Abstract
Situated within the field of women's photographic practice, this chapter investigates the relationship between trauma, memory, and the embodied trace. Using practice examples, the text explores how self-performed modes of self-representation might offer insights into the complex—psychological and physiological—inscriptions left by trauma. Evaluating this relationship, the text draws on analyses by Griselda Pollock, Jill Bennett, and Margaret Iversen. The argument supports post-qualitative research methods that unfold subjective material through the ‘doing-thinking-making' process. Approached through posthuman and new materialist frameworks referencing Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti, the chapter examines how a diffractive—rather than purely reflective—methodology can synthesise praxis and theory through affective photographic outcomes. The chapter concludes by evaluating how a diffractive approach to photographic self-representation can be productive for re-thinking the self, re-interpreting narratives of trauma, and re-imagining the way we see ourselves in our ‘becoming-with' others.
Many voices speak here in the interstices, a cacophony of always already reiteratively intra-acting stories. These are entangled tales. Each is diffractively threaded through and enfolded in the other. ~ (Barad, 2018)
TopIntroduction
This research enquiry is situated within the field of women’s arts-based practice-research, where the traces of trauma and its effects are examined through my personal perspective as an arts practitioner-researcher. Using embodied and performative modes of self-representation and photographic intervention, I draw on subjectively-situated narratives to re-think and re-imagine the self through a series of works. Organised in three interrelated and overlapping thematic strands, examples are discussed and developed through Case Studies, comprising: Case Study 1: Fragments,Case Study 2: The Damaged Family, and Case Study 3: Inscriptions.
Considering how embodied, empirical and investigative modes of photographic practice might be approached, I refer to contemporary posthuman and new materialist theory to re-think and frame my analysis. Pioneering feminist theorists Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti provide this framework by opening imaginative spaces for enquiry and creative concept-making. However, I also acknowledge work by black feminist scholars including writer and educator bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins) and African-American, self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ Audre Lorde, as influential activists dealing with subjecthood and issues of personal and collective trauma. This enquiry opens a speculative site for the archaeological or genealogical tracing of traumatic memory, and for exploring how a ‘diffractive’ methodological approach (Barad 2007, 2014; Davies 2014a, 2014b, 2017; Bozalek, 2017; van der Tuin, 2018) might provide a way for re-mapping the cartographic contours engraved in territories of the traumatised self. Against this milieu, the chapter proposes an alternative way for reconfiguring subjectivity in relation to trauma.
This prompts two questions: First, how might the effects of trauma be expressed through exploratory and performative modes of self-representation in women’s photographic art practice? Second, how might a diffractive posthuman methodology support such a practice-led enquiry into the traumatised self? Responding to these questions the focus will be to ‘unfold’ (Gilles Deleuze, 1980/2004, 1993/2006) the ‘psychic wounds’ (Gavin Delahunty, 2021) embedded within the material and discursive artefacts emerging from the creative process.
Using photographic practice as a critical and artistic tool for navigating this enquiry, I argue that Barad’s (2007) concept of ‘entanglement’ and adapted Deleuzian concept of the heterogeneous ‘assemblage’, enable a posthumanly-grounded understanding of what art of trauma does. I also argue that the embodied effects of trauma and dynamic operations enacted through the creative process, align with Barad’s (2007) model of ‘intra-action’ in the way they impact, structure and re-structure the entangled subject. Further, using photography as a performative medium, I argue that a diffractive methodology is “respectful of the entanglement of ideas and other materials in ways that reflexive methodologies are not” (Barad, 2007, p. 24). This offers a contemporary posthuman understanding of how the complex patterns of trauma and autobiographical memory are intertwined.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Material-Discursive Practices: For me, this much used but tricky ‘materialist’ term emphasises the way matter (the material or the concrete) and thought (the abstract or the theoretical), combine to define and articulate each other to produce meaning. In Barad’s understanding this means neither the material nor the discursive exist - in an ontological or epistemological sense - prior to each other. The material and discursive do not stand separately, but co-constitute or mutually articulate each other (see Barad, 2007 , p. 152).
Diffractive Methodology: Whilst the notion of diffraction for understanding the interference patterns of waves is widely recognised in classical physics, its application as an optical metaphor and methodology in practice-based research is relatively nascent. By responding to the lines of flight emerging from, embodied within and prompted by, the performative creative process, a diffractive methodology ‘troubles’ well-worn art historical and philosophical epistemologies for knowledge production. In diffraction, the subjective or positional perspective of the researcher - e.g. their history, experience, memories and emotions – is taken into account and contributes to enacting new configurations of thought. As a practical approach, diffraction presents a hybrid methodology for thinking-with complexity and through the entangled relationships between data, materials, ideas and performative processes of making. Through a deeper appreciation of the entangled relationships between research and researcher, the diffractive structure of the ‘research assemblage’ de-centres traditional anthropocentric or representational modes of interpretation, offering more imaginative ways to ‘materialise’ affective thought. Adopted by contemporary feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, diffraction offers a different kind of critical consciousness that attends to emerging ‘differences’. Rather than simply reflecting, comparing, contrasting or using binary oppositions, diffractively engaging with material/s allow us to think transversally across multiple, disciplinary fields of knowledge - to think-otherwise and think-anew. (See: Fox & Alldred, 2021 ; Sayal-Bennett, 2018 ; Geerts & van der Tuin, 2016 ; Andersen & Otterstad, 2014 ; Barad, 2007 ; Haraway, 1992 , 1997 ).
