Catherine Liu @ Georgetown Lecture: Trauma Culture

Thesis excerpts:

So the women who were working in the 30s and 40s in unions identified themselves as Social Feminists, and they were quickly eclipsed during the women's movement by the rise of Second Wave Feminists. And this is part of my thesis, and it will owe something to Rogers work as well, is about how trauma culture and the position of the Survivor presents a kind of class integration into Professional Managerial Class "Therapeutics" for the mission of second wave feminists. So without further ado, in the 1970s feminism was taken over by professional women hoping to Level Playing Fields, raise awareness, and highlight the injustices baked into men's unfair advantages in the competition for top jobs in large and prestigious organizations. I argue that second wave feminism set a trajectory towards the 'C' Suite by way of trauma culture. Highly credentialed women took over the women's movement and steered feminism towards professional life on the one hand, and emotional life on the other. Affective emotional personal feelings of discontent would henceforth Drive the movement and its priorities forward. 

[...]

The women's movement then (in the move to 2nd Wave Feminism) focuses on workplace representation of Sex and competition with men, which was something that the Social Feminists were not concerned with necessarily. They believed that men and women were different, they could they could do different jobs, and they needed, women needed, special Provisions.

The other thing that really killed the Social Feminists was that they were against the Equal Rights Amendment, because they felt they were afraid that if the Equal Right Amendments went for that, women who are working in blue-collar jobs would have to do like really dangerous work that the men were doing, because they were because equal. They were equal. They wanted to be "equal and different".So that was the nail in the coffin for them, because that's when the Second Wave Feminist just completely said, "You are all left behind by history. You don't understand what's happening. What we need to do is compete with men, equal rights. Men provided equality at work. You don't understand this."

And I was watching the Super Bowl, as many of you were as well, and they had that "flag football" ad where the women were like playing flag football they were like all running against men. That's a perfect apotheosis of PMC feminism. Like, "We're competing with men, we can run as fast as men, I'm going to tackle that guy! And that, that's the whole energy of this kind of PMC feminism, because I'm going to beat you. I'm going to beat you at this game. And I'm getting a better job than you!"

[...] Hijacking the Narrative

The other thing about the trauma for export idea which is supposed to be, which is,  always argues that we have to get people on the ground right away when a country goes through something as catastrophic as the tsunami, we have to get people right on the ground right after the traumatic event so we can treat them. 

In 1992, and I don't even know if a study like this would even be possible now, the Lancet did a series of studies about Palestinian children who survived the violence of the first intifada, and they found that they did not react according to a trauma script because they had a narrative about violence and survivorship that has to do with the National Mission. So the British psychiatrist who wrote this said, "You know, when you have people who are socially reintegrated into a narrative where their trauma has meaning, or their suffering, let's not even call it trauma. Their suffering has meaning, there's less of the kinds of PTSD symptoms like numbing, anxiety, phobia that we'll see." 

So the other thing though, is that the self-help movement is going to take this and run with it too. Because if any of you are in childhood education, there's a huge term now that people want to use called "Resilience", like, how do we create resilience. And that's that resilience that is something that's going to be sold back to survivors, so it's all part of the script. Recovery becomes "Resilience", and yet there is this kind of political contextualization that I think is completely out of the picture when you have this highly commodified, highly reified way of talking about mental anguish. This is a thesis that I hope I build up to in the book which is that the PMC gentrifies human suffering to make it "trauma" so that it can lay claim to a formative experience and monopolize the language around it.

[...] 

I think that that's why that kind of essentializing feminism really does the work of disguising the power of Capital. And so this gender divide which was drawn out in the FTE in February 2024  is just playing itself out in electoral politics today, and what a sad sad stupid mistake to make men the enemy.

A classic case of the luxury values imbued in the Professional Managerial Class (Pareto's 20%) superceding the needs, values , and expectations of the Working Class (Pareto's 80%) 

Trauma's articulation (Step 2 in Trauma 'Survivor' process)  forms the kernel around which a new Identity Narrative can now be constructed, that of 'Survivor'.

NGOs and USAID - "Trauma for Export"

Bonus Video

The Anxiety of Che Vuoi?

Takeaway Notes:

Traumatized Individuals feel "powerless" and share their stories of trauma (their gift) to establish credentials for a "trust thru personal suffering" community... an "empathetic" and perhaps even "feminine" community of infantilizing emotional connections that strip the victims of contextual responsibility, as opposed to a stronger stronger logical social meaning narrative (the opposite is possible too).

Preventing PTSD requires a strong communal and logical social meaning narrative that empowers the individual and creates contextual responsibility... with perhaps purification rituals post-exposure to trauma that stifle the formation of personal and collective "guilt/ shame acceptance" narratives.

Teaching "tolerance"... and transforming Erinyes into Eumenides.