Queer trauma, everyday experience and surveillance in This Bed We Made

Building on trauma studies and affect theory, this article examines the representation and the affective experience of queer trauma in This Bed We Made (Lowbirth Games, 2023), a game set in Montreal in 1958. More specifically, it explores the ways queer trauma circulates within this game and moves queer players. To do so, it first approaches queer trauma through the lens of everyday experience, focusing on material culture and the feelings attached to various personal objects. Then, it analyses This Bed We Made in relation to surveillance, suggesting that the game places the player within a sensibility familiar to many queer people in the 1950s and still resonant today, thereby capturing part of the affective experience of queer trauma. While trauma continues to be primarily understood in popular culture and academic discourse as the result of extreme violence or sexual abuse, this article contributes to an emerging body of research that examines more subtle and cumulative trauma-inducing experiences like microaggressions and structural violence, and how they can be conveyed through different artistic media.