Storied trauma: the violent chronotopic laminations of queer survivor narratives

This dissertation is a critical autobiography interanimating a queer feminist rhetorical/cultural analysis and critique in which I “de- and un- and re- compose” (Rhodes & Alexander, 2015) queer survivorship as a legible layer of literate identity. I attend to the blurring intersections of physical violence, identity-based-narrative violence, and public perceptions of violence against queer trauma survivors as discursive sites of disruption/becoming across time and space (Prior & Shipka, 2003). More specifically, I examine representative narratives of survivors who do not fit within culturally perpetuated rape myths and scripts (Hesford, 1999)— e.g., myself, Emma Sulkowicz, Melissa Etheridge. In doing so, I extend the project of queer rhetorics and composition by complicating understandings of dominant sexual assault discourse to account for the previously “unspeakable violations” (Girshick, 2002) of woman-on-woman sexual assault. A significant portion of this work is dedicated to examining how such violence rematerializes in various forms of narrative engagement upon circulation, reception, and participation. This work challenges normative categorizations separating personal, pedagogical, and scholarly lived-realities, positioning queer storying potential within multimodal composition across genre, medium, and discipline.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Kapczynski, Alexandria Nicole

Contributors dc:contributor

• Prior, Paul A.
• Prior, Paul A
• Murison, Justine S
• Rhodes, Jacqueline
• Russell, Lindsay R.

• Literate Identity
• Queer Literacy
• Queer Survivorship
• Queer Trauma
• Intersectional Literacy
• Feminist Rhetoric
• Queer Storytelling
• Critical Autobiography
• Queer Rhetoric And Composition
• Writing Across Media
• Queer Writing Studies

Statement dc:rights

• Alexandria Nicole Kapczynski, 2025

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130017

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F130017