We made it a point not to forge on with our stories of trauma with any level of certainty or clarity. We knew that it would have been dishonest, trying to tell a linear recounting of stories that have minced our memories. So we didn’t try to. But underlying this narrative is a thread. A thread that, when tugged on, unravels a question critical to composing in the field.
As we pull on the thread of the tapestry that reads “how does trauma compose bodies?” another question arises out of the knots: How can bodies compose trauma? We cite Payne here, from Bodily Discourses: When Students Write About Abuse and Eating Disorders: “At what point, then, is the body purely text? Purely physical? Neither? Both?” (xxi) We’ve tied up our fingers with these questions, cat’s cradle that outlines our composition. Without hesitation, we admit that our traumas have painted our bodies with patterns that we can no longer separate from ourselves. “I become aware of my body as having a surface only in the event[s] of feeling discomfort … that become transformed into pain through an act of reading and recognition … which is also a judgement” (Ahmed The Cultural Politics of Emotion 24). These traumas have constructed our bodies the same ways the dead eyes of our childhood pets keep us from being able to look at black marbles the same. But what we present here is itself a composition of trauma. What affordances allowed us to compose this story? When we’re asked to create with a series of sharp-edged memories, how do we keep from being pierced?
Quoting Ahmed here, “Does this mean that there is a way of relating to breaking that does not aim for restoration? Can fragments reassemble in or from being shattered? Wear and tear: traces of time on the surface of your body, the warmth of affection, comings and goings, the sharpness of an edge, things we endure; a raised voiced, brittle” (185 Living a Feminist Life).
What we want to emphasize here is an ethics of care that underscored all of our practices. It was this ethics of care for each other that allowed us to untangle our traumas for this project. What does it mean to have another pair of hands to unknot the tangles formed by our trauma? We argue that it was this ethics of care that we undertook with one another that allowed us the ability to move not past but through these traumas to inform our research.
Again, Ahmed: “Perhaps we need to develop a different orientation to breaking. We can value what is deemed broken; we can appreciate those bodies, those things, that are deemed to have bits and pieces missing. Breaking need not to be understood only as the loss of the integrity of something, but as the acquisition of something else, whatever that else might be.” (180 Living a Feminist Life)
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This balance that our ethics of care had to rest on, precarious on a ledge overlooking panic attacks and dissociation, required a level of empathy. In being able to care for our colleague we must have some kind of similar experience to call upon ourselves. It was, perhaps, that very empathy that drew our research together in the first place. In being able to describe pasts that mirrored one another’s, we were then able to outline a process of composition that let our trauma remain in the same knots that had once clasped our mouths shut. Our ethics of care was not about ensuring that the trauma we shared meet the impossible notions of composition, as we see it--rather our ethics of care encourages the expression and composition of trauma in whatever ways it spills out of our bodies.
Unlike other projects that tend to prioritize a final product, our main concern throughout this project was the wellbeing of our colleague. This meant dedicating time to both composing and decompressing. This meant letting our work drift off of our to-do list as our other responsibilities piled up. Our ethics of care meant first caring for our bodies and then making a space for what those bodies composed. We consider this ethics of care inherently feminist in the ways that it prioritizes the needs of the body over the product the body produces. In a field with an unspoken “Publish or perish” mentality, we consider this ethics of care mandatory practice amongst colleagues. So much of our field is overrun by theory that stems from the personal lives of their producers. When those bodies are working from a space of trauma, being able to separate the work from the trauma itself can seem impossible. In producing from our trauma we often tie ourselves up in the same knots that have trapped our bodies in the past. An ethics of care for our colleagues who are trying to compose the very traumas that have written their bodies is a starting point for forwarding equitable research practices.