In tracking an archive of trauma, I hope also to forge methodologies for the documentation and examination of the structures of affect that constitute cultural experience and serve as the foundation for public cultures. It is important to incorporate affective life into our conceptions of citizenship and to recognize that these affective forms of citizenship may fall outside the institutional practices that we customarily associate with the concept of a citizen.
My investigation of the affective life of lesbian cultures is motivated in particular by my dissatisfaction with responses to homophobia that take the form of demands for equal rights, gay marriage, domestic partnership, and even hate crimes legislation; such political agendas assume a gay citizen whose affective fulfillment resides in assimilation, inclusion, and normalcy.
While acknowledging the powerful theories of trauma that have emerged within clinical psychology and poststructuralist theory, I also turn to feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxist cultural theory, and queer theory as resources for a demedicalized and depathologized model of trauma. Trauma becomes the hinge between systemic structures of exploitation and oppression and the felt experience of them. Femme discourses about getting fucked reframe the relation between trauma and touch, at once acknowledging the traumatic power of touch and embracing it.
Butch discourses about emotional vulnerability connect the trauma of physical touch to the traumatizing potential of being emotionally touched. In addition to having been crucial to the formation of sexual public cultures, both in the pre-Stonewall decades and in their reappropriation over the last decade, butch-femme discourses provide a vital archive of not only sexual intimacy but trauma theory. The stories and performances it scrutinizes refuse to present the incest survivor as innocent victim and use the public cultures forged around lesbian sexuality as a resource for irreverent, angry, and humorous responses to trauma.
Both chapters 2 and 3 insist that sexual trauma also has persistently national dimensions, whether in the case of Allison using an incest story to incorporate southern white trash culture into U. Chapter 4 addresses trauma as a national category even more explicitly by asking what queer transnational publics reveal about the traumatic histories of migration and diaspora that haunt the construction of the nation.
The chapter seeks to incorporate the affective life of queer diaspora cultures into the transnational archive of migration as trauma history.
Chapters 5 and 6 take on AIDS, which has been acknowledged as a national and global trauma, but only through forms of cultural struggle that have had to address its close ties to homosexuality and forms of sexuality constructed as deviant or perverse. The chapters engage critiques of therapeutic culture as a response to trauma by exploring the affective dimensions of activist cultures in a way that problematizes distinctions between therapy and politics, or between mourning and militancy.
Yet this ethnography remains experimental, confronting the limitations of the interview as a way of creating an emotional archive. Chapter 5 explores the challenges of documenting the intimacies of personal relationships and political controversies within ACT UP.
Chapter 6 focuses on mourning, juxtaposing the interviews with memoirs by lesbians who have been involved in caretaking. The memoirs show how those on the supposed periphery of the AIDS crisis, who occupy what is so often a feminized role, turn the care of the body and encounters with death into a queer experience. The chapter also considers the ongoing legacy of AIDS activism and how its history continues to pervade the lives of activists.
Chapter 7 looks at the intersections between archives of trauma and archives of gay and lesbian history. The chapter also examines how documentary video, in its passionate quest for histories that can provide the foundation for culture in the present, incorporates and transforms archival materials. The particular ways in which new documentaries create affective archives are instructive for the ongoing project of creating testimonials, memorial spaces, and rituals that can acknowledge traumatic pasts as a way of constructing new visions for the future.
These queer lesbian archives and documentaries deserve a place alongside Holocaust and war memorials because they make room for the intimate histories demanded by emotion and sexuality.
The epilogue also discusses responses to this book while it has been in progress in order to further consider the value of both lesbian feelings and trauma as the foundation for public cultures.
A significant body of work within American studies has recently mounted a critique of U. Wendy Brown speaks about identity politics as a politics of ressentiment in which claims on the state are made by individuals and groups who constitute themselves as injured victims whose grievances demand redress. While such critiques of trauma culture have been indispensable for my thinking about trauma as a category of national, and particularly U.
Douglas Crimp, for example, writes about the trauma of AIDS for gay men as residing partly in its invisibility as such to the national culture. Even though AIDS has ultimately received considerable attention in the national public sphere, many of its losses, such as unprotected sex, remain unacknowledged or scorned. Refusing any quickfix solution to trauma, such as telling the story as a mode of declaring an identity or seeking legal redress, the cases that interest me offer the unpredictable forms of politics that emerge when trauma is kept unrelentingly in view rather than contained within an institutional project.
I keep open the question of how affective experience gives rise to public culture rather than operating with any presumptions about what constitutes culture or politics, or their conjunction. My investigation of trauma thus becomes an inquiry into how affective experience that falls outside of institutionalized or stable forms of identity or politics can form the basis for public culture.
In opening with a discussion of trauma as a social and cultural category, this book signals its recognition that trauma is the subject of a discourse that has a history.
