Reconjuring the Wound: Auditory Ghosts and Crossing the Bridge

Abstract:In this essay I explore the sonic memories of trauma and their relationship to how audibility and inaudibility operate within the justice system in the United States of America. I recount the crucial role that sound plays in shaping sensory knowledge of sexual assault. The sound worlds that emerge, while individualized, are emblematic of traumatic sound productions and their consequences. Pivoting around this experience, I theorize broadly about how sound is operationalized in the justice system and in healing processes, through the intersections of sonic memory, hearing, and authority. In the justice system, the abstract categories of truth and subjectivity are solidified through a series of aural technologies: telling, hearing, aural witnessing, and reconjuring. The machinery of justice insists on re-sounding as an important part of verifying "truth" even while sound becomes a medium through which the wound is transmitted. Through these aural technologies that repeat, replay, and interrogate, the sonic memory becomes an echo, separated from its articulation. In the resounding there is a complex duality for survivors: the desire to be believed, verified as a sound authority, but also the retraumatizing effect of the echo that is conjured. Proceeding from Gloria Anzaldúa's intellectual positioning on wounding and healing, I reflect upon the potential of sonic reconjuring to act as a transformational posture of re-voicing trauma.