Great analysis / summary of the Aviv piece on Munro.
The only thing that really bothered me about her broader “art imitates life / tells on you” is the brief aside about Munro’s ambivalent, dismissive reaction to her own assault. I read the passage as subtly casting a sinister light on that knowledge — an early example of her capacity to dismiss violence out of hand, of her deficient empathy.
I’d read a lot of Charlotte Shane and Vanessa Veselka when I lighted on the Aviv piece. They wrote extremely contested (but imo pretty persuasive) critiques of how victims of sexual violence are expected to adopt an affect and presentation to be constructive about their experience, and write about how deviance from that expectation is pathologized.
I think what Aviv does with the early life anecdote is cavalier and needlessly pathologizing. Shane, eg, wrote of abuse she received as a sex worker and how, while she found it obviously unpleasant, she didn’t feel particularly scarred by it. She was more sick of the psychic strain and fatigue she accrued by putting up with it than degraded by the acts.
Shane explicitly did not prescribe her own reaction to anyone else, but also refused to be written off as in denial, or disbelieved over a lack of evident crisis. In my understanding of her argument, when someone comes to us and discloses a history of violence, we owe that person a reaction of comfort and support; by contrast, the person thus disclosing does not owe us anything, including an affect of crisis or suffering.
There’s a weird dissonance in Aviv’s piece, stemming from how authorities’ over-emphasis of Andrea’s atypical affect (ie, that of a functional adult) is shown to be sloppiness and neglect, while the younger Alice’s atypical affect is portrayed as an ominous portent of her pathology.
Munro’s betrayal of her daughter is unconscionable, but her orientation toward her own experience is basically immaterial, as I see it. It provides no insight.
Great analysis / summary of the Aviv piece on Munro.
The only thing that really bothered me about her broader “art imitates life / tells on you” is the brief aside about Munro’s ambivalent, dismissive reaction to her own assault. I read the passage as subtly casting a sinister light on that knowledge — an early example of her capacity to dismiss violence out of hand, of her deficient empathy.
I’d read a lot of Charlotte Shane and Vanessa Veselka when I lighted on the Aviv piece. They wrote extremely contested (but imo pretty persuasive) critiques of how victims of sexual violence are expected to adopt an affect and presentation to be constructive about their experience, and write about how deviance from that expectation is pathologized.
I think what Aviv does with the early life anecdote is cavalier and needlessly pathologizing. Shane, eg, wrote of abuse she received as a sex worker and how, while she found it obviously unpleasant, she didn’t feel particularly scarred by it. She was more sick of the psychic strain and fatigue she accrued by putting up with it than degraded by the acts.
Shane explicitly did not prescribe her own reaction to anyone else, but also refused to be written off as in denial, or disbelieved over a lack of evident crisis. In my understanding of her argument, when someone comes to us and discloses a history of violence, we owe that person a reaction of comfort and support; by contrast, the person thus disclosing does not owe us anything, including an affect of crisis or suffering.
There’s a weird dissonance in Aviv’s piece, stemming from how authorities’ over-emphasis of Andrea’s atypical affect (ie, that of a functional adult) is shown to be sloppiness and neglect, while the younger Alice’s atypical affect is portrayed as an ominous portent of her pathology.
Munro’s betrayal of her daughter is unconscionable, but her orientation toward her own experience is basically immaterial, as I see it. It provides no insight.