Writing Witnessing, Witnessing Writing: Working Through Trauma Using Performative Autoethnography

Abstract

Centering on my transformation from a victim of sexual assault to a subject with sexual trauma, I examine how performative autoethnography differently addresses, responds to, and witnesses my own trauma. Kelly Oliver’s (2001) theory of witnessing provides a theoretical framework to witness through infinite address-ability and response-ability of subjectivity. In order to witness my trauma through increased subjectivity resulting from enhanced address-ability and response-ability, I use performative autoethnography as my methodology followed by Della Pollock’s (1998) six prompts for performative writing and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s (1982) experimental narrative style that intertwines multiple accounts, media, and genres of writing. I first create my multiple trauma subjects by intertwining myself with those who formerly worked through their trauma: My maternal grandmother Wonhwa Choi, who was subjected to ethnic abuse as a Northerner in postwar South Korea and dealt with her impending death, and a Korean comfort woman Duk-kyung Kang, who was an enforced sexual slave for the Japanese military during WWII. Second, in an attempt to increase address-ability to intertwined trauma, I include visual materials, such as my grandmother’s artifact, Hemp Shrouds (2012), and Kang’s painting, Lost Virginity (1995), that are used for their own witnessing. My  performative autoethnography becomes a site where the contingent, shifting, and emergent subjectivity of my trauma subjects are constructed for bearing witness. Therefore, the affective force of performative autoethnography enables writing to become witnessing itself, writing as witnessing and witnessing writing.