part 3 Surviving Trauma

Pree Rehal

The third and final part of this collection looks at trauma, interpersonal relations, and race. Trauma narratives are a main theme in the Jessica Jones series; however, this section takes an interdisciplinary approach rather than one centred on trauma theory. Beginning with how trauma has been depicted in recent years, and the impacts of off-screen rape in Jessica Jones, chapter 12 dives into the ways in which trauma narratives are represented in the series. In chapter 10, Keira Obbard analyzes how abusive dynamics like rape impact characters in the long term, and how rape is demonstrated by its aftermath rather than its onscreen portrayal. Obbard inspects how Kilgrave continuously terrorizes Jessica after the fact through violations of consent and boundaries, while noting the way the series allows her to take control of her narrative even as trauma impacts her memory and Kilgrave continuously gaslights her. And how does our society stop serial rapists? The series gives us a non-carceral example that widens the narrative of trauma and rape in society.

Michelle Johnson uses Laban movement analysis (LMA) to unpack how trauma, gender performance, bodily movement, and somatic experiences are linked. Johnson explains that “LMA is strongly connected to the idea of personal style and expressivity, understanding that everyone has their own particular movement tendencies and that there are often deep connections between psychology and movement patterns.” Johnson employs LMA concepts in order to create meaning with characters’ bodily movement and to demonstrate how the series represents binary power relations, including between abuser and victim, masculine and feminine, attractive and unattractive, and before and after trauma.

Tracey Thomas delves into the significance of Jessica and Trish’s friendship. Their sisterhood is driven by the platonic femme love they developed in childhood, and they continue to protect each other from their abusers, including Trish’s mom and Kilgrave, in their adulthood. Thomas contrasts Jessica’s superpowers and flawed heroism with Trish’s natural heroic prowess. The chapters for this volume were originally developed between 2017 and 2020, and one of the major historical events of this period, also mentioned in the introduction to part 2, was #MeToo. As the movement gained virality in the interim period, its Black creator, Tarana Burke, was often left out of the picture. In this section about trauma, it feels necessary to acknowledge and highlight the work that Burke has been doing for over a decade. In her chapter, Thomas argues that “Whether it is ‘saving’ the other, or just being there, Jessica and Trish embody strong female protagonists who do not let their lives revolve around their past and/or male-driven traumas.”

As Dreama G. Moon and Michelle A. Holling (2020) point out in “ ‘White Supremacy in Heels’: (White) Feminism, White Supremacy, and Discursive Violence,” “yet another example of (white) feminism’s penchant for marginalizing women of color is the whitening of #MeToo and #TimesUp, evident in their popularization and visibility extended to white women’s victimage. Only later was the founder of Me Too, Tarana Burke, a Black woman acknowledged, while testimonies of black and Latina actresses were ignored” (255). In Me Too International’s first Impact Report (2019), Burke explains that she “set out to bring healing to the Black and Brown girls in my community while raising awareness about the trauma they faced, and the lack of protections made available to them” (3). That a Black movement, by and for Black women, was subsequently co-opted by white women is unsurprising and reminiscent of the ways that both academic and activist communities have been employing the buzzword “intersectionality” within feminist contexts. Crenshaw (1991) writes, “Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices” (1242), and she coined the term “intersectionality” to identify the dual violence faced by Black women experiencing intimate-partner violence and violence from police.

Sorouja Moll reminds us in her chapter that women have always been discredited as she unpacks the etymology of the word “hysteria” and the ways it has been weaponized against women both historically and in the present-day, providing examples from US politics and the series itself. In chapter 14, Pree Rehal and Caitlynn Fairbarns decode how the audience consumes rape and violations of consent within the series. This chapter extends beyond considerations of gender to also analyze racial violence through the vehicle of white feminism in Jessica Jones. Similar to Jessica Seymour in her chapter “From Devils to Milquetoast Little Man-Boys,” Rehal and Fairbarns turn in the latter half of their contribution to Luke Cage, though here in an effort to unpack the impact of anti-Black racism and issues of consent on the show, rather than gender and Black masculinities.

Arun Jacob and Elizabeth DiEmanuele inspect place, space, and trauma in the series through the lens of urban revanchism. As a society, much of Turtle Island suffers from revanchism, a strategy that displaces the most oppressed: “ ‘Revanchism’ means ‘revenge,’ but what marked the city of the late 1980s into the 1990s was not so much revenge as a broad-based vengefulness” (Mitchell quoted in Lawton 2018, 867). And theorist Neil Smith, who coined the term, argued that “the concept of the revanchist city has captured the tense relationship between the remaking of urban space via gentrification and the experiences of those social groups side-lined by such processes” (quoted in Lawton 2018, 867). Analyzing Jessica’s domain and surroundings, Jacob and DiEmanuele thus ask, appropriately, “Who is more threatening to such an ideal than Jessica Jones, a woman who can lift cars, hold her own in a bar fight against a group of rugby players, and sleep in an apartment with a broken door, despite living in a densely populated, threatening city?”

References

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99.

Me Too International. 2019. Me Too. Impact Report 2019. https://metoomvmt.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019-12-09_MeToo_ImpactReport_VIEW_4.pdf.

Moon, Dreama G., and Michelle A. Holling. 2020. “ ‘White Supremacy in Heels’: (White) Feminism, White Supremacy, and Discursive Violence.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17 (2): 253–60.

Lawton, Philip. 2018. “Situating Revanchism in the Contemporary City.” City 22 (5–6): 867–74.