Haunting Violations Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real

Feminist critics place a premium on the "real" stories told by the victimized and the oppressed. Offering a corrective to such uncritical acceptance, this volume contends that depictions of the "real" are inherently performative, crafted within the limits and in the interests of specific personal, political, or social projects.Haunting Violations explores the inseparability of discourse and politics in quasi-autobiographical works such as I, Rigoberta Menchu and When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Contributors consider how the Sri Lankan Mother's Front movement exploits the sanctity of the maternal and how multiple political purposes on both sides bleed through U.S. government "documentary" photographs of Japanese-American concentration camp internees. This volume also investigates how South Asian feminists use the authority of their personal experience to critique the film Mississippi Masala and how realist narratives, such as Janet Campbell Hale's autobiographical Bloodlines, Margie Strosser's documentary film Rape Stories, and Shekur Kapur's film Bandit Queen, reexamine how assumptions about power and trauma are embedded in the promise of the real.Hesford, Wendy S. is the author of 'Haunting Violations Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real' with ISBN 9780252026102 and ISBN 0252026101.