MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the introduction to Michelle Tea’s 2003 anthology Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, Tea highlights the importance of writing for working-class writers: “We write to tell the truth, our writings like graffiti on the surface of the moneyed culture at large … for poor and working-class writers, writing itself is a survival skill” (xv). Following two decades of literary scholars unraveling the powerful interconnections of gender and race in trauma writing, this presentation pairs Tea’s insights with research in the burgeoning field of scriptotherapy to demonstrate the function of writing in class-based trauma solidarity, if not recovery. Scriptotherapy, often defined as the attempted working through of trauma via life writing, is commonly cast as simply a scribal version of the psychoanalytic analyser-analysand relationship. However, as a number of contributions to Without a Net illustrate, there can be many important, affected interlocutors in the scriptotherapeutic act. And expressed, shared traumas can become a political rallying point for all participants. In particular, writing on class-based traumas can be rightly understood as occasions for not just catharsis but political organization and reorientation. This presentation combines the frame of scriptotherapy (as established by psychologists James Pennebaker and Judith Herman and literary critic Suzette Henke) with Tea’s work to highlight the parallels between class- and gender- and race-based trauma writing and to consider the political possibilities of writing as a survival skill.