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oai:figshare.com:article/34031916 2026-09-30T11:59:39Z portal_1188 item_type_8 month_year_09_2026

Pure Violence: A Queer Autoethnographic Investigation into Personal Trauma Italo Ferrante (25143628) N/A <p dir="ltr">Pure Violence articulates personal trauma through an autoethnographic investigation that recurrently combines academic criticism with life-writing. In this process, the thesis turns to autoethnography — i.e. a qualitative research methodology that unites the ethnographic mode of “looking outward at a world beyond one’s own” with the autobiographical process of “gazing inward for a story of one’s self” (Schwandt 16). Such a form of enquiry has been chosen with the double intention of challenging the presumed incommunicability of trauma and of amplifying recognition and representation with respect to under-addressed distressing experiences. Firstly, the critical-personal nature of the research challenges the widely established view according to which “language itself reaches its limits and fails in the face of trauma” (Keener 34). What is more, notions of communicative failures and linguistic deficits are conceptually connected to the powerless silence recurring in victimhood narratives, which hinge on “helplessness, passivity, and lack of agency” (Ganteau and Onega 94). Secondly, my project brings collective visibility onto underrepresented subjects such as male anorexia nervosa, male-on-male rape, limerent attachment, and adult grooming. In this panorama, Pure Violence suggests a variety of expressive possibilities for traumatised individuals whose experiences are still undermined by taboos, stigma, and prejudice and who do not intend to endorse agendas of disempowering silence. Ultimately, the incorporation of confessional material alongside academic criticism bridges the gap between lived experience and doctoral research, between the self and scholarly discourses, between emotion and investigation. I will enter the scope of the thesis as an academic investigator, as a life-writer, and as a queer human being with a history of disparate trauma in the hope that a wide readership will acknowledge the distressing character of unrepresented issues within gender and sexual minorities, such as non-cis genderqueer homosexuals.</p><p dir="ltr">The originality of the research lies in its eclectic methodology and its thematic concerns at once. Indeed, taboo-laden and stigma-ridden themes such as male anorexia nervosa and male-on-male rape are unprecedentedly treated via a plurality of autobiographical strategies. The practice of autoethnography is pushed to its formal extremes by accommodating annotation, digression, audiovisuality, found material, free-verse poetry, and journalling.</p> 2026-09-30T11:59:39Z Text Thesis 10.83056/mmu.34031916.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Pure_Violence_A_Queer_Autoethnographic_Investigation_into_Personal_Trauma/34031916 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Open Access after 2028-06-23