Archival impulse in graphic memoirs: reading visual histories of child sexual abuse

This essay studies two graphic memoirs, Una’s Becoming Unbecoming (2015) and T.O. Walker’s Not My Shame (2017), unpacking the genre’s unique archival potential in documenting gender-based violence, and demonstrating how graphic memoirists participate in socio-cultural advocacy on the issue of child sexual abuse (CSA) by using the genre to build a feminist archive for progressive social interventions. The essay observes how, on one level, the memoir as a compilation of one’s lived experiences and traumatic memories offers a personal archive full of poignant silences within which the readers can co-construct narratives based on their subjective perspectives via critically imaginative encounters with the text. Simultaneously, the memoirs’ tangible recording of the reality of abuse also offers irrefutable testimonial evidence, and its visible public archive of horrors channels a mordant commentary on contemporary gender-based violence. By presenting lived experiences of abuse through material, visual, and narrative acts of graphic framing, and inviting the reader to co-constitute a public archive of gender-based violence, these memoirs ultimately perform a politically significant role, reframing dominant media narratives about child sexual abuse, and serving as vehicles of collective memory and democratic advocacy.