Tattooed Souls: The Vocabulary of Sexuality and Trauma in Women’s Memoirs on Romanian Communist Prison Experience
Tattooed Souls: The Vocabulary of Sexuality and Trauma in Women’s Memoirs on Romanian Communist Prison Experience

Summary/Abstract: Departing from extended previous research on Romanian women’s Life Writing covering the Cold War and Romanian Communist dictatorship, the paper focuses on trauma and sexual intimidation within the context of political investigations and interrogatories described by female victims in their memoirs. The paper focuses on the manner in which trauma and more precisely sexual trauma is approached by these authors, with a special interest for their vocabulary options. The article discusses the perspective of Life Writing as documenting trauma for the generations to come but also as a discourse with a therapeutic function. Regarding sexual violence, language violence (verbal rape) and intimidation are mentioned by all the authors. In contrast to the violence of language suggested by the authors, these women authors, socialized in the interwar period, in the bourgeois environment, show a reluctance to talk about the body and sexual violence. Therefore, I am largely interested in the oblivions, gaps, omissions, silences but, at the same time, in the mechanisms through which the silenced and previously unheard voices of women, traditionally perceived as a “secondary people” or nation (Morar-Vulcu 2007), become more prominent in the last decade.

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