Lucia Rhiannon Harrison L&S Arts & Humanities
My Year of Rest and Relaxation and 21st century dissociative feminism
All the it-girls are dissociating. Dissociative feminism has become the new cool-girl branch of white, neoliberal feminism which has been picked up by teenage girls online who idolize problematic characters who dissociate to cope with their trauma. Otessa Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation while drawing on elements of the gothic genre, satirizes this new media trope. I argue that the rise in dissociative feminism is indicative of a larger social incapacity to cope with trauma through a particular affective position of dissociation, in response to socio-economic and racial conditions which construct particular reactions to emotion and trauma. Through an interdisciplinary study of Moshfegh’s novel, social media reception, and interviews with women or teens who have or do dissociate, I look at the ways emotions and affect are socially made and how dissociation as a response is a particularly contemporary response.
Message To Sponsor
Thank you to the Anselm A&H fund for providing me with this amazing opportunity to research something that is so close to my heart. I feel particularly impacted by social media and mental health challenges and am so grateful to be able to perform a sort of cultural diagnosis in the hope of providing the beginning of a path towards healing for teenage girls. I have learned so much both about my research topic and about the research process itself; I feel far more equipped to research in the future and am so grateful for all the skills I was able to acquire in working with the archive, interviews and literature. And, I feel far more comfortable in my research capabilities having this experience!