The nowhere place: an autofictional approach towards understanding the unspeakable dimensions of queer trauma.

Traumatic experiences are often marked by unspeakability. The impact of violence and its enduring effects on a survivor’s emotional landscape frequently resists articulation, eluding both language and traditional narrative forms. As the work of trauma writers and survivors such as Christina Sharpe, Cathy Caruth, and Dorothy Allison demonstrates, language often falls apart when called upon to represent the embodied, lived realities of individual and collective suffering, of violence and its reverberating aftermaths. As traumatic memory is often characterised by fragmentation, absence, and the persistent return of the past, trauma narratives are shaped by silence, disruption, and non-linearity. The limits of language mean that it lacks the capacity to fully bear witness to the complex and multifaceted dimensions of trauma.

This thesis employs a creative-critical autofictive methodology, comprising playwriting, literary close reading, creative freewriting, and critical as well as (auto)theoretical analysis to explore the creative, conceptual, and political potentialities of trauma’s fraught relationship with language. The play, titled The Nowhere Place, tells the story of four women who materialise in a sentient realm beyond this earth. The characters learn to navigate this land through engaging with the traumatic memories of their past and sharing these experiences with one another.

This thesis demonstrates how creative approaches can open new avenues for expressing and understanding trauma. The analysis chapters adopt a reflexive methodology, drawing on the voices of trauma theorists alongside writers of fiction and memoir. Grounded in my own lived experiences, I engage with autofiction as a visceral and empathetic means of navigating and representing trauma, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction to explore the complexities of queer identity, traumatic memory, and survival. Framing trauma as a response to the lived experience of violence, this project places emphasis on the survivor’s embodied reality and the enduring impact of violation.