This arts-based PhD investigates microaggressions against queer bodies through an experimental documentary film art process. While the idea of a spectacular, very violent, and rupturing trauma experience begins to take on more nuanced perspectives through inquiries of feminist, post/de/anticolonial and queer scholarship, the particular fragmented, embodied and subjective affects of an exposure to microaggressions have as of yet not been fully understood within trauma studies. What do microaggressions do with queer bodies? How do they change their shape and distort their appearance, thus enacting oppression on and beneath the surface of queer bodies?

 

This study uses experimental film aesthetics and a queer film-phenomenological lens informed by Sara Ahmed (2006) and Katharina Lindner (2018) to question dominant understandings of trauma as rupture and demands a sensibility to forms of violence that are invisible, intangible, fragmented or purely embodied. Introducing a queer politics of encountering and sharing trauma on a sensory level, this study particularly explores what the cumulative, piercing nature of microaggressions takes out of queer people’s grasp, yet also the potentials of aesthetic and practical disorientation for building new lines of thought and action.

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This artistic exposition presents the three creative projects that shaped this PhD thesis: what it felt like to dream fire I-III, me in my gut and over/exposed. 

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The co-creative film art exhibition over/exposed acts as the main vehicle to (de)construct spaces of queerness, co-creation and trauma in experimental documentary film. The earlier projects what it felt like to dream fire I-III and me in my gut were initial experiments to explore a drawing near traumatic experience and to develop my filmmaking method 'in the doing'. Yet, they also took on a distinct life of their own, as they were shown in various gallery and film festival contexts.

 

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