Mapping Trauma and Affect: Reading Child Body as Commodity in Patricia McCormick's Sold

This paper aims at situating sexual abuse, violence, and the body as a commodity in the context of affect and trauma.The study analyses Patricia McCormick's Sold, a narrative of a child who is sold into sexual slavery.The child body loses its livelihood, protective cultural artifacts, and social relationships when exposed to the commercial sex trade.The body's exposure to such horrific and awful experiences, which eventually induces inhibition, and diminution of the self, amplifies suffering and pain.This paper analyses McCormick's portrayal of a child sex worker's traumatized bodily experiences through Michel Foucault's concept that the body is disciplined to perform tasks efficiently, produce value for capital, and symbolize and perform political roles based on cultural expectations and societal norms.The scholarship of trauma advocates for a social constructivist process of thought and understands the significance of the body in structuring traumatized experiences in language.The sex worker's body is treated and controlled like an object and a commodity that is bargained, traded, or appropriated in divisible and fractional components.The paper consults Affect theory, such as Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi's concepts and its contemporary development, which focuses on cultural forms as sites for articulating embodied experiences.