Archiving Trauma

My analysis of the works of Virginia Woolf and Cherríe Moraga reveals that insidious trauma pervades oppressed minority subjectivities which stems from ranked power relationships. Since trauma resists linguistic representation, the language used to express it will always be figural; for this reason figurative language provides us with a means of representing the ineffable experience of trauma. Trauma archiving is the process of articulating the specific nature of one's trauma(s) and observing the associated affects and traumas that ensued after the traumatic experience(s). Virginia Woolf validates trauma archiving by producing auto-biographical and experimental narratives. Cherríe Moraga's process of trauma archiving takes form in her retelling of ancestral indigenous myth to reconfigure individual and collective Chicana lesbian traumas. By unearthing trauma as a form of resistance to Chicano gender and sexuality norms, Moraga reconfigures a valid sexual, multi-ethnic self as a critical component to fashioning new communities. This work should be pertinent to academics in literary studies, trauma theory, cultural studies and queer theory.