Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

In eight pages that include many visual images, Allison uses storytelling as testimony to share a short but devastating story—how she survived rape and other forms of violence from ages 5-15. The explicit content, she knows, is unsettling. Beyond presenting this difficult content, Allison offers an unsettling account of the relationship among power, violence, and desire as she critiques several blind spots she sees in how feminism of the day regarded Gender and Identity, the book’s third main theme.

In this section, as in some others, the most tension exists between the photographs and the narrative. The photos depict an idyllic childhood typical of nostalgic representations of mid-century, white childhood: a beach scene, the highly stylized cars of the 1950s and 60s, Christmas trees, dolls, little purses, frilly dresses, and picnics. In the edition on which this guide is based, these photos follow a short paragraph in which Allison bluntly states that her stepfather raped her and precede Allison’s examination of how she struggled over the years to tell that story.

The photos serve several purposes. Allison worries elsewhere about her life and those of the other Gibson girls and women being reduced to their trauma. The photos show that her early life wasn’t only that trauma, and they provide a kind of respite as Allison tells her hard story. Additionally, however, they highlight how the picture of a comfortable childhood—with all the trappings of the middle class—is a myth that erases and silences the truth of how brutal that childhood was for a working-class girl during the 1950s.

In the latter part of this section, Allison worries about the thread that connects these early experiences of sexual violence to her identity as a lesbian woman. The clueless therapist articulates feminism’s then-contemporary, mainstream concerns about stereotyping insurgent women—and lesbian women in particular—as being motivated and “made” by their hatred of men. Allison does hate her stepfather, and efforts to recover from what he did to her motivated her early sexual experiences with other women. However, she refutes that abuse was the root cause for her (or is the cause for any woman) to prefer loving women.

Confessing that in this text and to the therapist will probably read as dangerous to second-wave feminists, but Allison’s point is that her understanding of her identity, love, and sex evolve. Her nasty comment to the therapist about the faulty logic of seeing lesbian identity as the product of rape indicates some skepticism about how mainstream feminists of the day thought about women’s identity. Who Allison is or even what it means to her to be lesbian aren’t settled things, which is why she focuses on “change” in concluding this section. Her insistence on viewing her lesbian identity as something fluid has more in common with how subsequent generations of feminism thought (and think) about gender, so it’s reasonable to read this part of her memoir as a critique of the dominant form of feminism at the time.

Allison rattles feminism’s cage again when she explicitly talks about how much that early violence continues to shape how she understands desire and her identity. In contrast to the early photos of Allison and her sisters presenting as docile, middle-class children, the photos at the end of this section show Allison as a powerful figure with the potential for her own violence. The textual account of her and her sister turning on her stepfather with knives does the same thing.

Allison knows that she’s “not supposed to talk about sex like that—or about weapons or hatred or violence—and she never to put them in the context of sexual desire for fear of their being seen as “male,” “mean,” or arousing (“Did you get off on it?” [47]). By transgressing against the then-dominant account of how a woman, or a lesbian woman, was supposed to present her feminism or her femininity, Allison basically argues that the feminism of that age fundamentally misunderstood women, gender, and desire. Dominance and violence—and being aroused by them—are parts of many women’s experience of sexuality. Allison’s account of her identity, sex, and violence reveals an unfortunate fact about then-contemporary feminism (as embodied by the therapist). Such feminists think that gender can be neatly divided into binaries—like aggression and violence being inherently masculine and their opposites being inherently feminine.

The impact of all of this visual material, the bare account of the rape, and Allison’s harsh critiques of feminism make this section the heart of the memoir. From this point on, Allison uses the narrative to talk about how her understanding of what her story says about her identity and feminism is fluid and evolving.