Excerpt: It is a particular irony of the times we live in that a woman of colour helps to suspend any ongoing awareness of the deathliness of American history by retelling her personal trauma.
You might not feel it now
But when the pain cuts through
You’re going to know and how
The sweat is going to fill your head
When it becomes too much
You’re going to shout aloud
—-“Savoy Truffle,” The Beatles
If a woman cries in private, do her tears even exist?
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez—widely known as AOC—needed to make sure everyone knew she had been traumatised by the events of January 6, when mobs of mostly white men took over the Capitol. In a live 90-minute Instagram video posted on January 12, AOC, clothed in a somber dark green turtleneck and with her arms calmly folded in front of her, spoke about the events of the day. The delivery was calm but forceful, and included sharp rebukes to her colleagues who had tweeted details of the whereabouts of other legislators, putting them in grave danger.
The backlash was immediate: AOC is that rare public figure with haters on both the Right and the Left. The Twitterati—whose power is entirely overrated and overestimated—insisted that she had falsely claimed to have been in the Capitol building. As this Reuters fact-checking article points out, the claims that she lied are themselves inaccurate.
This was a little before Andrew Cuomo was discovered to have been lying about COVID deaths, and was still seen as some kind of demigod: If he’d provided a similar account, laced with his signature bluntness and macho posturing while calling out his colleagues—the sort of performance already rewarded with an Emmy—his adoring public would have insisted on an Oscar. But AOC did the unthinkable and spoke as any male politician would, and for this she was instantly punished and called out for being a liar.
The kerfuffle could have gone away, easily, given that several respectable news outlets, including the New York Times, provided plenty of fact-checking evidence that AOC never lied about where she was. Video footage from reporters and witnesses easily demonstrated that the invasion of the Capitol had been a horrific event. AOC is notable for her quick wit and sharp responses on Twitter: a few words could have easily silenced her critics.
But there was more at stake than just the truth of what everyone saw: there was the reputation of a politician facing a particularly gendered and, given the state of affairs today, a racialised response. AOC chose to return to the scene of her account, in effect creating a do-over of her previous narrative. In the process, she presented herself as not just a politician but as a woman of colour with a secret to reveal.
In a second video, also 90 minutes long and posted on February 1, AOC retold the events of January 6, this time in a more relaxed silvery-mauve turtleneck. The tone and tenor here are entirely different, as is her physical presentation of the facts, provided in a blow-by-by account. At one point, she jumps up from her chair and stands with her back to the wall with arms held up on both sides, re-enacting how she stood breathlessly inside her bathroom as someone pounded loudly on her office door. Into this elaborate and highly dramatised narrative, AOC folded in the bombshell revelation that created a stir and conversations around her: She is a survivor of sexual assault.
What was the point of the disclosure, and how did it clarify January 6? In her introductory comments, AOC claims that she wasn’t just confronting the charge that she had lied but also fellow lawmakers (it was unclear who and how many) who apparently told her to move on from the events. She went on to say that such people were just like those who tell sexual assault survivors that they were not assaulted, or that they have not suffered as much as they think, or that they should just forget the assault and move on. This is a startling analogy, and its rhetorical potency colours the entire video. Slate’s Susan Matthews is among those who argue that AOC makes only a glancing reference to her assault, but in fact the revelation returns over and over again in different ways and constant references to personal and national trauma appear in both videos, over the course of 180 minutes. AOC links the events of January 6 to her own life and trauma, fusing the two together and making it impossible for sympathisers to disentangle them.
She does this explicitly in the second video when she says, “As a survivor I struggle with the idea of being believed. People are constantly telling me I’m untruthful or exaggerating.”
But those are two entirely separate and unconnected matters.
Even today, with changes to prevent victim-shaming and blaming, survivors of sexual assault face the onus of proving that they’re worthy of justice and not making up their stories. But to constantly be told, as AOC claims she is, that one is untruthful or exaggerating, is not connected to the first claim; it is nothing like what survivors face. Politicians are frequently accused of lying, or of changing prior positions: only recently, AOC called Joe Biden’s children’s detention centres “influx facilities” even though she had, under Donald Trump, referred to them as “concentration camps.” Not quite a lie, but certainly an act of dissimulation that marks her as being at least in the possession of the ability to lie.