My use of the term comes from a tradition that begins in the nineteenth century, when the term trauma, which had previously referred to a physical wound, came to be applied to mental or psychic distress.
Other Marxist theorists, most notably Walter Benjamin, have taken up the category of shock as a way of describing modern life, particularly in urban contexts, in an effort to characterize its effects on the senses. Indeed, psychoanalysis, like trauma, is constituted by the assumption that illness can be psychic, not just physical, and the close affinity and shared history of the two concepts make it difficult to separate them.
Defined culturally rather than clinically, trauma studies becomes an interdisciplinary field for exploring the public cultures created around traumatic events. Trauma has exerted a powerful hold over cultural theorists because it offers compelling and urgent cases of unrepresentability that confirm the fundamental assumptions of poststructuralist theory.
With similar results, though using not only psychoanalytic but also Marxist approaches, Mark Seltzer notes that trauma discourse is important precisely because it challenges distinctions between the mental and physical, the psychic and social, and the internal and external as locations or sources of pain.
Discourses of trauma serve as a vehicle for sorting through the relation between these categories rather than resolving them in a definition. Her work is quite portable to a range of contexts because of the abstractness of her formulations. By consistently stressing questions of epistemology and trauma as structurally unknowable, she flattens out the specificities of trauma in a given historical and political context. While Caruth does not always acknowledge the historical origins of her work and resists historicist readings of Freud, for example , her own work is rooted in the texts of Freud and has strong ties to Holocaust studies.
Furthermore, Caruth focuses on trauma as catastrophic event rather than on everyday trauma. By contrast, I seek to remain alert to the historical locations out of which theories of trauma arise and the possible limitations of those models for other contexts. This presumption is necessary in order to make room for the category of sexual trauma and the lesbian contexts from which most of my cases are taken—instances that might otherwise seem tangential to a discussion of trauma.
A PTSD clinical diagnosis defines trauma as an overwhelming event that produces certain kinds of symptoms in the patient.
Poststructuralist theory defines it as an event that is unrepresentable. I want to think about trauma as part of the affective language that describes life under capitalism. I want to focus on how traumatic events refract outward to produce all kinds of affective responses and not just clinical symptoms. I am compelled by historical understandings of trauma as a way of describing how we live, and especially how we live affectively.
Four theoretical allegiances—feminism, critical race theory, Marxism, and queer theory—each of which offers contributions to and problems for theories of trauma, serve as points of departure for this study.
Drawing on these theories, I hope to seize authority over trauma discourses from medical and scientific discourse in order to place it back in the hands of those who make culture, as well as to forge new models for how affective life can serve as the foundation for public culture. Roller Coasters and Little Women When my examples of lesbian trauma culture seem a little too slight or marginal, I remind myself that Lisa Kron approaches the Holocaust in her performance piece 2.
Like a roller coaster, 2. Kron stresses the challenge of addressing an audience that comes already equipped with a huge repository of Holocaust representations, which are the product of successful efforts to create a culture around this historical trauma. By juxtaposing stories of these two kinds of visits, Kron forces scrutiny of the limits and inadequacies of the quest for an encounter with trauma, testimony, and the Holocaust that are implicit in trips to both Auschwitz and the theater.
Lisa Kron, performance artist and author of 2. Photo by Kristina LeGros. Courtesy of Lisa Kron. How is it that extreme sensations, including fear and terror, can be entertaining? The image of the roller coaster in 2. The roller coaster is also a resonant figure for exploring trauma, given the centrality of railway travel not only in nineteenth-century discourses of trauma but in memories of the Holocaust. Witnessing is fraught with ambivalence rather than fulfilling the melodramatic fantasy that the trauma survivor will finally tell all and receive the solace of being heard by a willing and supportive listener.
Kron captures the burdens, the everydayness, and also the humor of a witnessing as she and her almost-blind father bumble their way through such material difficulties of tourism in a foreign country as what to eat and how to read signs. She says, But when I enter the crematorium for the first time in my life I feel horror. Physical repulsion. I can feel my face contort, my lips pull back. In the gas chamber, my father stops to take his pill. This breaks my heart. I stand to the side and cry.
I can feel. I can feel the bottom. This is the only reality—what happened to my father and his parents fifty years ago. Yet rather than following through with the performance of this emotion or belaboring the sudden shock of an encounter with death, Lisa abruptly interrupts her story.
By refusing to continue in this vein, Kron alerts her audience that 2. Affectively, 2. Indeed, the challenge it addresses is how to make room for another kind of story in the face of the hyperrepresentation of the Holocaust and its saturation of the cultural landscape by a proliferation of horrific images. Just as the juxtaposition of the roller coaster with Auschwitz foregrounded the dangers of sensationalism, this segment uses the wedding to suggest that sentimentality is another kind of popular affect that a trauma culture must circumvent.
