Abstract
The autographical narrative Becoming Unbecoming (2015) interweaves Una’s own coming-of-age story with the collective histories of women living in Yorkshire in the mid to late 1970s. The chapter considers Una’s formal and graphic strategies to work through her personal experience of sexual trauma alongside her exploration of the ‘Ripper’ murders, which she witnessed first-hand when growing up in Leeds. Becoming Unbecoming critiques the regimes of visuality that have framed the victims of gendered violence in the media, and produces alternative modalities of seeing that simultaneously draw attention to the silencing of women and to the challenge to represent trauma. Drawing on comics studies, gender theory, and extensive interviews with Una, the chapter explores how Becoming Unbecoming proposes new forms of visualization that are disengaged from the overt visuality of violence and its mythologizing implications for both victims and abusers.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The interview with Una was conducted across two days (25 March 2018 and 26 March 2018), in four audio tracks (parts 1.1 and 1.2 were recorded on 25 March 2018; parts 2.1 and 2.2 on 26 March 2018).
- 2.
In another reading, which Una has pointed out, this fear makes reference to the after-effects of abuse in the development of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. (1977) 1982. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana.
Benedict, Helen. 1992. Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. New York/London: Oxford University Press.
Berger, John. 1982. Another Way of Telling. London: Writers & Readers Publishing Cooperative Society.
Bilton, Michael. 2003. Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. London: Harper Collins.
Bland, Lucy. 1992. The Case of the Yorkshire Ripper: Mad, Bad, Beast or Male? In Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, ed. Jill Radford and Diana E.H. Russell, 233–252. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1978) 1988. The Dangerous Individual. In Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, 124–51. London/New York: Routledge.
Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1997. The Persistence of Vision. In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, 283–295. New York: Columbia University Press.
Herman, Judith. 1997. Trauma and Recovery. London: Pandora.
Hollway, Wendy. 1981. ‘I Just Wanted to Kill a Woman.’ Why? The Ripper and Male Sexuality. Feminist Review 9 (Autumn): 33–40.
Kitzinger, Jenny. 2009. Rape in the Media. In Rape: Challenging Contemporary Thinking, ed. Miranda A.H. Horvath and Jennifer M. Brown, 74–98. Cullompton/Portland: Willan.
LaCapra, Dominik. 2009. History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Marshall, Elizabeth, and Leigh Gilmore. 2015. Girlhood in the Gutter: Feminist Graphic Knowledge and the Visualization of Sexual Precarity. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 43 (1): 95–114. The Feminist Press. Retrieved May 15, 2019, from Project MUSE Database.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2013. Introduction: For Critical Visuality Studies. In The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London/New York: Routledge.
Moorti, Sujata. 2002. Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television’s Public Spheres. New York: State University of New York Press.
Orbán, Katalin. 2015. Mediating Distant Violence: Reports on Non-photographic Reporting in the Fixer and the Photographer. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 6 (2): 122–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2015.1027943.
Randall, Richard S. 1989. Freedom and Taboo: Pornography and the Politics of a Self Divided. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Satrapi, Marjane. 2006. Persepolis. London: Jonathan Cape.
Scherr, Rebecca. 2013. Shaking Hands with Other People’s Pain: Joe Sacco’s Palestine. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 46 (1): 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1353/mos.2013.0004.
Sekula, Allan. 1986. The Body and the Archive. October 39 (Winter): 3–64.
Smith, Joan. (1989) 1996. Misogynies. London: Vintage.
Una. 2015a. Becoming Unbecoming. Brighton: Myriad Editions.
———. 2015b. Overcoming Adversity, Becoming Brilliant. Interview by Joanna Whitehead. The f word, October 26. https://www.thefword.org.uk/2015/10/becoming-unbecoming-review/
———. 2018. Unpublished Interview, March 25–26. Audio. 120: 25.
Walkowitz, Judith R. 1982. Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence. Feminist Studies 8 (3): 542–574.
Ward Jouve, Nicole. (1986) 1988. The Streetcleaner: The Yorkshire Ripper Case on Trial. London/New York: Marion Boyars.
Wattis, Louise. 2017. Revisiting the Yorkshire Ripper Murders: Interrogating Gender Violence, Sex Work, and Justice. Feminist Criminology 12 (1): 3–21.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 52 (4): 965–979. Johns Hopkins University Press. Project MUSE. Accessed 15 May 2019.
Yallop, David A. (1981) 1983. Deliver Us from Evil. Aylesbury: Macdonald Futura Publishers.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baeza Ruiz, A. (2020). Una’s Becoming Unbecoming, Visuality, and Sexual Trauma. In: Davies, D., Rifkind, C. (eds) Documenting Trauma in Comics. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37997-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37998-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)