A manual for girlhood – the embodied mechanical intertext in <i>Exploded View</i>

This paper interrogates my 2019 novel Exploded View , which uses a Holden workshop manual as its central scientific intertext and narrates a closely observed road trip from the west to the east coast of Australia. I reflect on the traumatic girlhood of the novel’s narrator and examine how she subverts the phallogocentric text of an automotive repair manual to question her silent place within the machinery of family and society. I look at how a motif like a car engine can function metaphorically and allegorically within a novel and unpick my use of the vocabulary of the workshop manual, its processes and its visual structures (the exploded view) and reflect on how they are used to represent the violent constraint of life for an Australian girl. I conclude with a reflection on my obsession with scientific intertexts and their subversion through situated, embodied or somatic knowledge. This is something I trace back to my status as a migrant searching to ground myself in this country and perhaps even before that as I attempted to situate the alphabet in its landscape.