Stories and Rape Trauma: Narratological and Psychotraumatological Perspectives

Main Supervisor: Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed
Co-supervisor: Filip Arnberg

What is your educational background?
MA in Comparative Literature, Uppsala University

Why did you apply to WOMHER's interdisciplinary graduate school?
I was interested in literature and gender, and the Womher project provided an opportunity to pursue my research interests.

Tell us more about your research project?
The project explores the ways in which ghosts and haunting are used to depict women’s experiences of rape-related trauma in a selection of American and Nordic contemporary novels (1996 to 2018).

The 1990s saw a rapid growth in trauma research in psychology as well as in cultural theory and during the same period, trauma increasingly appeared as a theme in literary fiction published. This study focuses on a category of trauma fiction in which women who have been subjected to raped experience a sensation of inhabiting a position between life and death. A consequence is invisibility, isolation and a lost sense of self, sensations that play a significant role in how trauma is depicted in these stories. Seeking social connection and testimonies of their pain, the spectral women of the novels try to haunt their loved ones. Simultaneously, they feel haunted by memories of the rape, which appear over and over again as post-traumatic flashbacks. The study explores how narrative patterns of spectral, involuntary return affect the fictional rendition of the very nature of rape trauma.

What do you hope the impact of this project to be?
In a time when trauma and rape are subjects discussed widely in society, I hope that this project will provide insight into how fiction and narrative shape ideas about these two phenomena.