The Traumatophilic Wound That Remains Is What Teaches: Carving a Queer Kinky Otherwise- Through Lorde and Michelangelo’s David

• In Event: Counter-Storytelling for Queer & Trans Epistemic Justice

Abstract

This begins in the wound and persists. It presses its ear to the ache and listens, again and again, for the rhythm of my return. I trace queer pain not as rupture to be resolved but as a method; recursive, intimate, and pulsing. I stay with what bruises. I breathe alongside it. I carve toward the cuts. Informed by traumatophilia (Saketopoulou, 2023; 2024), I follow repetition, heartbreak, kink, and sonic memory, not to recover, but to (be)come. The blade sings. The scar writes back. I etch myself toward the otherwise- and when I remain, joy curls beside the grief like breath against stone, I cannot be carved from. The bones of this work are shaped by queer psychoanalysis and affect theory, Saketopoulou’s loop of traumatophilic return (2023; 2024), Muñoz’s queer temporality and deferred arrival (2009), and Berlant’s cruel entanglements with what we cannot let go (2011). I do not cite them; I breathe them. I hum them. I let them hollow and haunt me. Lorde’s David (2025) and Beirut’s Hadsel (2023) rupture inside me as sonic events, and not as evidence. They cut. They carve. They echo what was done to me. Michelangelo’s carving of David (be)comes a method: not the sculpted ideal, but the grief that could not be erased. I chip away at what was added to me without permission until something unrecognizable and alive emerges. My methodology is my spiral. It moves with no clean start, and no promise of an end. I write from the wound, into it, as it will not seal. I write what was done to me, and I do not clean it for the academy's comfort. I let the language stay sharp, swollen, and frantic. The spiral guides me back through trauma, kink, longing, heartbreak, dissociation and desire. This is fieldwork in my ache that pulses through flesh into the otherwise-
The data here lives in scar and silence, in the breath between verses, in the ghosts that visit me in bed and call themselves love. My archive is made of what was taken from me. My evidence is what remains. I spiral through the men who broke me. I name them. I sing to them. I spiral back through the kinks they left behind in grief, and transform them into joy. The classroom is transformed into a kink scene. The curriculum bruises, while pedagogy bleeds. Each return (be)comes a trembling lesson in how to live otherwise- (Saketopoulou, 2023; 2024; Muñoz, 2009). This contribution pulses through queer pedagogy, trauma theory, kink studies, and poetic inquiry. It refuses the lie of recovery and names recursive longing as a site of queer knowledge production. It speaks the unspeakable in a tongue braided from my ache. I offer a methodology shaped by haunting, by kink, by the ghosts that press into my flesh and never leave.

Author

• Maclean Frey, University of Toronto - OISE