The critique of the sentimentality of weddings is facilitated by the overt focus on lesbianism and on how Lisa and her girlfriend Peg are subjected to the indignities of being the odd couple at the scene of compulsory heterosexuality. Ambivalent about the wedding, Lisa finds herself unexpectedly crying, responding in spite of herself to the moment when her parents walk her brother to the chuppah.
She describes her feelings with reference to one of U. You know a couple of years ago I went to see the movie Little Women. And it was in a big theater and there were only about thirty people there and they were all women and were all sitting separately, scattered about in this huge theater. These women were racked with sobs. All around me I could hear noises like: [Makes huge, hiccuping crying noises].
By making this comparison, Kron opens up the possibility that her response is merely sentimental, but in this instance, the sentimental genre, whether the weepie or the wedding, enables something more. She continues: It had never dawned on me in a million years that I would feel anything other than a big, judgey reaction to the whole thing. But its reference to Little Women cuts both ways, serving not only as a model of what 2.
Using the genre of solo performance, one of whose primary resources is autobiography, Kron approaches affective experience as unsettling, unpredictable, and necessary. For Kron, humor is much easier than tears, and while it often seems to displace other emotions, it would be more accurate to see it as a way of expressing what cannot be expressed otherwise.
Humor becomes a way of approaching the Holocaust through indirection, of warding off emotional breakdown with a joke. The rapid shifts in both narrative and affect have a distancing effect, keeping the Auschwitz story from becoming too sentimental or horrific, but they also possess their own kind of affective power.
The sudden shift to humor is another way of conveying the enormity of the Holocaust. There are gaps and silences in 2. Although Lisa vividly describes the images, the screen is blank. Like the empty slides, 2. By forging this connection, she indicates that the American Jewish response to the Holocaust is influenced by a culture of Jewish immigration and diaspora in which theater and entertainment public cultures have been central.
More generally, her strategy suggests that trauma is affectively negotiated in culturally specific ways. As an approach to the Holocaust, though, humor can seem especially taboo or transgressive —a reminder that responses to trauma are often constrained by normalizing demands for appropriate affects. In addition to using Jewish traditions of humor, Kron makes expert use of a genre that has strong ties to queer culture: performance art.
Forced to draw on memory and personal experience to construct an archive in the wake of a dominant culture that provides either silence or homophobic representations of their lives, queers have used solo performance as a forum for personal histories that are also social and cultural ones.
The life stories of performance art are often structured around, if not traumatic experience, moments of intense affect that are transformative or revealing.
The cultural texts explored here are more like 2. Not only is this often the condition of lesbian representations of trauma and responses to trauma but this obliqueness or tangentialness can also be described as queer. It produces a different theory of trauma than work rooted in the example of the Holocaust, which has been a key reference point for the most influential trauma theory in cultural studies.
Recognizing the significance of the Holocaust in this body of trauma theory is crucial to evaluating its historical specificity and the possible limits of its applicability to other contexts. Yet even as the sites of trauma explored here are not comparable to the Holocaust, they are certainly informed by Holocaust studies and memory. Testimony, in particular, serves as an important example of the radical approach to the archive that trauma can demand.
Such repositories as the Yale Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah History Foundation seek not just to produce a document or record but to create new forms of historical memory. It can be found in other places as well, including one of the most significant texts of Holocaust culture. Indeed, the links between them are a reflection of my use of both a minoritizing approach, exploring the specificity of lesbian texts, and a universalizing one, emphasizing their continuities with other texts of trauma.
I look at the effects of colonialism on those who are immigrants to the United States or whose parents were, and at how migrations of all kinds are the scene for traumas of cultural diaspora. I explore how trauma manifests itself in everyday sexual lives in which the vulnerability of bodies and psyches is negotiated. Roller coasters and Little Women are as much a part of these trauma stories as the death camps.
Feminism and Sexual Trauma Although my approach to trauma as everyday and not just catastrophic can be gleaned from Holocaust culture, it emerges more directly from my interest in the contested status of sexual trauma, which has been the focus of both feminist critiques of definitions of trauma and significant controversies within feminism. One goal here is to show how a queer perspective more attuned to the vagaries of sexuality can resolve some of the conundrums sexual trauma has posed for feminists in their efforts to give it a central place within clinical definitions of trauma.
Although the experience of Vietnam War veterans was instrumental in the establishment of PTSD as a diagnosis in the third edition of the DSM in , increasing attention to rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, especially from feminist psychologists, also played a key role in the call for a clinical diagnosis. Whether acknowledged or not, embedded within the history of trauma discourse are debates about gender and sexuality as well as about the relation between private and public spheres that have preoccupied feminist theorists.
