Silenced Into Secrecy: Reclaiming Voice in the novels "Mean" and "Excavation"

For her capstone project, Jessica Susanto participated in the course FEMGEN 151: “Feminist Life Writing” and wrote a research paper analyzing the ways enforced silence serves as a tool of control in personal narratives of sexual violence. Ultimately, the project highlights how writing becomes an act of resistance: by reclaiming feminist voices through memoir. Focusing on the novels “Mean” by Myriam Gurba and “Excavation” by Wendy Ortiz, Susanto explores the ways secrecy, shame, and institutional complicity perpetuate cycles of abuse, particularly for young women of color. Gurba and Ortiz dismantle structures of silence and offer a path toward healing and survivor empowerment. Through close textual analysis, this paper examines how both memoirists were coerced into silence by their abusers and failed by the adults and systems around them; yet how writing reclaims power and reconstitutes voice. Student project deposited by department for archival purposes. Original work unavailable for public download due to permission restriction preferences of the author.