Queer Trauma Across Borders Comparative Approaches to Literature, Film, and Sound

This book reframes trauma as not just a response to violence but a structural condition of queer subjectivity—an aesthetic, affective, and epistemological impasse. Through provocative readings of literature, film, music, and performance, the contributors expose how trauma disorients narrative, troubles identity, and resists the consolations of resolution. Urgent and uncompromising, this book offers a bold rethinking of trauma’s role in queer theory, literary studies, and cultural critique.

1 Introduction - Anchit Sathi.- Part I: Queer Trauma and the Closet.- 2 The Poison and/or the Cure: The Closet as Pharmakon in Tom at the Farm (2014) by Xavier Dolan - Cris Robu.- 3 Julien Baker, Scrupulosity, and Representations of Queer Religious Trauma in Song Lyrics - Nathan Fleshner.- Part II: Queer Trauma and Intersectionality.- 4 Familial Trauma and Queer Sexual Catharsis in Neel Mukherjee's A Life Apart - Caylum O'Neill.- 5 Painful Reflections: Trauma and Forgetting in Giovanni's Room and "The Other Man" - Ann Catherine Hoag.- Part III: Queer Trauma and Subjectivity.- 6 Performing a Self: Subjectivity and Queer Trauma in the Work of Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and Laure Murat - Per Esben Svelstad.- 7 ‘Ça fait un sacré chemin parcouru’: Displays of Queer Traumatology in Edouard Louis' Writing - Airelle Amédro.- Part IV: Queer Trauma and Healing.- 8 Cure, Camp and Technological Escapism: Healing as a Sci-Fi Fantasy in Robert Ferro's Second Son - Jaroslaw Milewski.- 9 Belonging through Unbelonging: Transgender Trauma and Heterotopic Spaces in Kaushik Ganguly's Nagarkirtan - Sucheta Choudhuri.

Anchit Sathi is a Franco-American independent scholar of comparative literature based in Berlin. He holds a Ph.D. from Queen Mary University of London, alongside MAs from the Sorbonne Nouvelle and Fern Universität in Hagen. His research focuses on queer kinship, trauma, and narrative across twentieth- and twenty-first-century world literature. Sathi has published in journals such as Textual Practice, German Life and Letters, Monatshefte, and Comparative Critical Studies, and is the co-editor of a recent essay collection on queer kinship in comparative literature. He has taught at the University of Potsdam and the University of Washington.