Quotidian Trauma and Everyday Pain: Emancipation Through Creative Destruction

Abstract

Quotidian Trauma and Everyday Pain: Emancipation Through Creative Destruction is a research-creation thesis shaped by subjective embodied memories of abuse trauma. The research-creation comprises a series of sequential graphic stories and a poetry collection. These narratives re-imagine trauma’s impact on my maternal generations. Like women’s encounters with abuse trauma, women's stories were once narrated from male perspectives based on male-centered experience. However, women’s autobiography is now a validated scholarly discipline. Similarly, graphic medicine, the practice of using visual stories of bodies to help explain medical conditions, has carved a place for women’s knowledge. At the intersection of graphic memoir and graphic medicine, the stories in Quotidian Trauma and Everyday Pain: Emancipation Through Creative Destruction reveal my perspective on events according to my perceptions and beliefs. These are real stories of abused bodies and minds unfolding in images and words. They are thoughtful recollections filtered through the lens of trauma memory. As narrator, I tell these stories from a place in my body where trauma knowledge is stored and lives unacknowledged until it erupts, usually distorted and misunderstood. Then I deny this knowledge, forget it, rewrite it, re-store it, and finally re-imagine it through art. My written thesis draws on trauma, psychoanalytic feminist, storytelling, and graphic medicine theories to support embodied knowledge and my attempts to translate it. Although I engage with affect theory, I don’t engage with it critically. Time’s theories are the interlocutors that insert themselves firmly into my project, unsettling chronological stories with specific events in dialogues between them. Time connects the distance between body and mind in my creative process. Time and traumatic events, once experienced, are always in the past. It is not possible to re-visit time or re-experience traumatic events. But much of this project is dedicated to trying. Quotidian Trauma and Everyday Pain: Emancipation Through Creative Destruction is a story of time, of living in and out of time, of colliding times, of aging, and multi-generations. It is a story of traumas and a process reflecting attempts to imagine an impossible order in my life through art.