Rituals of Sisterhood: Queer Girlhood and Trauma in Julia Armfield’s Private Rites (2024)

Abstract

This article examines Julia Armfield’s Private Rites (2024) through the intertwined lenses of intersectional girlhood, queer identity, and trauma theory. Drawing on recent work in girlhood studies, the analysis foregrounds Armfield’s depiction of three sisters—Isla, Irene, and Agnes—who struggle to navigate familial estrangement, the burdens of intergenerational trauma, and the precarities of queer adolescence within a climate-crisis dystopia. The study situates the novel against postfeminist cultural backdrops, resisting narratives of seamless empowerment and instead highlighting how trauma unsettles narrative and lived experience. Intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2000) underpins the discussion of privilege and vulnerability among the sisters, while queer theory (Sedgwick 1993; Halberstam 1998) illuminates Agnes’s affective and embodied navigation of sexuality and identity. Literary trauma theory is used to interpret Armfield’s narrative techniques, including fragmentation and nonlinear chronology, which reflect the persistence of wound and memory. Ultimately, the article argues that Private Rites advances contemporary fiction by probing the unstable ties of sisterhood, the affective volatility of queer girlhood, and the cyclical inheritance of trauma, offering a textured vision of survival that is marked by misrecognition, longing, and endurance.