ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the deeply ambivalent representations of fame and infamy within urban captivity narratives. On the one hand, survivors take the pen to tell their stories, which some feminist critics situate as an emancipatory project. However, many of these authors (as well as their fictional protagonists) are openly critical of the public’s insatiable appetite to read about the lurid details of captivity and sexual abuse, which suggests that voicing experiences of trauma is more complex than simply liberatory. In order to complicate this interpretive frame, this chapter situates urban captivity narratives as examples of the Foucauldian sexual confession and subjectification. This chapter devotes considerable attention to memoirs of abduction and prolonged captivity, and explores the social, political, and economic forces that simultaneously silence survivors while compelling them to confess intimate and traumatic aspects of their experiences.
