Rupturing the skin of memory, bearing witness to the 1989 massacre of women in Montreal

grantor: University of TorontoThis thesis has been written through the aftershock of the 1989 murder of fourteen women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, an event known commonly as the "Montreal Massacre". Taking a feminist position that this was not the act of a "madman", I argue for careful consideration of how to remember this event and in what relation to other acts of violence against women. I propose the massacre may be understood as an event of "historical trauma": both because it broke the frame of what was normal and expected for women attending university in Canada, and because it surfaced a sense of the horror that is already known and unbearable in the lives of those subject to more everyday assaults and violations. By way of explicating the nuances of this argument, the thesis is developed along three intersecting dimensions. First, I work with my own memories of violation--a history of incest that I began to remember through the event of the massacre. Second, I draw from post-Shoah (Holocaust) theorizings to introduce a language of witnessing and to contemplate the impacts of trauma, not only on individual "survivors", but also for social integrity. Third, I perform the writing as itself a site of bearing of witness, marked by the disturbances of rupture, incomprehensibility and visceral impact. Substantively, the thesis develops through a series of engagements with feminist memorial responses to the Massacre of Women, including art, song, installation, memorial vigils, and monument--drawn from my annotated bibliography of English-language feminist response (1990-1995). Each of the selected works is approached through two central questions: Which calls to witness are inscribed in memorial responses to the massacre? What are the implications of bearing witness to these responses, when one comes to witnessing already traumatized? The close analysis of responses is organized in part through an interest in attending to and conceptualizing the pedagogical effectiveness of memorial practices. The work will be of interest to those working on philosophies of witnessing; relations between history, traumatic memory, and pedagogy; autobiographical theorizing: and, cultural practices in response to violences against women.Ph.D