Queer Wounds: Writing Autobiography Past the Limits of Language

Abstract

This chapter is an exploration of the writing of wounds in autobiographical and epistolary writing (both my own, and Fanny Burney’s letter to her sister regarding a mastectomy that was performed without anaesthetic), and will challenge the trope of writing-trauma-as-healing. By calling into question the desire to recuperate the unreliable, traumatised life-writing narrator through writing-as-healing, I will argue that writing trauma is not at the limits of language, and that writing the wound is possible through writing in fragments and with poetry, where gaps in memory/narrative are celebrated and performed rather than closed down. I will argue that the fear of the wound, the need to ‘heal’, to close over, to suture, to de-suppurate, is the fear of the hole, the gap, the void. That by continuing to write wounds, unreliable life-writing narrators remain open to multiplicity, to the complex state of being not-healed, changed and changeable, inside-out and outside-in, and I posit that writing wounds is writing a Derridean hymenography, which has the ability to celebrate and commemorate the between-space that is both the wound, and the story of the wound.