The Production of Girl Life and the Lives of Girls

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore trauma and its normalizing effects in my own childhood. I also examine the ways that my experience reflects the larger normative culture as described by the radical feminist movement of the 1970s. In my childhood, violence normalized. It worked to gender me as a normative girl. I became quiet, accepting, submissive, disembodied and disassociated from my body, without sexual feeling, and ashamed. Along with violence, trauma saturated my childhood. And the sexual clung to and burst from my gendered experiences of both. For me, becoming girl meant succumbing to another’s sexuality. Being-girl was a matter of no-longer-mattering, in both senses of the word. My girl-experience was that of no-longer-being-embodied. Instead my form became the surface for the pleasure of another.