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

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.

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.

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

Interdisciplinary study of collective violence offering insights into darker side of humanity.

"Where Memory Dwells is a crucial contribution to the current debate on political violence. Macarena Gómez-Barris has researched exhaustively on the Chilean post-dictatorship to find the deep relationship between what happened in Chile on September 11, 1973 and what is going on today, in Chile and in the world."—Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, University of Arkansas "This book offers intriguing insights on the symbolic, aesthetic, and personal aspects of memory-making by activists, survivors, and artists during the afterlife of the Pinochet dictatorship. The author shows how specific cultural actors wrestle creatively with the dilemma of how to represent experiences of atrocity that defy our ability to know, narrate, and depict them, yet prove crucial to the building of a democratic culture."—Steve Stern, Alberto Flores Galindo Professor, University of Wisconsin "Macarena Gomez-Barris takes the reader on an often personal journey through the 'memoryscape of terror' of the Chilean dictatorship in Chile and Chilean culture in exile. This book makes a poignant and compelling contribution to the study of traumatic memory in Latin America."—Marita Sturken, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication studies, New York University "Where Memory Dwells offers an immensely luminous rearticulation of the 1990s 'politics of memory' theme for the twenty-first century. Illustrating the profound relevance of memory studies to political theory, Gómez-Barris shows with great lucidity how the remembering and forgetting of state terror are entwined with global and local forces of the neoliberal economy, nationalism, and universal human rights discourse. Where Memory Dwells exemplifies the best efforts of a sociological approach to memory as cultural mediation of power. It should be read by anyone interested in the critical work that collective memory may perform for our societies in transition.”—Lisa Yoneyama, Author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory "Where Memory Dwells is a creatively researched and exquisitely thoughtful study of the memory of state terror as it lives and hides in complex and politically activated cultural practices. Gómez-Barris's exploration of how authoritarianism and social injustice are remembered, forgotten, and redressed by nations, citizens, and exiles is a beautiful achievement, one with an immediate relevance for us today."—Avery F. Gordon, author of Ghostly Matters