The insights of feminist theory thus have important implications for trauma theories, and moreover, controversies over the truth of recovered memory have created a situation in which the status of feminism is bound up with sexual trauma. The author of one of the earliest and most influential books on incest, Father- Daughter Incest, Herman makes a bid in Trauma and Recovery to bring a feminist perspective to trauma in a global context and to write a book that will be accessible to a general readership.
She therefore leaves room for the political and social in trauma cultures, especially evident in her insistence on the need for collective and social forms of recovery in addition to individual therapy. Most significantly, in her effort to link war trauma with sexual trauma, Herman naturalizes trauma even as she historicizes it. In order to equate its different forms, she emphasizes psychic reality as a common denominator, outlining the symptoms of traumatic response—such as hyperarousal, intrusion including flashbacks , and constriction or numbing—that are found in all cases of PTSD.
Recognizing the commonality of affliction may even make it possible at times to transcend the immense gulf that separates the public sphere of war and politics—the world of men—and the private sphere of domestic life— the world of women.
Written as much for students and lay readers as professors and experts in the field, Keywords for Comics Studies revivifies the fantasy and magic of reading comics in its kaleidoscopic view of the field's most compelling and imaginative ideas" Author : Daphne A.
Informed by the overlooked contributions of women who wrote about the blues, rock, and pop, Daphne A. Brooks argues that acclaimed entertainers have also been radical intellectuals, challenging the culture industry to catch up. Features original essays from an international team of cultural theorists which offer fresh and compelling perspectives and sketch out exciting new areas of theoretical inquiry Thoughtfully organized into two sections — lineages and problematics — that facilitate its use both by students new to the field and advanced scholars and researchers Explains key schools and movements clearly and succinctly, situating them in relation to broader developments in culture, society, and politics Tackles issues that have shaped and energized the field since the Second World War, with discussion of familiar and under-theorized topics related to living and laboring, being and knowing, and agency and belonging.
A model of community-university collaboration, it includes contributions from scholars in a wide range of disciplines, survivors of mass violence, and performers and artists who have created works based on these events. At its core is a productive tension between public and private memory, a dialogue between autobiography and biography, and between individual experience and societal transformation.
Remembering Mass Violence will appeal to oral historians, digital practitioners and performance-based artists around the world, as well researchers and activists involved in human rights research, migration studies, and genocide studies.
Whether discussing video platforms in Japan and Indonesia, K-pop reception videos, amateur music videos circulated via microSD cards in India, or the censorship of Bollywood films in Nigeria, the essays trace the myriad ways Asian video reshapes media politics and aesthetic practices.
While many influential commentators overlook, denounce, and trivialize Asian video, the contributors here show how it belongs to the shifting core of contemporary global media, thereby moving conversations about Asian media beyond static East-West imaginaries, residual Cold War mentalities, triumphalist declarations about resurgent Asias, and budding jingoisms.
The program will take place from October to March Prior to the official kickoff in late September or early October tbd , we are planning a soft launch event on July 2, , to bring together the 85 Academy participants and the workshop conveners and to introduce you to the overall project. The Academy features a format with different components. The workshop program will be held as 5 digital meetings from October until February The sessions will take place monthly, in the first week of each month.
One session will last around 3 hours. This extended online version of the Academy will culminate in Method Sessions in which the individual approaches and findings of each workshop will be shared amongst all participants and a semi-public audience of guests from the partner institutions, the broader network and the participating institutions.
The Method Sessions are set to take place digitally on March 11, This reader shall serve as an introduction to the general ideas, topics and methodologies of all workshop programs, including the guests who will contribute to the curricula, the institutions and places that will be brought into the programs and the group of participants.
The individual workshop schedules will be shared at a later stage. We will be using the secure platform Nextcloud to share these files. As a first step, each of you will receive an invitation to join the platform by email. The assigned username as well as the profile picture can be changed at any point within the settings menu.
Please note that all shared material is for internal use only. All online events and reading sessions will be held via Webex. You will receive an invitation link prior to each event.
In her scholarship, Cvetkovich engages with feminist and queer theoryaffect and feelingtheories of the archiveand oral history. Page numbers if excerpting, provide specifics For coursepacks, please also note: The course is designed to meet the needs of students who already have some background in gender and sexuality studies such as WGS Intro to LGBTQ Studies and are looking for more advanced coursework, but cveetkovich is open to all who are interested and committed.
Her current writing projects focus on the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to create counterarchives and interventions in public history. She is the author cvetkovifh Mixed Feelings: The course is open to all and aims to encourage self-reflection and dialogue around gender and sexual differences and to promote the work of being an ally to LGBTQ-identified people.
Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen C. Please check back for updates. Duke University Press Full view. Report a connection problem. Green Library. C89 Unknown. More options. Find it at other libraries via WorldCat Limited preview.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references p.
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