By eliding the fact that survivors struggle to be believed with accusations that she was lying about the facts, AOC made it clear that to not believe her version of events was to also disbelieve her story of sexual assault. Her rhetorical conflation of the two is an unfair and duplicitous move, designed only to shut down all critiques of her, perhaps all critiques ever. The only option left to viewers and listeners who don’t want to be seen as Trump Wallahs is to metaphorically raise their hands in surrender and quietly back away.
In an era of #MeToo, we’re easily led to assume that women’s long-hidden and suppressed stories about sexual harassment and assualt can finally be revealed and discussed as part of an ongoing problem. The reality is that #MeToo has had no discernible effect on the lives of millions of women without the connections and the economic security to go public with their stories, and this is more so the case in the pandemic. In restaurants with dine-in service, waitresses face increased sexual harrassement from customers who want them to take off their masks to decide how much to leave in tips (proving that women have to perform myriad forms of sex work in every sphere just to make the bare minimum).
As labour writer Sarah Jaffe has been pointing out, long before #MeToo, labour rights and women’s ability to walk out of oppressive and exploitative conditions that include but are not limited to sexual harassment are what will ultimately give them the freedom to strike back against their superiors. The emphasis on individual and prominent women’s tales of bravery takes away from the fact that systemic conditions won’t change if all we can guarantee is that mostly white, privileged, and famous women get to tell their stories about personal harm. Yet #MeToo and its particular style of exposure has become a touchstone for contemporary feminism: the ability to tell one’s story has become the definition of empowerment and such stories land without the necessary contexts like race and class: who is telling these stories, and who is left unscathed after telling their stories? In a better world, we would guarantee the rights of everyone—whether porn actors, waiters, or celebrities—freedom from all forms of exploitation and we would guarantee all that without them having to constantly vomit out their individual stories of woe. Instead, what we have today is a somewhat lascivious—dare we say pornographic—interest in having women relate their stories over and over again.
AOC’s revelation arrived against this backdrop as she welded her personal story onto a larger national one. A recurring sentiment and statement that circulates around January 6 is “This is not who we are,” as if the events were a shocking aberration, a culmination of four years of the Trump presidency. AOC’s videos outline a narrative that liberals and progressives have stubbornly held on to: that everything awful is Trump’s fault, and the biggest problem facing us is the extreme Right wing of the country.
In her videos, AOC gestures physically and verbally to the conservatives in her legislature as the cause of January 6. But January 6 is the result of centuries of racial and economic unrest that led to the events of the day. It’s easy to dismiss what happened as animus on the part of some, but the pandemic has shown us that the United States, despite being the hoarder of the most wealth, suffers from multiple broken systems that have left vast numbers of people without basic resources. The rioters certainly bore every appearance of being violent usurpers of national property, but the history of the United States is a history of establishing dominion and domination and to then claim property, including human bodies, through violent means. The majority of those who stormed the Capitol were white men, and video evidence shows that security officers were polite and respectful even as some of the intruders were walking out with lecterns and photographing documents left behind by legislators. The obvious point needs to be made: that if they had been Black rioters, it would have taken days to wash the blood off the stairs and hallways.
It’s impossible to miss the level of racist and sexual menace that permeates the event as witnessed in numerous recordings: a group of white men roars through the halls of power; outside, someone hangs a noose; inside, men stream around loudly calling out names and demanding to know where particular lawmakers, including women, are. It’s surprising that the effects of January 6 were not infinitely worse, with assassinations and rapes added to the gruesome list of all that happened. It’s not surprising that AOC, a woman of colour in power, historically exactly the sort to be raped and killed by such a group, should have felt threatened and terrified and utterly vulnerable.
But none of this means that what happened is an aberration. The fervent discourse of trauma that has sprung up around the events, the eagerness with which mental health professionals in the media have insisted on teaching us all how to “heal” is meant to support the idea that “we” suffered “harm.” Seen this way, January 6 turns into a dark but closing chapter on four terrible years that are the fault of one man and his racist followers.
