So many of our colleagues and mentors composed work out of an attempt to respond to a trauma that shapes and orients their lives. Sarah Ahmed articulates this response to trauma, stating “Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies” (The Cultural Politics of Emotion 4). We are not separate from our trauma, and as we move through the field of rhetoric and composition, we take that trauma with us. We use the techniques we study to compose ourselves so that this trauma might be be understood.

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We wanted to understand the ways that we were shaped by our past traumas, daring to name what that trauma actually was. As Gloria Anzaldúa says, “Naming is how I make my presence known, how I assert who and what I am and want to be known as. Naming myself is a survival tactic” (To(o) Queer the Writer 164). As we began to name our experiences as trauma, we are then able to write our bodies alongside that trauma. Banks writes in “Written Through the Body,” “I know the bodies of others by knowing my own body, and vice versa; I read into those bodies as I read into my own” (25). Our trauma, internal as it might be, was a sort of object we could render through our narratives. As Ahmed states, “shaped by contact with objects and with others, with 'what' is near enough to be reached. Bodies may even take shape through such contact, or take the shape of that contact. What gets near is both shaped by what bodies do, which in turn affects what bodies can do” (54). We found as our trauma took shape, the way our bodies surfaced around it shifted as well.

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When we realized the investment of supporting one another through this research, we saw an opening that needed to be addressed. We found no model for supporting colleagues when they’re unraveling and being unraveled by work tied to trauma and pain. We had to do more than just be there for one another when it became too much to bear. We had to be prepared to ask questions to help drive the research forward. We had to help each other make connections between these pasts and the current moves we were making within our field. We had to be more than just colleagues and more than just friends. We developed an ethics of care that would allow us to enter safely into roles of scholar/writer/teacher/caretaker. We see this ethics of care as crucial to not just our own projects, but to the field of composition as a whole.

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Those with traumatic backgrounds will be present at any workplace, but the field of rhetoric and composition is in a unique position because of the way that it often forces its scholars to engage with their pasts and identities, despite trauma. Because of this, it is imperative that scholars be prepared to respectfully acknowledge and support their colleagues when this inevitable resurfacing of trauma occurs. We move from the assumption that to ethically care for our colleagues, we must also ethically care for their trauma. This project is, then, a move to articulate what that care might look like, paying particular attention to trauma’s effects on composition and the body.

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Writing is “a gesture of a body” (Anzaldúa). As scholars, we are often tasked to turn to our bodies, and, therefore, our own trauma, to compose.  As Banks writes “the violence, once inscribed on the body, is difficult to erase and, as such, may control the readings we do of ourselves, our experiences, and others” (25). If we are unable to separate the trauma from the body, it is imperative for us to be prepared to support the colleagues whose composition is also plagued by trauma. Since traumatic subjects like ourselves will always have trauma be an object in reach, its presence is a tattoo on the surface of our writing. “The action (writing) is what brings things near other things at the same time that the action (writing) is dependent on the nearness of things” (Ahmed, 64). When trauma is inlaid on the surface of our writing, we are inevitably shaped by its nearness. In this project we learned to reach for it, through it, and past it. What follows serves as an example and framework to conducting such research and performing the care needed for a colleague to also do this sort of work.