"A dauntless and
harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence." --Publishers
Weekly
In
Everything I Never Wanted to Know, Christine Hume confronts
the stigma and vulnerability of women's bodies in the US. She
explores bodily autonomy and sexual assault alongside the National
Sex Offender Registry in order to invoke not solutions but a
willingness to complicate our ideas of justice and defend every
human's right to be treated like a member of the community. Feminist
autobiography threads into historical narrative and cultural
criticism about the Victorian-era Frozen Charlotte doll; the Nylon
Riots of the 1940s; the movie Halloween; Larry Nassar, who
practiced in Hume's home state of Michigan; and other material. In
these reflections on sexuality, gender, criminality, and violence,
Hume asks readers to reconsider what we have collectively normalized
and how we are each complicit, writing through the darkness of what
we don't want to see, what we'd rather not believe, and what some of
us have long tried to forget.