aunt
nobody
this is an homage to aunt nobodies all over
I can’t do anything as linear as an interview, or as sober as a report. She leapfrogs away from me. She is not artifice, and not family tree: she is the result of one rubbing up against the other. She is emotional in the Ahmed-ian sense: her emotions are "not 'in' either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects" (p10).
To seek her sustains me. I eat her like the placenta I may never wanna produce. She placates me.
But we know that the very mode of 'history' as authoritative document can reinforce hegemony. Emma Parker conceptualises this as 'phallusy': the archive's lack of, or misrepresentation of, women. She proposes as alternative not a 'herstory', but a 'hystery'. This view retains the messy twining that often occurs between trauma and memoir: it does not attempt to split them. It positions hysterics as "subjects haunted by the past," and reasserts the concept (via Irigaray 1985 and Bronfen 1998) that their hysteria is an imitation or mimicry of the femininity forced upon them by oppressive cultures.
So we can gladly ditch the dry pages of herstory and whack into the turgid, mouldy tomes of hystery.
