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Browsing by Author "Carter, Angela"

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    Disabling Trauma: Toward A Crip Critique of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
    (2019-08) Carter, Angela
    Utilizing both Critical Disability Studies and Critical Trauma Studies, this dissertation investigates the dominant discourses within contemporary U.S. trauma culture. There are four primary goals. First, by analyzing the popular discourses of trauma this project explores what trauma, as a concept, does in contemporary U.S. society – particularly the impact the discourses of trauma have on society’s most vulnerable. Second, in bringing together these two interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, this project argues that we are better able to attend to the social, discursive, material, and embodied realities of trauma which allows for the situating of trauma as a coalitional site for affinity groups and political connection. Third, this project works to imagine trauma otherwise, specifically to reimagine trauma theory in ways that disrupts the current circulation of power and oppression within its discourses, thus allowing for more transformational and restorative healing both collectively and personally. Four, and last, this project aims to create breathing room for more narratives of trauma, including: alternative narratives, fractured narratives, futuristic narratives, anti-narratives, and no narratives at all. The dissertation begins with an analysis of thirty-six years of TIME magazine - through both quantitative methods and close readings - in order to understand how the popular discourses of trauma/PTSD have shifted since the diagnosis was incorporated into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Chapter Two provides a Feminist Queer Crip analysis of Emma Gonzalez’s “March For Our Lives” speech from March 24, 2018, offering a reconceptualization and working definition of trauma as an embodied, affective structure that must be taken out of the medical model of disability. Chapter Three turns to recent debates about trauma and trigger warnings in the college classroom. When contextualized within the intersecting politics of disability and feminist pedagogies, this chapter argues that three fundamental misconceptions within this debate become apparent and the need for a Feminist Disability Studies Pedagogy arises. Chapter Four imagines trauma otherwise through a close reading of A little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, arguing that the book’s main character presents an alternative, crip, ways of knowing and being with trauma that deserves our critical consideration.