During the late 1970s and 1980s speaking out about the traumatic reality of incest and rape was a rare and politically groundbreaking act. Today it is a ubiquitous feature of popular culture and its political value uncertain. In Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma, Jane Kilby explores the complexity and consequences of this shift in giving first-hand testimony by focusing on debates over recovered memory therapy and false memory syndrome, the spectacle of talkshow disclosures, discourses of innocence and complicity as well as the aesthetics and affect of shock. In counterpoint to the frequently cynical readings of personal narrative politics, Kilby advances an alternative reading built around the concept of unrepresentability. Key to this intervention is the stress placed by Kilby on the limits of representing sexually traumatic experiences and how this requires both theoretical and methodological innovation. Based on close readings of survivor narratives and artworks, this book demonstrates the significance of unrepresentability for a feminist understanding of sexual violence and victimisation. The book will of interest to those working in the areas of Cultural, Literary, Media and Women's Studies as well as Memory and Trauma Studies.Key Features* Provides a topical discussion of the debates generated by a mass culture of speaking out about violence and victimisation* Offers an interdisciplinary case-study analysis of survivor testimony* Applies cutting-edge developments in trauma and testimony theory to a feminist analysis of women's incest testimony* Makes accessible the significance of unrepresentability for a cultural politics of trauma

In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.

An essential tool for healers, therapists, activists, and trauma survivors who are interested in a justice-centered approach to somatic transformation The Politics of Trauma offers somatics with a social analysis. This book is for therapists and social activists who understand that trauma healing is not just for individuals—and that social change is not just for movement builders. Just as health practitioners need to consider the societal factors underlying trauma, so too must activists understand the physical and mental impacts of trauma on their own lives and the lives of the communities with whom they organize. Trauma healing and social change are, at their best, interdependent. Somatics has proven to be particularly effective in addressing trauma, but in practice it typically focuses solely on the individual, failing to integrate the social conditions that create trauma in the first place. Staci K. Haines, somatic innovator and cofounder of generative somatics, invites readers to look beyond individual experiences of body and mind to examine the social, political, and economic roots of trauma—including racism, environmental degradation, sexism, and poverty. Haines helps readers identify, understand, and address these sources of trauma to help us bridge individual healing with social transformation.

1. Within trauma : an introduction / Eric Wertheimer and Monica J. Casper -- I. Politics -- 2. Trauma is as trauma does : the politics of affect in catastrophic times / Maurice E. Stevens -- 3. "She was just a Chechen" : the female suicide bomber as a site of collective suffering in wartime Chechen Republic / Francine Banner -- 4. Naming sexual trauma : on the political necessity of nuance in rape and sex offender discourses / Breanne Fahs -- 5. Conceptualizing forgiveness in the face of historical trauma / Carmen Goman and Douglas Kelley -- II. Poetics -- 6. Bahareh : singing without words in an Iranian prison camp / Shahla Talebi -- 7. Voices of silence : on speaking from within the void (a response to Shahla Talebi) / Gabriele M. Schwab -- 8. Future's past : a conversation about the Holocaust with Gabriele M. Schwab / Martin Beck Matuštík -- 9. "No other tale to tell" : trauma and acts of forgetting in The road / Amanda Wicks -- 10. Body animations (or, Lullaby for Fallujah) : a performance / Jackie Orr -- III. Praxis -- 11. First responders : a pedagogy for writing and reading trauma / Amy Hodges Hamilton -- 12. Answering the call : crisis intervention and rape survivor advocacy as witnessing trauma / Debra Jackson -- 13. Documenting disaster : Hurricane Katrina and one family's saga / Rebecca Hankins and Akua Duku Anokye -- 14. A cure for bitterness / Dorothy Allison

Collective violence changes the perpetrators, the victims, and the societies in which it occurs. It targets the body, the psyche, and the socio-cultural order. How do people come to terms with these tragic events, and how are cultures affected by massive outbreaks of violence? This book is a groundbreaking collection of essays by anthropologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, drawing on field research in many different parts of the world. Profiting from an interdisciplinary dialogue, the authors provide provocative, at times deeply troubling, insights into the darker side of humanity, and they also propose new ways of understanding the terrible things that people are capable of doing to each other.

Democratic Insecurities focuses on the ethics of military and humanitarian intervention in Haiti during and after Haiti's 1991 coup. In this remarkable ethnography of violence, Erica Caple James explores the traumas of Haitian victims whose experiences were denied by U.S. officials and recognized only selectively by other humanitarian providers. Using vivid first-person accounts from women survivors, James raises important new questions about humanitarian aid, structural violence, and political insecurity. She discusses the politics of postconflict assistance to Haiti and the challenges of promoting democracy, human rights, and justice in societies that experience chronic insecurity. Similarly, she finds that efforts to promote political development and psychosocial rehabilitation may fail because of competition, strife, and corruption among the individuals and institutions that implement such initiatives.

Emotions work to define who we are as well as shape what we do and this is no more powerfully at play than in the world of politics. Ahmed considers how emotions keep us invested in relationships of power, and also shows how this use of emotion could be crucial to areas such as feminist and queer politics. Debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, as well as reconciliation and reparation, are explored through topical case studies. In this book the difficult issues are confronted head on. The Cultural Politics of Emotion is in dialogue with recent literature on emotions within gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Throughout the book, Ahmed develops a theory of how emotions work, and the effects they have on our day-to-day lives. New for this editionA substantial 15,000-word Afterword on 'Emotions and Their Objects' which provides an original contribution to the burgeoning field of affect studiesA revised BibliographyUpdated throughout.

In Beyond the Trauma Vortex, Gina Ross proposes a collaboration between the media, trauma researchers, and helping officials in order to break the vicious cycle of trauma and violence. The media, Ross suggests, can use their tremendous influence to promote peace rather than violence and to heal wounded psyches, communities, and nations. Delving first into the destructive nature of the "trauma vortex" through a variety of individual and historical examples, Ross then offers her insight into an alternate, restorative "healing vortex." By focusing on the interrelatedness of personal and collective healing, the author makes a compelling case for why--and how--media professionals can play an influential role in effecting widespread healing for their viewers and for themselves.

For many of the 1.6 million U.S. service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, the trip home is only the beginning of a longer journey. Many undergo an awkward period of readjustment to civilian life after long deployments. Some veterans may find themselves drinking too much, unable to sleep or waking from unspeakable dreams, lashing out at friends and loved ones. Over time, some will struggle so profoundly that they eventually are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress Disorder (PTSD). Both heartbreaking and hopeful, Fields of Combat tells the story of how American veterans and their families navigate the return home. Following a group of veterans and their their personal stories of war, trauma, and recovery, Erin P. Finley illustrates the devastating impact PTSD can have on veterans and their families. Finley sensitively explores issues of substance abuse, failed relationships, domestic violence, and even suicide and also challenges popular ideas of PTSD as incurable and permanently debilitating. Drawing on rich, often searing ethnographic material, Finley examines the cultural, political, and historical influences that shape individual experiences of PTSD and how its sufferers are perceived by the military, medical personnel, and society at large. Despite widespread media coverage and public controversy over the military's response to wounded and traumatized service members, debate continues over how best to provide treatment and compensation for service-related disabilities. Meanwhile, new and highly effective treatments are revolutionizing how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides trauma care, redefining the way PTSD itself is understood in the process. Carefully and compassionately untangling each of these conflicts, Fields of Combat reveals the very real implications they have for veterans living with PTSD and offers recommendations to improve how we care for this vulnerable but resilient population.

Five sociologists develop a theoretical model of 'cultural trauma' & build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new & binding understandings of social responsibility.