Identity Work, Sexuality, and the Reception of Testimony: On Identification with Anne Frank

Identity Work, Sexuality, and the Reception of TestimonyOn Identification with Anne Frank Hannah Jakobsen (bio) A once-censored passage from Anne Frank's Diary has garnered increased attention in recent years. In the passage, Frank details her feelings about women's bodies and her friend Jacque: Once when I was spending the night at Jacque's, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she'd always hidden from me and which I'd never seen. I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other's breasts. Jacque refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy. Sometimes I find them so exquisite I have to struggle to hold back my tears. If only I had a girlfriend! (174–75) In online commentary about this passage, readers have used these words to characterize Frank's sexuality—though others have advocated against such speculation—with some even detailing an identification with Frank rooted in this passage that has to do with sexuality. Much of this strand of identification with Frank has taken place in online personal essays, with titles such as "How Anne Frank's Sexuality Helped Me Accept My Own" (Freeman) and "Anne Frank, My First Bisexual Hero" (Iyer), where authors write that they "knew exactly how Anne felt" when she "describes her attraction to women" (Hermes). Thinking about cases where an essayist reports relating to Frank's perceived sexuality first requires clarification of the concept of identification and of the stakes involved in identifying with Frank specifically. We should note that identification is an "embarrassingly ordinary process" (Fuss 1), which has nonetheless been under-theorized.1 As a simplified and amalgamized working definition, identification might be described as the affinity for or the influence of a character or a figure on a [End Page 50] reader. While many scholars have focused on the experience of identification understood as a ubiquitous part of media reception (Cohen), or framed it as an (often unstated) process that impacts self-formation (Fuss), others have begun the work of reframing inquiry on identification to examine why it is figured as much as how it works. Marisa Palacios Knox describes identification as a "flexible capacity instead of an emotional compulsion" (3), noting that it can contribute to "engagement in a larger cultural dialogue" (6), and Anna Poletti emphasizes the potential of identification to be a tool for the formation but also the expression of identity (1). Thinking about identification through its exposition in life writing specifically will help give shape to ideas around what identification looks like, but also, following Palacios Knox and Poletti, why it is figured. Any identification with Anne Frank occurs across time and vast difference—it sees the self in relation to another person, but one whose subject position as a Holocaust victim is starkly different from that of the reader, who might, for example, encounter the Diary while "living in a large comfortable house in Canada, filled with every material desire" (Iyer). Such identifications with Frank are also often forged through her writing, which although it is not dominated by the address of her circumstances directly (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Shandler), has become a canonical testimony to the Holocaust (Rosenfeld 95–162). Yet, most scholarly work on identification has centered on identification with persons encountered in life or with fictional characters, and theorists who have considered identification through testimony have tended to argue that the form actually discourages identification. Leigh Gilmore contends that while in general autobiographers "stand in place of the representative person," traumatic accounts like Frank's discourage identification, and therefore I (the reader) cannot "substitute myself for you" (22). That position—and the related argument that identifying with victims of atrocity can mean unduly and potentially unethically centering oneself in considering their experience (LaCapra)—would hold identification with Frank to be unethical or a misreading. Still, identification with Frank is widespread, even to the extent of its being an educational paradigm in approaching the text (Bos 416); and crucially for thinking about why identification is...

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