Spatial markings: Memory, agency and child sexual abuse

Abstract

In this article, I argue that material locations (spaces) are not simply peripheral to acts of remembering but central to how the ongoing flow of memory and agency is constituted and experienced by individuals in their practice of memorial self-interpretation. This argument, however, can only be accepted when selfhood is treated as a form, a process, as opposed to a determinate substance. Examples from autobiography, psychological research, fiction and film on the topic of child sexual abuse will be used to render visible the ways in which agency within memory is played out across a variety of material locations that leave their mark on memory in particular ways. Furthermore, it is argued that such material locations are always already deeply embedded in a variety of political systems that in turn render subjectivity and agency diverse and multiple.