The overwhelming presence of whiteness in the Capitol riots points to the rise of white supremacy, to a degree, but it also indicates a disenchantment and a sense of futility that Trump tapped into: his genius lay in filtering such helplessness through a racial lens. To date, American public discourse has yet to make place for the reality of American history: that the U.S is broken for nearly everyone except an incredibly tiny minority that’s able to literally fly to safety, as Naomi Klein points out with regard to the wealthy, like Ted Cruz, who can escape climate disasters. In the absence of any truly widespread economic critique, even most leftists prefer to talk about the racism of capitalism simply because that’s the easiest way to advance what they imagine to be a left agenda. Such talk only mires us in a discussion of racism and other forms of conservatism as the root causes of everything that ails us. At the same time, discussions of January 6 and “who we are” rarely address the fact that the American nation-state was founded on slavery and genocide—unless it’s to, once again, see slavery and genocide only as reflective of personal hatred and animus towards darker races. It’s not that capitalism does not function in racist ways, but that its racism is about the deployment of race: if capitalism could funnel white labour into exploitative conditions that produced more profits, it would and does (in ways too long to go into here—suffice it to say that we can think historically about how capitalism exploits all people, without wandering into the racism of many lefties like Connor Kilpatrick who speak nostalgically of a mythic “white working class”) .
But all of these complications are set aside in a much simpler and coherent narrative that ever-dwindling and also desperate mainstream media outlets like to emphasise: racist white men stormed a sacred government institution in order to reinstate their racist leader. Decontextualising the events from the larger context of a country that is barely functioning, and simply discussing them as the effects of racism only results in a forgetting of history. AOC talks, as every politician must, about the Capitol as the “citadel of democracy” and how she refused to let the “world’s oldest democracy” be taken over by those who stormed the building.
As I write this, the number of deaths from COVID has crossed 500,000 and a child in Texas has frozen to death in his bed. This is who we are.
Did AOC intentionally craft her two videos to allow for a forgetting of American history, to create a #MeToo narrative that centralised an individual story that in turn quietly erased a larger and troubling failure of an entire country? Intentionality is not the issue: as with every cultural and political text, authorial intentions are secondary to the effects generated, to the questions raised by the intense circulation of such a narrative. How do narratives about personal and private trauma affirm or deny a masculine, violent nationalism, the very sort that created the January 6 events in the first place? And how did AOC’s identity as both a survivor of sexual assault and a woman of colour play a role in defining January 6 as a site of trauma in the history of a country that was, after all, founded upon the projects of genocide and slavery, both traumatic and ongoing events that define the United States? Is trauma even any longer a useful framework with which to think about, well, really anything at all, given that it has become, especially for those defined as minorities, a requirement to enter into public recognition?
Trauma, the emotional response to a horrifying physical or psychological event, is real and its effects can be long-lasting. Americans in particular suffer from a massively inadequate healthcare system that fails to provide survivors of trauma even the most basic tools with which to recover. But “trauma” has also become an elastic term, ranging from the supposed effects of reading something that might trigger a memory or the actual effect of being physically or psychologically wounded by another human. In this context, it’s no surprise that January 6 is now widely read as a traumatic event for an entire nation, and AOC’s words reflect a sense that you didn’t even have to be present near the Capitol to feel traumatised:
You could have seen it on TV, you could have just heard about it, but if you at all feel unsettled in a deep way then your intuition is telling you that something’s not right, go check in with somebody.
Wednesday was an extremely traumatising event.
When everything is trauma, then nothing is. If trauma becomes all that we see on our horizon, it becomes impossible to sift through the gradations of everything that happens to us, from insults and slights to painful episodes to matters that truly ravage our bodies and souls. But it suits AOC’s purpose in the two videos to first set the stage for some imagined national trauma and then to squarely locate herself in the centre of it. It is a particular irony of the times we live in that a woman of colour helps to suspend any ongoing awareness of the deathliness of American history by retelling her personal trauma.
Women of colour and other minorities are frequently called upon to retell and vomit out their narratives of trauma simply in order to legitimise themselves and to make themselves legible in the public eye or in myriad settings, including professional ones. Grant applicants must not only provide some evidence that they are in fact members of marginalised communities but also provide at least one story about how they have overcome hardships: the proof of their identity is inextricably bound up with the trauma stories they’re required to cough up. Applicants for asylum or refugee status go through an onerous process and are often denied admission because they don’t seem traumatised enough and the not enough is subjectively defined by the presiding judge. The process can be psychologically brutalising because the system requires them to not only repeat, over and over, their traumatic and traumatising stories but to make sure that they ratchet up every evidence of trauma. If you want your supper, the logic goes, you must sing of your suffering and woe.
