ABSTRACT
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. This chapter deals with the work of Hershman, in order to broach the vicissitudes of traumatic memory. Traumatic memories are highly fraught 'imaginary scenes' that are constructed with regard to reality rather than reincarnating it; a traumatic memory both weaves itself around and substitutes for an event too terrible to acknowledge non-traumatically. Hershman's work fits into and helps define a 'trauma cinema' of the 1980s and 1990s in which unconventional filmic strategies raise epistemological questions about history, memory, and representation. A person who is traumatized will re-experience such events as 'recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including images, thoughts, or perceptions', that may take the form of memories, dreams, flashbacks, hallucinations, recurrences, and/or dissociation.
