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She also learned about trauma and through joining online support groups and by writing, she acquired the necessary language needed to challenge the narratives about size, womanhood, and skin color (among others), and she could reframe these ideas and finally give voice to her shame.
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“With my tattoos, I get to say, these are choices I make for my body, with full-throated consent…This is how I take my body back” (p. For Roxane, marking her body was a way to reclaim her own skin. These ideas were easier in theory than in practice.Īlthough she struggled immensely with self-loathing and early on sought to stay permanently invisible, there were saving graces throughout Roxane’s life: relating to the characters in the novels she read, friendships made in theater class and with camp counselors, finding enjoyment in classes, academics, and writing, even getting tattooed. She mentions this often throughout the book. However, knowing intellectually what was harmful to her, and doing what might be more healthy for her, was not so cut-and-dried. This may not have been the best way to measure, but at least it was a start. Additionally, for Roxane, the experience, along with subsequent, mostly dysfunctional relationships throughout her 20s and 30s, may have later helped to shed light revealing what she didn’t want for herself.
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For a year, she immersed herself in a life that caused a tremendous downward spiral, but she was doing so on her own terms.
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87, 90-91), I saw this as her first attempt to break free from everyone’s expectations and gazes. When Roxane left school and disappeared, though she had totally succumbed to her vices (p.p. She had to live a double life to try and please them until she couldn’t. In addition to shouldering the blame for her situation, she felt as though she was a bad daughter-certainly not the daughter they believed her to be, the good Catholic straight-A student.
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Though her family meant well, their concerns, comments, and suggestions regarding Roxane’s weight and health only further burdened her. Roxane’s painful experiences with shame and self-loathing were compounded by the relentless panoptic gazes of society, strangers, lovers, later, the medical community, and family. And she comes to the conclusion early on that she is deserving of such mistreatment because she lacks the discipline that she and society tell her she must have to overcome the unruliness of her body. 45) while subsequently trying to build an impenetrable fortress that no one could breach, that was her body. So began Roxane’s relationship with eating to excess. Roxane’s hidden shame deepened exponentially after being betrayed by Christopher, and after the gang rape and violence that was done to her, but that she returned to Christopher after the rape, broke her. She struggles throughout the book with the reality of having put up with it (p. I had no reason to have such low self-esteem at twelve years old” (p. She writes of her relationship with Christopher, “In truth, he treated me terribly and I thought I should be grateful that he bothered to treat me terribly, that he bothered with a girl like me at all. Roxanne Gay’s Hunger is a memoir about shame: how that shame manifests and perpetuates when buried, and how, under the right conditions, one may find healing when that shame is unearthed.Īs early as age 12, though she had loving and nurturing parents, Roxane experienced some level of shame before the rape. Please make it like these other two students have done. Here are students replies please write about what the reading of “Hunger” made you feel and create discussion. Your posts should be 300 words minimum and should close-read a passage (or passages) from the memoir and from a theoretical essay (or essays) begin to “put them in conversation” as you did for your Short Analysis Essay. You’ll also find that your classmates’ ideas and interpretations can serve as catalysts for your own analysis later in your own Body Stories. In your posts (due by Monday at midnight), you may find that you raise more questions than you answer in these posts. Use this Discussion Board to work through thoughts, reactions, and questions in informal, low-stakes writing as you read Hunger.