Una’s Becoming Unbecoming, Visuality, and Sexual Trauma

The autographical narrative Becoming Unbecoming (2015) interweaves Una’s own coming-of-age story with the collective histories of women living in Yorkshire in the mid to late 1970s. The chapter considers Una’s formal and graphic strategies to work through her personal experience of sexual trauma alongside her exploration of the ‘Ripper’ murders, which she witnessed first-hand when growing up in Leeds. Becoming Unbecoming critiques the regimes of visuality that have framed the victims of gendered violence in the media, and produces alternative modalities of seeing that simultaneously draw attention to the silencing of women and to the challenge to represent trauma. Drawing on comics studies, gender theory, and extensive interviews with Una, the chapter explores how Becoming Unbecoming proposes new forms of visualization that are disengaged from the overt visuality of violence and its mythologizing implications for both victims and abusers.