Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the temporal work of trauma in making certain pasts, presents and futures possible. Drawing on interviews from a study of trauma and drug use, I identify the binary logics on which the trauma concept relies, arguing that it installs limits on experience and subjectivity.

Paper long abstract

Recent decades have seen a turn to ‘trauma-informed’ approaches in healthcare. In this presentation, I apply insights from feminist research and STS to consider the temporal performativity of trauma in making certain pasts, presents and futures possible. Drawing on interviews from an Australian study of trauma and drug use, I argue that trauma renders suffering and distress legible within a socio-medical frame. As our participants accounts show, it offers a heuristic for designating frontiers, e.g. between the everyday and the exceptional, normality and pathology, memory and amnesia, and present and past. In this sense, trauma functions as a powerful conceptual frame that installs temporal and ontological limits on experience and subjectivity. These limits constitute trauma as a transformative event: an exceptional rupture of ordinary experience. However, as Lauren Berlant argues, even the worst events which may attract the label ‘trauma’ are in fact ‘embedded in life’ and ‘twist continuity rather than shattering it’ (2018: 117). In tracing the temporal regimes of trauma and the limits they enact, I illuminate the founding assumptions and binary logics on which the trauma concept relies, and reflect on its effects in healthcare. I suggest that while trauma-informed therapies are a welcome move in acknowledging the social context of suffering, they do not sidestep the pathologising effects of locating dysfunction in the individual, and thus may serve neoliberal therapeutic agendas. In making this argument, I consider the sociopolitical implications of the turn to trauma, including its possibilities and limits for addressing structural violence and suffering.