Forgive me for so speaking: towards a hermeneutics of wounded embodiment and an ethics of contingency

I begin here, at my wounds, writing to reach out and touch, writing to find a way of being with you. Drawing on Julietta Singh's conception of the body archive, I conceptualise my body here as marked by wounds, in particular relation to my embodiment as a person that is queer, racialised and experiences a physical impairment. I give my account of these wounds as traces of a history of being hurt, where I have been impressed upon by what I come to feel as the surfaces of the world. I argue this leads my body, in the repetition of its misfitting, to come to inhabit a position of bodily instability, which orients my perception towards the anticipation of pain. While this might read this as a re-inscription of a deficit narrative about the othered body, or a hypochondriacal logic, I argue this embodiment and its anticipation in my work of interpretation to be the beginning for a way of living and seeing differently, justified in the way that its' contingent touch it might bring us closer together in relation, as a means to survive.