Body-fortress and text. Roxane Gay’s somatic practices

Abstract

The article concerns the somatic practices of the American writer and feminist Roxane Gay. The main direction of interpretation is determined by trauma embedded in the writer’s obese body, which she calls her ‘work’ or ‘achievement’, and takes on a narrative form in the book of memoirs titled Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. The author of the article examines somatic practices in both indicated areas. Firstly, she is interested in the mechanism of compulsive eating, which is Gay’s long-standing reaction to the rape she had experienced at the age of twelve. Secondly, she examines the themes, style and rhetoric of memories. The framework of the reading is determined primarily by the theory of trauma and traumatic visualization presented in the book Empathic Vision. Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art by Jill Bennett. This theory allows us to perceive Gay’s body as a work of art and understand how the effect of visibility is imposed on traumatic memory. The themes present in Gay’s memoir, in turn, allow us to look at it as a reparative text.