Traumatized

How Trauma became a weapon, by highly-acclaimed author of Virtue Hoarders How Trauma became a weapon, by highly-acclaimed author of Virtue Hoarders

Traumatized traces the emergence and triumph of the concept of trauma in public life. From shell-shock and PTSD to the power of Oprah Winfrey and the authentic personal brand, Liu weaves together the history of this now ubiquitous idea and explains what it all means for our society.

Trauma culture speaks to our current moment - the demise of liberalism, the expansion of social media, and the rise of surveillance capitalism. Trauma culture promised liberation from repression and oppression but has never delivered. Instead, it has been made into a weapon to individualise suffering, promoting a politics of false consensus. It undermines solidarity and eviscerated the foundations of liberal politics by demanding submission to a regime of vulnerability and accommodation.

When suffering is all we have in common, what are we to do when we are all too traumatised to resist?

Autorentext

Liu is professor in the Departments of Film and Media Studies/Visual Studies, Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine, where she also served as director of the UCI Humanities Center. She is the author of Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton, T**he American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique and Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.

Klappentext

What happens when an idea born of genuine suffering is weaponized as a tool of social control? Traumatized is the story of how shell shock became PTSD, how Oprah turned pain into profit, and how "authenticity" became the ultimate brand. It is a history of surveillance cap­italism’s greatest coup: convincing us that wounds define us and that accom­modating each other’s trauma is more important than challenging the powerful.

Catherine Liu delivers an unflinching diagnosis of our current crisis, rooted as it is in the collapse of liberal politics, the ascendance of performance fragil­ity, and the rise of emotional display as a surrogate for political action. Sharp, provocative, and urgently necessary, Traumatized argues that we must re­ject a politics of permanent victimhood since it destroys solidarity and leaves us defenseless against the systems that cause real harm.