”Det er sårene, der synger”

Om homoseksuelle traumer, historie og narrativ temporalitet i romanen Techno

Abstract

This article argues that homosexuality can be thought of as a site of trauma. Through a reading of Niels Henning Falk Jensby’s novel Techno (2016), it explores how the novel relates male homosexuality and trauma of sexual violence to a broader question of narrating a history of a primordial homosexual trauma. I argue that the novel both formally, through a circular, repetitive narrative temporality and the traumatic short-circuit of said temporality, and thematically, in its depiction of repetitious sexual subjection, addresses and works through a homosexual trauma of sexual violence. The first part of the novel centers around a repetitious sexuality, which, to borrow from Lee Edelman (2004), can be called sinthomosexual. This death-driven, tautological sexuality is broken by the narrator’s sexual trauma. Trauma, being the short-circuit that nevertheless organizes the novel’s narrative temporality, troubles any straightforward causality between homosexuality and sexual violence, but binds them through the contingent causality of the accident. Following Elizabeth Freeman (2010) and Carla Freccero (2006), I conceptualize the narrator’s sadomasochism as a queer erotohistoriographic exercise of addressing a traumatic past that implicates him in a ghostly community of homosexual bodies, through which the collective primordial trauma of homophobia can be reworked. Finally, I follow Valery Rohy (2014) in thinking of trauma as a site of queer reproduction, proposing that while it would be wrong to say that trauma ‘causes’ homosexuality, homosexuality nevertheless becomes a question of cultural transmission of a traumatic past that must be addressed.