Paper short abstract:

This paper performs its healing. It draws on ethnographic research in an occupied courtyard in Barcelona, Spain, and the researcher's own embodied history of abandonment trauma to open a space for dialogue on the limits of autobiographical subjectify in ethnographic epistemology.

Paper long abstract:

I don't yet have the words, the theory. Traumatic event sounds definite enough to be outside myself. As if those bodies we shared, in the assembly, in the street before a home I save myself from calling my own. She kissed me—but this was supposed to be abstract, an abstraction into the general fold we must remember we never left. This is why I begin with safety, with holding (Winnicott), and move into the space of the unknown. There are two sets of arms here: one is ethnographic; the other, familial. Between them is the familiar space of making (hooks, Angelou). In 2019 I was in one of the most difficult relationships of my life. I had met her in an occupied courtyard where I hoped to be documenting (read, figuring out how to be alive and to care for myself) its social life. The relationship ended in me having a panic attack in public, in plain sight. Then I left, swearing I'd never return. In this paper, I draw on theories of the body (Moten, Lepecki, Dodge) to move through my embodied experience of having been a body in pain. Individuation is the process by which we, I, come to see ourselves as not we, but I. Childhood trauma informed my experience of being in relation to this woman, and I'd like to share some of the healing I've done around that and to show how theory can help us heal, rather than help us just think healing.