Prevailing on the Inside: Fractures of Justice and Self, via Bodily Trauma and Narrative Medicine

Prevailing on the Inside is an interdisciplinary study of trauma, embodiment, and narrative ethics, engaging feminist theory, medical humanities, and creative research. Esther Kentish examines how the wounded body operates as both an archive of lived experience and a site of knowledge production, where silence, memory, and language converge to theorise survival.

Drawing on autoethnography, poetic testimony, and trauma studies, the text explores the ethical and epistemic fractures produced by sexual assault, systemic injustice, and medical intervention. Kentish situates narrative medicine as a space of negotiation between care and containment, examining how institutional frameworks often replicate the violences they claim to heal.

The book reframes the survivor’s voice as a mode of inquiry rather than confession, positioning creative and visual language as tools of reclamation. Through this synthesis of theory and art, Prevailing on the Inside advances a model of trauma narrative that privileges embodied knowledge over empirical certainty, redefining survival as a critical and theoretical act of justice.

Hardcover 172 Pages