phd /2: microaggressions, affect and trauma

overexposed at the pipe factory, glasgow, june 2023

Have you ever felt that you needed to hide a part of yourself?

Did someone ever look at you strangely, whisper to someone else, or look away?

Did it make you uncomfortable, but really, it's "just" a gaze, joke or harmless comment?

Trauma studies, a field in the humanities that emerged in the 1990s from European post-structural, psychoanalytic thought, predominantly understands trauma as a violent, rupturing and rare experience. While the field begins to take a more nuanced gaze at experiences other than those of white, male, straight and able-bodied people (take a look at Michael Rothberg, Victoria Burrows, Ann Cvetkovich or Stef Craps) trauma is still assumed to occur with a crushing force.

Having been interested in representations of trauma in film for some years, I had so far looked at precisely those exceptional limit experiences. However, as I prepared for my PhD, I wanted to look the other way. I wondered what was missing from these discussions. What about painful experiences that don't only happen once, limited to a specific time or place? What about small, subtle intrusions that can take place anywhere, at any time?

I wanted to take a closer look at microaggressions as they are experienced by queer people.

Scientific research in psychology and education has already done this work. There are countless studies that microaggressions, even though they occur subtly and often unnoticed, can have the same impact on mental and physical health as incisive, violent traumas. Depression, anxiety, low mood, PTSD with all their different manifestations such as tense muscles, nausea, nightmares, panic attacks, low self-worth. Read more for example in Kevin Nadal's expansive work: https://openjournals.bsu.edu/jsacp/article/view/3035

But apart from definitions and scientific measurements, what do microaggressions do with queer bodies? How do they influence how we move in the world? How they change how we present ourselves, our shapes and contours?

The exhibition over/exposed, which I co-created with Lu Castello, Cristina Delgado, Ace V!s!on, Flava J and Bee Asha, explored the affects of microaggressions. We wanted to articulate through film, photography and video installations what it feels like to be exposed to the pervasive sense that "something" is wrong with our identites or bodies. At the same time, we wanted to share the comfort and confidence that we felt in our collective process, which did not make distinctions between director/researcher and subject/researched.

installations, over/exposed, june 2023, leith arches edinburgh and pipe factory glasgow

Being in a constant spotlight,

feeling fragmented,

stepped on,

blurring with the background,

bordering on invisibility

and also--

sharing thoughts,

resting within an artwork,

opening conversations.

Each artwork had an element of relationality and collectivity that drew the viewer close to the image and the image bodies. Some artworks needed the viewer to step in, to touch the artwork, to become part of it, in order to produce meaning and thought.

This closeness is what Herzogenrath (and Deleuze, Bennett and many more; see previous post) call an encounter. Something that forces the viewer to think and feel - rather than looking at it from a distance.

The exhibition with its long-exposed imagery and lingering co-creation is at the core of my findings: by understanding our bodies and experiences through the camera, it became clear that trauma does not always occur as a rupture. Trauma may occur as an overexposure. Rather than a sudden rupture that changes how we understand the world from one day to the next, trauma can slowly, over time, stretch us, fragment and distort our sense of self. We smile, while also screaming. We nod along while also faltering. Recurring frictions and abrasions might grind through the surface of our bodies, and form an ontological base. Trauma is the given, not the exception.

This is a difficult realisation to make when it happens to your own body. And this is where arts-based methods in research have real, tangible value.

For, the implications of these findings are that we cannot necessarily approach healing trauma through a careful return to a painful, hidden memory in our psyche, as it is traditionally done in psychotherapy. With microaggressions, we might know and remember very well what causes us pain, but wider structural acceptance of queerphobia and racism make microaggressions an omni-present reality that indeed reoccurs all the time. In turn, we have found that the empathic encounter that art and a co-creative process can stimulate is an energy-inducing and powerful mechanism for healing. The lines that we can create between each other, those that refract outward from an artwork, may in this case be stronger than those that go back to countless traumatic experiences in the past.

So my call is for understanding the bonds that art often creates, and letting them unfold and manifest also in a research context.

If you're into academic writing, read the whole thesis here: https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/14291