This volume presents eight integrated essays that explore the intersection of the scholarly fields of gender and trauma, combining work that can broadly be located in the subject areas of literary studies, the humanities, and the social sciences.
The contributors search for a more comprehensive theoretical ground to analyze the overlapping, inter-agency, and also, the lines that separate the issues of gender and trauma, to establish a more political linking of the materiality of the effects of trauma to the performativity of gender, as well as to examine the ways in which the categories of sex, sexual difference and sexual identity figure within such a relationship. Likewise, our discussion is guided by the increasing awareness of the cross-cultural delineation, dynamics, and translatability of these fields – the awareness that facilitates the understanding of the instances of their interference in the rhetoric of a dominant culture and in dominant societal structures. This specific input which refers to structurally quite comparable identity formations or to their prevention, and also to complex terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility, is the attainment of a joined intercultural and interdisciplinary work on some of the key concerns we are confronting today.
