Expressing embodied trauma through feminist autoethnography and arts-based ways of knowing

Abstract

As a female survivor of abuse in sport, the first author spent more than a decade engaging in harmful embodied practices including alcohol and prescription medication misuse, disordered eating, and self-harm as she attempted to reclaim control over her body. These practices were shaped by historical disciplinary practices imposed on her adolescent body by male sport staff. This paper uses arts-based feminist autoethnography as a methodology to examine how embodied experiences of abuse and trauma persist into adulthood and shape ongoing struggles for bodily autonomy. Drawing on creative methods including drawing, digital photo collage, and poetry, this paper demonstrates how arts-based methods can illuminate embodied, affective, and often invisible dimensions of abuse and trauma that are difficult to access through conventional research approaches. Positioned within feminist scholarship on embodiment, trauma, and creative methodologies, the paper outlines how arts-based autoethnography offers a trauma-informed approach that both supports survivor safety, and generates embodied knowledge. In doing so, the paper advances feminist methodological thinking by illustrating how arts-based approaches can enable survivors of abuse to articulate lived experiences, while minimising the risk of re-traumatisation. In doing so, it makes visible, forms of embodied knowledge, often marginalised in scientific research approaches.