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Dowager’s story-telling tales of trauma

Mark Aldous Vicars

Qualitative Research Journal

ISSN: 1443-9883

Article publication date: 3 December 2024

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Abstract

Purpose

In this paper, queerly contoured stories of trauma fold in the ambiguous and contradictory knowledges of the body. I posit that trauma-informed identities are not fabricated fictions and that they can sediment subjects into being and behaving in certain ways.

Design/methodology/approach

Stories, legitimate and illegitimate, circulate in almost every sphere of everyday life, and drawing on a friendship as source material, I present a reconstructed life history narrative to show how queer life stories can productively reveal the unspoken and disciplining pedagogies of trauma in LGBTQ lifeworlds.

Findings

In speaking of and about embodying intersectional differences underlying social values and cultural attitudes of sexual differences, its presence becomes another lens to narrate trauma and understand how it is bound to heteronormative social equity, inequalities and injustices.

Research limitations/implications

I posit that trauma-informed identities can sediment queer subjects into being and behaving in self-denying, self-injurious and at-risk behaviours.

Practical implications

In speaking of and about embodying intersectional differences underlying social values and cultural attitudes of sexual differences, its presence becomes a lens to engage trauma and understand how it is perceived as being bound to social equity, inequalities and injustices.

Originality/value

In the narrative presented in this paper, there is an implicit critical reflection on narrating the purposes, practices and actions of queer positionality vis-à-vis the represented “norm”.

Keywords

Citation

Vicars, M.A. (2024), "Dowager’s story-telling tales of trauma", Qualitative Research Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-02-2024-0033

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024, Emerald Publishing Limited

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