Freezing. Childhood sexual abuse and the impact it can have on the body and the brain

Abstract

This thesis uses autoethnography of assemblage as its methodology, and philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad’s agential realism philosophy as its theoretical framework, in order to analyze how childhood sexual abuse can impact the body, specifically the back and the brain, and how theorizing about one’s abuse can lead into a different possibility on how oneself can relate to one’s abuse. It entangles theorizations of phenomenology, archive, and affect in order to understand the impact of childhood sexual abuse as something that does not operate within the realm of memory but rather of repetition. Then it analyzes the act of freezing through the agential realism philosophy to address the possibility for the impact of childhood sexual abuse to not be fixed nor pathologized. In other words, this thesis contemplates, while engaging with the author’s personal story of childhood sexual abuse, how the body can carry the impact of childhood sexual abuse and the possibility of relating to it in a nonfixed way.