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4.0
Traumatized
ByPublisher Description
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?
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?
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesTraumatized Reviews
4.0
“Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!
This is a fascinating book that reads as somewhat more so of a long form essay, exploring the tokenisation and alteration of trauma in the public consciousness and how we have commodified it. I found it to be somewhat alarming, but also remarkably interesting.
So often we are caught up in the narrative of suffering- what it means to have ‘lived experience’ of something versus being educated but not having actually experienced it. This leads to a concept that is, perhaps, more interesting than all others- the idea that we have invalidated research and data in favour of anecdotes.
This book goes aways to explaining this, and more. I think the part I found most interesting was the segment on Oprah and her business modelled off trauma. We have seen the rise of this even more sharply on the internet in recent years, and it’s got an undertone of ill-will underneath.
I think as the world develops further into comfort and we see the rise of a specific narrative in relation to technology, we are going to only see more of this kind of thing. I do wish that we got a little bit more about the advent of the internet in this book, but with that said, it was definitely more than fascinating.”
About Catherine Liu
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, The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique and Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.
Other books by Catherine Liu
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