identity and the infliction of irreparable damage, leaving one less of the person who s/he was before the rape or assault (Lamb, "Constructing" 109). This set of associations, in turn, led to a rejection in the 1990s of the term "victim" and its subsequent replacement with "survivor" in an effort to evoke agency and resistance as opposed to violation (119; see also Projansky 9). However, in her edited collection New Versions of Victims, psychologist Sharon Lamb argues in "Constructing the Victim" that this backlash against victim rhetoric denies the legitimacy of feelings of powerlessness, humiliation, and/or shame that sexual violence can cause. Rather than replacing the term "victim," [End Page 308] Lamb critiques the pathologizing of victims in social, psychological, and legal discourses, and how this practice reinforces the association of victimization with weakness, passivity, or hysteria (120). There is thus a tension between two opposing subject positions: the rape Victim versus the rape Survivor (Spry 27). The way in which Victims are pathologized and required to suffer long-lasting harm denies them agency (Lamb, "Constructing" 109), while a Survivor is required to have actively fought against the assault/s, regardless of the circumstances (119).2 Many texts that represent sexual violence against women reproduce this Victim/Survivor dichotomy, and dominant among these texts is the narrative of recovery, in which the Victim—through various acts of empowerment and disclosure—becomes a Survivor. While such narratives of healing may be uplifting, their prevalence in fiction about sexual violence invites critique. In this article I consider the representation of sexual violence in some contemporary Western adolescent novels, positing that many adhere to a Victim-to-Survivor narrative in which a damaged, powerless Victim must recuperate a sense of self through the healing journey of the narrative and emerge at its end an empowered Survivor, having resolved the harm inflicted upon her. While I discuss Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak (1999) and Louisa Luna's Brave New Girl (2001) as two examples of the Victim-to-Survivor narrative, my primary focus is on Australian author Kirsty Eagar's Raw Blue (2009) as a text that resists this trend. Specifically, I examine the use of first-person/present-tense (FPPT) narration and the relationship constructed between narrator and reader in this narrative style to demonstrate how Raw Blue challenges the Victim/Survivor dichotomy. While my argument is underpinned by narratological analysis of FPPT narration in Raw Blue, it is not FPPT alone that I suggest resists normative narrative tropes. Rather, I posit that Raw Blue's unique resistance to such tropes is embedded in its use of FPPT narration. My approach, I hope, makes a case for further narratological analysis in adolescent literary scholarship, without suggesting that we uncouple narrative style from content and its attendant...