NCJ Number
182873
Date Published
1999
Length
29 pages
Annotation
This chapter examines the debate over recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
Abstract
The chapter deconstructs “The Courage to Heal,” considered by many the “bible” of the survivors’ movement. The chapter explores the basis of the book’s populist appeal, and considers its progressive insights and blind spots, particularly in explaining the complex, conflictual currents of female sexuality. The chapter analyzes the historical context in which the book achieved tremendous currency and takes up the question of why remembering incest emerged as the “master narrative” of feminism in the late 1980's and early 1990's. The chapter argues that childhood sexual abuse narratives, and specifically incest, acquired a legendary power within feminism as stories moved beyond the concrete suffering and voices of actual incest survivors to encompass a broad range of more ambiguous grievances. In widening the field of interpretive possibilities for understanding women’s narratives of abuse, the chapter uses the concept of transformative remembering. This refers to event schemata that have supra-ordinate explanatory power, serving as phenomenological anchors in autobiographical recall. From this perspective, the truth of the memory may lie less in its factual content than in the narrative structure of shifting plots and subplots and of changing subject positions that emerge out of memory. Notes, references