Biting the Tongue that Speaks You

Abstract

How do we speak usefully about unspeakable things? This paper draws on my doctoral research with survivors of spousal abuse and subsequent book to address the methodological and ethical challenges of producing knowledge within and from sites of trauma. Writing what we cannot know, in spaces where we have lost trust in language, connection and cohesive modernist subjectivity raises complex representational challenges. This paper explores the limits of making sense, and proposes alternative approaches, through writing wonder, writing art, writing dirty, being haunted, and troubling genre, illustrated by their application in my own work. Rather than offering problematic promises of recovery, these ways of writing through trauma reach for the redemptive possibilities of thought.