Dowager’s story-telling tales of trauma

Abstract

PurposeIn this paper, queerly contoured stories of trauma fold in the ambiguous and contradictory knowledges of the body. I posit that trauma-informed identities are not fabricated fictions and that they can sediment subjects into being and behaving in certain ways.Design/methodology/approachStories, legitimate and illegitimate, circulate in almost every sphere of everyday life, and drawing on a friendship as source material, I present a reconstructed life history narrative to show how queer life stories can productively reveal the unspoken and disciplining pedagogies of trauma in LGBTQ lifeworlds.FindingsIn speaking of and about embodying intersectional differences underlying social values and cultural attitudes of sexual differences, its presence becomes another lens to narrate trauma and understand how it is bound to heteronormative social equity, inequalities and injustices.Research limitations/implicationsI posit that trauma-informed identities can sediment queer subjects into being and behaving in self-denying, self-injurious and at-risk behaviours.Practical implicationsIn speaking of and about embodying intersectional differences underlying social values and cultural attitudes of sexual differences, its presence becomes a lens to engage trauma and understand how it is perceived as being bound to social equity, inequalities and injustices.Originality/valueIn the narrative presented in this paper, there is an implicit critical reflection on narrating the purposes, practices and actions of queer positionality vis-à-vis the represented “norm”.