Speaking the Unspeakable: Discursive and Political Resistance to Dominant Trauma Discourse and Trauma Work

Speaking the Unspeakable: Discursive and Political Resistance to Dominant Trauma Discourse and Trauma Work

Clinical psychology

Kristen Walker

Catrina Brown, Emma Tseris

Reframing Trauma Through Social Justice

2024

Routledge

Book chapter

English

Restricted Access

In this chapter we emphasize the importance of discursive resistance in our critique of oppressive dominant social discourses on trauma and mental health which pathologize, decontextualize and medicalize daily life and individual and collective struggle. We will begin by providing a history of the development of trauma discourse and how it has become more commonly part of everyday mainstream conversation. We argue for the need to reinvigorate feminist analyses, which center the social context of trauma and violence including relations of power, oppression, exclusion, discrimination and marginalization. The conservatizing effects of mainstream approaches to being “trauma-informed” has depoliticized and degendered trauma work and the re-storying or creation of alternative stories will be offered. The focus today has become very individualized, shifting away from a “personal is political” to a “political is personal” framing. We provide an analysis of how the current conflation of postfeminism, neoliberalism, and biomedicalism has shaped the dominant trauma discourse and subsequent approaches to practice. We will argue that we need to resist this dominant discourse and offer alternative understandings and approaches alongside the integration of analyses of how discursive and institutional practices and structural systems of power and oppression are often co-implicated in people’s struggles. Unhelpful dominant stories are unpacked helping to produce a counterviewing of people’s stories of struggle and the development of counterstories that participate in social resistance.