Ann Cvetkovich's article "The Everyday Life of Queer Trauma" was a bit of a mixed bag for me, as was illustrated in the class discussion of the piece. At many points throughout her argument, Cvetkovich convinced me that we have in fact become a trauma and wound obsessed culture. Several years ago I recall a storm of controversy over the inclusion of "PMS" in the CPS (Compendium or Pharmaceutical and Specialties). When objections over this became loud enough, which didn't take long, PMS was declassified as an illness, and taken out of the CPS. Women it seems are particularly susceptible to trauma narratives in our culture. Childbirth is a prime example. Why hospitals run at you with wheelchairs if you walk through the doors and are pregnant is beyond me. They claim insurance, liability..., but it's indicative in my opinion, of a larger cultural perception about women's bodies somehow being inadequate. I might be totally off base here, but it could be argued that the trauma narratives of pregnancy entrench traditional values and nationalism, in much the same way that the trauma narratives of "911" has translated into nationalism and traditional values. Obviously these are quite different, but the everyday trauma of our bodies performing a task for which they were designed has become a substantial trauma that requires standard medical intervention.
Few would argue that "911" was not a major national trauma. It has permeated the American identity so deeply, that it now operates at the level of trauma in everyday life. Many would argue however, as both Cvetkovich and Nancy Miller do to varying degrees, that the national trauma of "911" has been tapped for gain, whether this be for the professional purposes of journalists and reporters, the profit-driven purposes of the media, or politically driven as in the case of Rudy Guilianni's crack at the White House, or most notably by those already in the White House. Journalist Susan Faludi has written about some of these dynamics in her book The Terror Dream. She contends that national trauma of "911" and the "War on Terror" has been used to re-entrench traditional family values by way of nationalism. Nancy Miller discusses the shift in journalism, which came with the day's events and and the aftermath of "911" in her piece "Portraits of Grief". She argues in fact, that a new genre of journalism and reporting has sprung from the disaster. This new genre seeks to both grapple with and export grief. "In the face of a collective disaster , whose scale strained the imagination, the anecdote was seized upon as a form suited to rendering the familiar acts of everyday life".
The complex media narratives which came out of the sea of posters and photographs of those missing from the World Trade Center, framed trauma in terms of the everyday lives of everyday people. The juxtaposition is disorienting however. In searching for an appropriate picture to include with this post, I found myself unable to rationalize putting pictures up of the events, its aftermath, or any of the portraits of grief.
