The Transformative Memoirs of the MeToo movement: A Cognitive Perspective on Roxane Gay’s Hunger, a Memoir of (My) Body and Vannessa Springora’s Consent: A Memoir as Transformative Readings

Abstract

This thesis is a theoretical exploration of the transformative potential of MeToo memoirs from a cognitive perspective. Conceptualizing memoirs written by sexual abuse survivors as a medium of the MeToo movement, I showcase how Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017) by Roxane Gay and Consent: A Memoir (2021) by Vanessa Springora could enact self-transformation in readers’ understandings regarding sexual violence and spark social change. Theories of foregrounding, transformative reading, and second-generation cognitive approaches are used to analyse the two case studies. In doing so, I demonstrate how vivid embodied descriptions of abuse could enact mental imagery, how the interchange of the memoirists’ past experiences and their present perspectives on sexual violence may afford identification, and lastly, how self-reflective narrative structures on the texts’ purposes could foster sympathy in readers. Through those textual affordances, I conclude that the memoirs, as contributions to the MeToo movement, prompt readers to reflect upon the political conceptualization of personal experiences of sexual abuse and reconsider their self- and other understandings, a transformation from which further social change follows.

Trigger warning: this thesis contains descriptions of rape, sexual abuse, paedophilia and abusive/offensive language.