The Nonsovereign Subject and Sexual Violence in Contemporary North American and Russian Culture

Abstract

Through stories about sexual violence, societies confront the condition of nonsovereignty that underlies the reality of suffering, self- and other-inflicted, in the lives of sexed beings. Analyzing theoretical, fictional, and popular media texts, written in the United States, Canada, and Russia from the 1980s to the 2010s, this dissertation formulates a structural approach to narratives about sexual violence and nonsovereignty. This approach avoids naturalizing the opposition between the “progressive” West and “traditional” Russia, enabling more informed discussions of cultural narratives about sexual violence and a more critical use of the discursive tools available for dealing with it. I identify three modes of approaching the problem of sexual violence: reparative, radical and prosaic. These modes shape subject positions and patterns of power relations. Each chapter analyzes the structure of a particular mode, its manifestations in cultural myths and in specific texts, and ultimately, its limitations. Chapter 1 discusses the reparative mode, which aims to heal the subject or the world, and its manifestations: the Western speakout model in Sapphire’s Push (1996) and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999), and the Russian ideal of kenosis in Viktor Astafiev’s “Lyudochka” (1989) and Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (2015). Reparative projects can be totalizing and easily appropriated by neoliberalism and conservative nationalism. The radical mode, discussed in Chapter 2, seeks to avoid appropriation by foregrounding identification with trauma. I analyze its manifestations in North American discourses of feminist and queer negativity and the Russian “literature of evil.” Reading Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (2011) and Vladimir Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love (1987), I argue that the radical mode reinscribes abjection as a source of empowerment and supports identity politics and structures of inequality. Chapter 3 formulates the prosaic mode, which focuses on processes of adaptation and survival without resolution or liberation. Reading Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night (1992) and Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead (2012), I articulate a prosaic vision of the subject as headquarters for self-maintenance in a world both sustaining and hostile. Understanding the three modes as at once fundamental and mutable, I argue for their critical and pragmatic use in debates about sexual violence.