Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming

by KJ Cerankowski

The landscape of trauma is scattered with ghosts. Wolves hunkering in the shadows. Memory’s spectral persistence and evasion. Leaky bodies and selves gathered up in the storm of pain. Genders imposed and genders made. History’s cruel excisions, scars, the spillage of wounds. A landscape in which we are nevertheless called to build home. Here, “storytelling is a kind of suturing.”

Combining memoir, lyrical essay, and cultural criticism, KJ Cerankowski’s Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming stitches together an embodied history of trauma and its ongoing impacts on the lived realities of trans, queer, and other marginalized subjects. Suture is a conjuration, a patchwork knitting of ghost stories attending to the wound as its own archive. It is a journey through many “transitions”: of gender; through illness and chronic pain; from childhood to adulthood and back again; of psyche and form in the wake of abuse and through the work of healing; and of the self, becoming in and through the ongoingness of settler colonial violence and its attendant subjugations of diverse forms of life.

Refusing a traditional binary-based gender transition narrative, as well as dominant psychoanalytic narratives of trauma that center an individual process of symptom, diagnosis, and cure, Suture explores the refractive nature of trauma’s dispersed roots and lingering effects. If the wounds of trauma are disquiet apparitions—repetitions within the cut—these stories tend the seams through which the simultaneous loneliness of mourning and togetherness of queer intersubjective relations converge. Across these essays, healing, and indeed living, is a state of perpetual becoming, surviving, and loving, in the nonlinearities of trauma time, body-time, and queer time.

Genres: Queer

246 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2021

Reviews

[Eyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a difficult book to read because it is always difficult to read pain. After I came out as transgender, I lamented how I had never read an account or a book by or about a trans masculine person that I felt reflected my experiences. It alienated me further than simply being trans had already done. And yet KJ Cerankowski's beautiful exposition felt so familiar and so painfully close to home. This is a narrative I can understand and relate to, mixed with beautiful exposition and also academic in nature. I loved everything about this and hope to emulate the style of work as I continue working trans theory in the medieval field.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly open, honest, and thoughtful. The book left me with visceral feelings throughout.

[Ray Zhou · Rating 5 out of 5]

It hurts. Suture witnesses that we are all broken pieces, with visible and invisible wounds cut open and knitted together. Trauma can always reopened. It leaves a mark. It makes us who we are. "Healing trauma is akin to creating a poem - both require the right timing, the right words, and the right image"(35).

[Sophie Silverman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could not put this book down. So beautiful and thoughtful and interesting. This was actually a professor at Oberlin who’s a lecture I went to last week. It was compelling and devastating and super well written. I honestly really liked the thoughtful reflection on Freud lol.

[Kari Barclay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Radiant.