Children as Commodities in the American Suburban Home: Joyce Carol Oates’s Adaptation of the Ramsey Case in "My Sister, My Love"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.24.2.2Keywords:
Joyce Carol Oates, children exploitation, Ramsey Case, American suburbsAbstract
Joyce Carol Oates's My Sister, My Love is a fictional memoir inspired by the unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey. The novel, told from the perspective of the victim's brother, satirizes the exploitation of children in beauty pageants and the superficiality of suburban life. Through a counter-memory narrative, Oates sheds light on the hidden abuse endured by children, revealing the dark underbelly of a seemingly perfect family. The novel serves as a powerful critique of societal pressures and the devastating consequences for young victims.
References
Alexander, C., & McMaster, J. (2005). The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf. Cambridge University Press.
Allen, M. (1976). The Necessary Blankness, Women in Major Fiction of the Sixties. University Press of Illinois.
Arcana, J. (1979). Our Mother’s Daughters. Shameless Hussy Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Texas University Press.
Blaffer Hrdy, S. (1999). Mother Nature: History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. Pantheon Books.
Douglas, J. E., Olshaker, M. (2000). The Cases that Haunt Us. Scribner.
Farnham, M., & Lundberg, F. (1947). Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. Harper & Brothers Publishers.
Foley, D. (2011, September 27). Joyce Carol Oates on her Fictional Version of the JonBenet Ramsey Murder. Newark Star-Ledger. http://dylanmfoley.blogspot.com/2011/09/joyce-carol-oates-on-her-fictional.html
Hodges, A. G. (1998). A Mother Gone Bad: The Hidden Confession of JonBenét’s Killer. Village House.
Johnson, G. (1998). Joyce Carol Oates: Invisible Writer. Plume.
Katz, C. (2011). Accumulation, Excess, Childhood: Toward a Countertopography of Risk and Waste. Documents d’Analisi Geografica, 57(1), 47-60. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/dag.806
Katz, C. (2012). Just Managing: American Middle-Class Parenthood in Insecure Times. In R. Heiman, C. Freeman, & M. Liechty (Eds.), The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography (pp. 169-188). SAR Press.
Klein, M. (1998). Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945. Vintage.
Lipsitz, G. (2001). Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. University of Minnesota Press.
Oates, J. C. (1999, June 24). The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey. New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/06/24/the-mystery-of-jonbenet-ramsey
Oates, J. C. (2008). My Sister, My Love. Harper Collins.
Parker, R. (1995). Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence. Basic Books.
Pickering, S. J. (1974). The Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates. Georgia Review, 28(2), 218-226.
Ramsey, J., & Ramsey, P. (2001). The Death of Innocence. Onyx.
Ricoeur, P. (1985). Time and Narrative. University Press of Chicago.
Schiller, L. (1999). Perfect Murder, Perfect Town: JonBenét and the City of Boulder. Harper Collins.
Shields, D. (2010). Reality Hunger. A Manifesto. A. Knopf. https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2010.0041
Smith, C. (1999). Death of a Little Princess: The Tragic Story of the Murder of JonBenét Ramsey. St. Martin’s Press.
Thomas, S. (2000). JonBenét: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation. St. Martin’s Press.
Yagoda, B. (2009). Memoir, a History. Riverhead Books.
Zaretsky, N. (2007). No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline 1968-1980. Chapel Hill: University Press of North Carolina. https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807867808_zaretsky
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Barbara Miceli

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Access Policy and Content Licensing
All published articles on the ESNBU site are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes. The terms on which the article is published allow the posting of the published article (Version of Record) in any repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Note that prior to, and including, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2024, articles were licensed under the Non-commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. The transition to CC BY 4.0 is effective as of Volume 11, Issue 1, 2025.
In other words, under the CC BY 4.0 license users are free to
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
Under the following terms:
Attribution (by) - You must give appropriate credit (Title, Author, Source, License), provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Notice: No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.
If the law requires that the article be published in the public domain, authors will notify ESNBU at the time of submission, and in such cases the article shall be released under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver CC0 1.0 Universal.
Copyright
Copyright for articles published in ESNBU are retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. Authors retain full publishing rights and are encouraged to upload their work to institutional repositories, social academic networking sites, etc. ESNBU is not responsible for subsequent uses of the work. It is the author's responsibility to bring an infringement action if so desired by the author.
Exceptions to copyright policy
Occasionally ESNBU may co-publish articles jointly with other publishers, and different licensing conditions may then apply.