Abstract
This essay is a creative intervention into what it means to be traumatized. Drawing together memoir and theory, I make a case for working through sexual trauma in ways that go against the traditional ‘shape’ of what trauma is thought to be and how it should be responded to. ‘Doing trauma wrong’ makes space for trauma as affectively labile, and welcomes sensations that are often pathologized in clinical and therapeutic work—shame, anger, and feeling ‘broken’. I argue this pathologizing is integral to an historical psychiatrizing and depoliticizing of trauma, which deflects from the reality of sexual violence as systemic. I also argue that the dominant idea of trauma as a catastrophic, discrete event occludes from view sexual violence as chronic and endured by survivors as a quiet horror. Putting these ideas into practice, the writing is intended as a self-help experiment, and as a sort of ‘how-to’ for trauma for others, without being instructive. By laying bare on the page some of the most haunting and shameful details of my past, I hope to encourage by way of affective resonance others to embrace, or at least feel less awkward about, the inconsistencies and oddities of their own experiences. Ultimately, I hope to reduce the imperative to a seemingly self-evident happiness—a journey which is framed by normative assumptions and thrust upon sexual violence survivors in a bid to help them ‘get better.’
Highlights
Because of this, the shape of trauma becomes an imperative to suffer in the right way
There’s a deep body of queer and critical race theory that I take as a point of departure, and which explores depathologising trauma in relation to how it engages with Freud’s vision of melancholia – which is as a profound mourning that marks bodies as absorptive and self-indulgent, unable to turn away from the source of misery (Crimp 1989, 6)
Writing on living daily with the AIDS crisis, Douglas Crimp describes this in the context of public mournings of the dead – seen by AIDS activists as defeatist and sentimental
Summary
The shape of trauma becomes an imperative to suffer in the right way. I make room for these feelings by using writing to perform trauma as ongoing and affectively labile, in real-time. When I write about trauma, I don’t ascribe it any meaning – for me, there’s no theatre of the unconscious – but I do think it can be followed and traced with words, mapping out sensations.
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