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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This essay will look at different modes of trauma that are represented in Louise O’Neill’s novel Asking For It (2015). These modes of trauma will be looked at in terms of how the repeated visualization and production of an initial act of violence and rape across social media platforms actively transforms post-traumatic stress into a repeated and ongoing sense of traumatic stress which has profound implications for the sense of selfhood and identity of the protagonist of the novel Emma O’Donovan. Emma is not remembering a repressed experience; she is re-living it virtually in the present as the images are both present and future, as she knows there will be more images and more comments when she turns on her phone. The initial act of rape, which is extremely traumatic, is never actually in the past in the book, as a series of graphic images of Emma’s body, in all stages of abjection, are continuously circulating on social media meaning that there is never a stage of post-traumatic experience, as these images circulate in the present so it is as if the whole process is on a loop which has no end, and cannot ever be dealt with. It is an important book in dealing with the epistemological and subjective impact of social media on senses of the self and of subjectivity. Lacanian theory and the work of Cathy Caruth, Laura Mulvey and Julia Kristeva will be used as lenses through which to read these issues.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/E6CE-0103

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