TRACE: Related to ‘inscription’, for me, ‘trace’ alludes to the residues or remnants left by the traumatic inscription of a disturbing event, experience or encounter. The ‘trace’ may be clearly seen or only perceived in/on human and non-human bodies, and can act as a symbolic signifier for an unnamed trauma or hidden historical memory (See Iversen, 2017 ).
Posthuman: The term ‘posthuman’ describes a movement of thought which negotiates our human predicament in the Anthropocene. Posthuman theory proposes that entities - such as human and non-human others, nature and culture - are mutually-constituted, advocating for an ethics of care, account-ability and response-ability. The posthuman subject is therefore an embodied, embedded, relational and affective entity that is becoming-with the world (See Braidotti, 2013 , 2019b ).
Embodied: I use the term ‘embodied’ to indicate bodily participation, involvement or inclusion in modes of engagement. Performatively enacted or engendered through the creative art-making process and its productive artefacts, embodiment can give visible form to the way an idea is incorporated, materialised or comes to matter in, with or through bodies (see Schechner, 2006 ).
Assemblage: I use ‘assemblage’ to describe an evolving and open-ended synthesis of forces, entities and processes that self-perpetuate and go beyond themselves to create something generatively more-than , or outside the whole. The ‘assemblage’ cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. As a concept, ‘assemblage’ originates in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980 AU76: The in-text citation "Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. /2004) philosophical thought, consequently adapted by physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad (2007) for a new materialist understanding of the term. Jane Bennett (2010) similarly adopts the term: ‘Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within’ (pp. 23–24).
Affect: I use ‘affect’ to describe an intense, dynamic and materialising force that can be transmitted in ways that enact or enable transformative encounter. Emerging through a relational network of human and non-human actants or entities, affect is encountered or experienced at a deep perceptual level as a felt sense. Affect permeates our corporeal boundaries dispelling notions of a distinct inside/outside. See: Jill Bennett (2005) and Teresa Brennan (2003) .
Intra-Action: Distinct from ‘interaction’, which suggests separate pre-established entities coming together and participating with each other, ‘intra-action’ proposes that agency is not an intrinsic or fixed property of entities, but enacted as a dynamism of forces. With intra-action ‘things’ are constantly in-process. As a critique of objectivity, intra-action between say an apparatus of measurement and the material measured, or between research and researcher, causes things to change or phenomena to emerge (see Barad, 2007 , pp. 139-141).
Posthuman Convergence: The Posthuman Convergence is located between the Fourth Industrial Age and Sixth Extinction and describes the posthuman condition in relation to the inseparability of ethics, ontology and epistemology—neologistically termed ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ by Karen Barad (2007 , p. 185; see also Braidotti, 2019b , pp. 6-13).
Performative: Creating works of self-representation oblige a ‘performative’ mode of engagement and production. Further, even if no part of me or my body appears in an image, performative interventions are implicated in the work. For example, creating a backdrop or mise en scène for a photographic shoot is a performatively enacted process. In this way, autobiographical works may also ‘perform’ identity (See Butler, 1993 AU78: The in-text citation "Butler, 1993" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. /2011).
Inscription: In my practice-research I use the term ‘inscription’ to explore the process of how trauma impacts the body. I use inscription literally/metaphorically to reference the physical/psychological imprints or marks left on bodies in relation to the effects of trauma. Trauma is ‘inscribed’ onto and into the human body, transforming the subject and reconfiguring subjectivity, as described by Bessel van der Kolk (2015) AU77: The citation "van der Kolk (2015)" matches the reference "Van der Kolk, 2015", but the capitalization is different. in The Body Keeps the Score .
Entanglement: My posthuman or new materialist understanding of ‘entanglement’ relates to Karen Barad’s (2007) idea that entities are ontologically inseparable - they do not exist in isolation, even if they appear to be independent. ‘Entanglement’ thus describes a field of relations that materialise entities through their intra-action. In a field of relations, for example: a particular scene, observation, materials, photographic apparatus, history, memory, imagination and processes of production, phenomena emerge through their intra-active entanglement. In this way, the separation of the artist and artwork, or researcher and research, might be more productively thought-together - constituted through their ‘entangled’ field of relations.