The Traumatic Paradox

Lynn Hershman is a San Francisco-based performance and multi-media artist who, over the course of a career spanning more than thirty years, has explored the construction of self and identity. In her video works, particularly the autobiographical Electronic Diary series begun in the mid-1980s, these explorations of selfhood have adopted the technique of documentary direct address, but direct address pushed to its most radical ends, complemented with other forms of expression that irrupt strategically into the text, and used so as to foreground the specificity of the video medium. ¹ In Binge (1987) she confides to the camera, ironically, ‘I would never ever talk this way if someone were in the room’. And what she confides in particular are almost unbearable (her word) truths (her word) about her personal history of physical and sexual abuse and about how that history forms a link in a worldwide chain of human rights abuses. What makes Hershman's work radical, suggests the critic Julia Lesage, is its specifically feminist endeavor to bring to light the relationships among psychic fragmentation, the physical and sexual abuse of children, and patterns of men's domination and women's masochism under patriarchy. ²