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janinsanfran's avatar

I greatly appreciated your piece in the Atlantic. I don't want to jump into talking about it. Still thinking.

But I'm old enough to have experienced an era when feminists of all stripes confronted our traumas collectively and built movements. The traumas are individual experiences, but we once were better at learning that our individual experiences point to collective understandings and solidarities, to movements! I see you trying to revivify that potential.

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Jamie Baldwin's avatar

I haven’t read the Atlantic essay and stopped reading this one to comment when I read this sentence:

“ What can also undermine a sense of one’s own agency is the idea that one’s trauma should be central to one’s identity, one’s politics, and one’s activism — that it’s not something that happened and is integrated and moved through, but that the event is a definitional and immovable aspect of you. “

My comment is that trauma in the clinical sense of the word is not the same thing as trauma in the popular sense of it, and this results in confusion. People routinely describe experiences as traumatic that are not really traumatic in the clinical sense of the word. We know what they mean. It’s hyperbole. That’s fine. In the sentence I quote, the things JF says don’t necessarily apply to trauma in the clinical sense of the term, which, sadly, can be as life changing and permanently debilitating as some physical injuries. If she’s using the term in the popular sense, then trauma, rather than undermining a person’s sense of agency, can be central to their identity and can inspire their politics and activism.

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