Oct 28, 2016 | 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM | Loft 2

Ms. Arpita Mandal, Bachelor of Arts

Collective Memories As Sites of Nationalist Discourse

I will examine testimonial production and reception of the 2012 gang rape case in India that led to the production of the documentary India’s Daughter (2015) by British –Israeli filmmaker, Leslie Udwin. The reception of the documentary occurred amidst national outrage as well as a governmental ban on the screening in India. My goal is to examine the narrative forms through which national collective memory was constructed, mainly through sensational journalism fed by details of the trial. By analyzing the two different modes of narrative (journalistic evidence and documentary reception) I aim to demonstrate the ways collective memory is contested in its making in order to champion nationalistic discourse. I argue that the result of the contested collected memory is erasure of the individual’s identity in which the victim and their trauma gets rewritten to champion nationalistic discourse.

My framework will engage the works of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, as well as Jenny Edkins in order to engage sociological theory of trauma and memory. I position my project within American sociologist Robin Wagner Pacifici’s argument that (collective) memories come to us through forms such as “narratives, pictorial images”. My engagement with the case study will reveal how the forms, which inform us of the individual’s trauma, are constructed around larger goals of society that privilege ideas of unified national mourning and reduce the victim to a symbol or allegory. India’s Daughter allegorizes the victim, where the individual went from being a woman who suffered violations to becoming the nation’s daughter who had been violated. The framing of the violation as a crime against the nation’s daughter served to reinforce patriarchal codes about womanhood and femininity, thereby erasing individual suffering.

Mr. Jessica Marsico, B.S. in Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism

It's All in the Name and Weight: Sexual Trauma and the Formal Operational Stage of Development

Highly narrative and visual, this author/speaker-as-subject presentation queries the long-term effects on language and expression of childhood sexual trauma. Particularly for girls, ages 8-9 is a period of peak neurological growth in areas of the brain responsible for language, memory, experiential categorization, and emotion. At all points in life, these areas of the brain can be damaged by prolonged and/or intense stress, setting a uniquely dangerous time for the occurrence of sexual trauma. This highly specialized period of cognitive development is vital for adulthood: it is during this time we create the complex neural filing system for ease of retrieval throughout our lives.

Without the language to describe a horrific event and lacking an appropriate folder in which to place the experience, a child in this pragmatic and questioning stage of development may become obsessed with words and frustrated with expression, a hindrance that continues throughout the lifespan. My own life, my very existence, has shown me that experience does not shape language but the other way around, albeit circumspect. Names and labels can only be assigned to an experience if they already exist in a child’s vocabulary, and significance bears on the assigned word, name, label. When words do not exist for something like sexual trauma, in a stage where categorization and language and expression are of the utmost import, the dissonance between felt significance and named significance teaches a child that she cannot rely on her ability to parse minor threat from major or discomfort from danger.

Eventually that child becomes an adult, and that adult woman struggles with expression, with self-trust, with internal reliability every single day. Would she, still, had the sexual trauma occurred during a different stage in neurological development?

Dr. May Friedman, PhD

On Truth, Lies and Jian Ghomeshi

This paper attempts to expose the incoherence of truth and lies when applied to the legal proceedings against Canadian media celebrity Jian Ghomeshi.  A discourse analysis of the March 24, 2016 verdict of his case, in which he was acquitted of all charges, reveals interesting limitations in popular conceptions of truth and lies, especially in the context of trauma. Specifically, the case, generally understood as an example of “he said/they said”, hinged on the reliability of witness testimony of events which occurred many years ago.  The verdict casts doubt on the integrity of these witnesses and uses that doubt as the grounds for acquittal. The Ghomeshi case rests as an example of the ways that the law is a crude tool, especially in its insistence on coherent, rational, linear and uncontested truths. 

In exploring the credibility of accusers, normative behaviours are maintained, especially around how abused women “should” act.  Perhaps of greater importance, however, is the extent to which the legal proceeding dismisses the confusion and ambiguity of the stories we tell, suggesting that all relationships must be strictly either welcome or unwelcome; consensual or non-consensual, and leaving no room for more complicated or contradictory motivations or narratives.  This paper will briefly consider the details of Ghomeshi’s case but will focus on the whole in analyzing the verdict to consider which “truths” (in the form of normative moral expectations) are actually exposed by the measuring of accuser’s narratives in this case.  This analysis will be undertaken through a feminist lens that considers the complicated context of sexual violence within an inherently misogynist society.

n.b. Ghomeshi faces a further trial in June 2016. Should that verdict become available, this paper will then analyze both verdicts through the themes named above.

Biographies

Arpita Mandal

Arpita Mandal is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Connecticut with an interest in human rights theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies. Her research is focused on Anglophone literatures with a particular interest in literatures of India and North Africa.

She is the author of book reviews on the following novels: The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan by Rafia Zakaria and Desire of the Moth by Champa Bilwakesh. She has also published a blog post titled "The Politics of Beef in India" for Warscapes, an online literary magazine

Jessica Marsico

Jessica Marsico is a graduate student in the Social and Public Policy department with a focus in Family Court and Trauma at Empire State College School for Graduate Studies in NY. She received her B.S. in Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism from SUNY Empire in 2013. While working on her undergrad she co-taught both "Mythology and Modern Life" and a successful pilot online course for first-year college students in Lebanon. Her research interests include the epigenetic effects of complex trauma, language and authority, etymology, and mother/child testimony in Family Court. Her academic thought has been largely shaped by the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and her Italian-American cultural identity. [She chose the honorific "Mr." due to dissatisfaction with the female need to choose between a married or unmarried identity.]

*** Unpublished

*** Presented at the 2012 Student Academic Conference of SUNY Empire in Buffalo, NY:

"The Female Condition: Archetypes in Contemporary American Poetry"

Dr. May Friedman

May blends social work, teaching, research, writing and parenting, often in the same five minute period. Her book, Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood was published by the University of Toronto Press in early 2013 and won the 2015 Women’s and Gender Studies/Recherches feministes Outstanding Scholarship Prize. She has also recently edited books about gender fluid parenting (Chasing Rainbows, Demeter Press 2013) and the international SlutWalk movement (Demeter Press, 2015). In addition, May has written book chapters and journal articles on topics as diverse as motherhood and sexuality, reality television, and size acceptance and fat activism. May has also been the recipient of a number of grants which have allowed her to explore topics including motherhood and criminalization; the intersections of social work and activism; and the impacts of fatphobia on queer bodies.