Waterspout, or, queering traumatic fall-out

This auto-fictocritical piece stages an attempt to write the fall-out of the 1952 CSIRO Dakota crash during an electrical storm off Wattamolla NSW, which atomised key members of its Radio Physics team, including my father. In order to enact the traumatic legacy and the compensatory pleasures of the weakened paternal function, the writing touches on influential French fictocritical experiments of the 1960s and 1970s whereby autofictional desire breaks into the critical language. Mobilising the difference within genre (both gender and genre in French) ‘Waterspout’ suggests that trans-generic traffic both enables the registration of traumatic loss and queers genres by inscribing a dance of their others. It is in the generic shifts themselves that the differential between intensities might create potential charge, where the ‘skydiver’ and the ‘waterspout’ of his demise undergo a ‘genre-change’. Here, through this trans-generic play and a relay of metonyms, the not-yet-symbolisable loss promises the exhilarations of queer becoming for the autofictional subject-in-process.