HGMV Workshop
Thursday, October 16, 3:00p.m. Room 710 Social Sciences Building
From news coverage to television dramas, American culture is saturated with representations of trauma. Moreover, global politics and economic policies all but ensure a future where a life structured by catastrophe can be expected.
Carter deconstructs the ubiquity of trauma discourse, arguing for a cripistemology of trauma as a way to reconceptualize PTSD in our neoliberal landscape. Whereas theorists such as Lauren Berlant have recently rejected trauma as an analytic framework - since, as it's argued, psychic catastrophe is something we'll all experience if we live long enough - she proposes a crip approach to trauma as a crucial lens into how suffering and "crisis ordinariness" are unevenly distributed, and dissimilarly experienced, among neoliberal subjects. By cripping PTSD, it becomes possible to reimagine an approach to suffering that makes life more livable.
Gesturing toward a larger dissertation project, she will outline three sites of inquiry within contemporary discourses of PTSD. First exploring how the post-9/11 framing of certain traumatized subjects as ideal citizen-patriots forcefully erases those that cannot be interpolated into rhetorics of U.S. exceptionalism. Secondly, examining how dominant methods of "curing" PTSD illuminate similar neoliberal undertones. Lastly, drawing on anti-psychology theorizing, offering beginning thoughts toward reimaging PTSD as an alternative, and queer, affective and temporal structure. In doing so, this paper proposes a crip way of understanding trauma - one that finds its political imperative in the pervasiveness of the discourse, and demands a theorization that imagines otherwise.
Angela Carter is a fifth year Ph.D Student in Feminist Studies. She came to the U after becoming a Ronald E. McNair Scholar at Truman State University, and the first person in her family to graduate from college. Her academic interests include: trauma theory, disability studies, queer theory, ethnography, and critical pedagogy. Broadly speaking, her dissertation work examines the intersections of contemporary feminist praxis and critical disability studies within the academy.
The HGMV workshop was founded to foster interdisciplinary conversations on the subject areas of Holocaust studies, genocide and memory, peace and conflict studies, human rights, nationalism and ethnic violence, representations of violence and trauma, conflict resolution, transitional justice, historical consciousness and collective memory. Support fellow scholars and provide feedback at various stages of the research process, and to engage in dialogue with invited scholars.
For more information contact Erma Nezirevic at nezir001@umn.edu.
