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Tracks

LAURA E. TANNER (ESSAY DATE 1994)

SOURCE: Tanner, Laura E. “‘Known in the Brain and Known in the Flesh’: Gender, Race, and the Vulnerable Body in Tracks.” In Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction, pp. 115-41. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Tanner discusses the double implications of gender and race in Erdrich’s portrayal of rape in her novelTracks.

Rape begins, like many other forms of violence, with the painful confrontation of two bodies; more importantly, however, its dynamics originate out of two opposing experiences of embodiment. For the male violator, embodiment emerges as a source of strength rather than vulnerability. Often imaged as solid, fixed, powerful, the body of the rapist is capable not only of asserting his presence but of appropriating, reshaping,...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Louise Erdrich (Essay Date 1995)
4. General Commentary
   1. Julie Tharp (Essay Date 1993)
   2. Annette Van Dyke (Essay Date 1999)
5. Title Commentary
   1. Tracks
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Feminism
2. Louise Erdrich