In a better world, people would get the resources they need because they need them, but right now their access to the basics requires them to perform their trauma to unspeakable lengths. Race and ethnicity colour the extent to which people are deemed worthy of care and how much their experiences are validated. Gender stereotypes mean that women in particular are taught to always perform their emotional selves in public and private: their responses must always emerge from the personal. The legibility of minoritised people, like women of colour, depends on the extent to which they can function as walking wounds for all to see and poke at. If they deviate from that kind of performance, they’re firmly reminded of why they don’t belong: re-entrance comes at the price of performing their broken-ness. AOC faced the backlash to her first video because she gave a firm and clear account of events and where the blame lay: She spoke like a white male politician. Her second video had her publicly reliving a trauma and effectively became a passport to reintegration as a popular public figure: she was now, once again, a woman of colour.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
—“Blackbird,” The Beatles
AOC is part of The Squad, a group of six Democratic members of the House of Representatives, all people of colour (AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush). In an overwhelmingly white and male legislative body where the average age is 57, the 31-year-old AOC stands out for her keen ability to use social media to her advantage. For anyone north of 40, social media is to be mastered and relearned with every frustrating update but for anyone else, it’s the air they breathe, a seamless part of their everyday lives. Knowing how to use it well requires a combination of playfulness and a constant, watchful eye on whatever messaging needs to be sent out and how to message it. AOC intuitively understands how to keep herself and her friends in the limelight, and it was she who came up with the moniker of The Squad: it’s playful, with just enough of a hip edge, and deftly but humorously conveys the idea that these admittedly groundbreaking politicians are a band of superheroes committed to protecting American ideals.
Even among the six, AOC occupies a unique and new role as an approachable celebrity who could also be your friend and neighbour (the Kennedys were celebrities but seen as distant royalty). As I’ve written in “What Does Your Politician Mean to You?”, she’s part of a disturbing trend among left-leaning American voters who see their politicians not as people elected to do their bidding, but as their friends. AOC, with her signature lipstick and her willingness to laugh in the face of her critics, has endeared herself to many who are entirely unaffected by what happens in her district. She has, in the process, become a template for others: when Rossana Rodríguez-Sánchez ran for Chicago Alderman in 2018, the Reader asked “Is a Puerto Rican native running for Chicago alderman the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?” (it was the kind of question that, sadly, proves yet again that Chicago will always have a second city problem). There’s no denying that she is, at this moment in time, a distinctly unique politician. So, of course, AOC has an Instagram account because, really, without one, who are you these days?
AOC is a politician but, in the familiar style of millennial politics, she’s also an Influencer of sorts. More to the left than most, very young, not unattractive (it is dangerous to admit this in the presence of a sexist Right, but let’s admit that at least a fraction of her popularity on the Left has to do with her looks), and from the Bronx: she brings with her an aura of street-smart feistiness and the sort of socialism-leaning politics that goes a long way with her constituents and fans. There is much to admire about her (like her current campaign to raise funds for those suffering in Texas) and much to dismay (see her pivot on detention centres for children), as is the case with all politicians. This essay is not concerned with her political work, so I’ll leave that for others to dissect at greater length. Of interest here is that AOC is a woman, a woman of colour, and a millennial, and the only way for a politician to succeed with that combination is to periodically vomit out life details which leave her more vulnerable so that voters might feel they know enough about her to like. A politician like Governor Andrew Cuomo can get away with being—let us be clear—a growling, lying asshole in public and receive an Emmy for performing the role of Governor (see Lyta Gold’s excellent piece on him) but a woman half as brusque as him would have been recalled out of office.
Women like AOC are constantly called upon to humanise themselves, because the logic of American political culture is that a male politician is someone you can drink a beer with while a female politician is someone who will happily serve you the beer with a smile—that AOC once worked at a bar adds a certain level of irony here.
This double standard explains why the two videos are so different.
In the first video, AOC presents herself as a calm and collected politician, recounting what happened on January 6 to her audience. She remains seated, with her arms crossed most of the time, except when she passionately (and correctly) calls out politicians like Ted Cruz for having helped incite the riot: “You have no place in the citadel of democracy if that’s the trash that you believe in, because we will never go back.” AOC’s language throughout is replete with such nationalistic, jingoistic talk, standard issue for any politician.
Trauma both suffuses and frames this first video. As she says:
After you are exposed to a traumatic event, whenever any person has an encounter where they think they’re going to die and they’re going through that process, that is a traumatising event and things don’t have to get that far for it to be traumatising. I once really excellently heard trauma … described as too much too fast too soon. So when psychologically a development happens when it’s way too jarring for an individual, if it’s something that happens and happens way too fast or way too soon that could be a traumatising event for a person.
Later, towards the end, when she’s asked what she’s doing for herself, she weaves her own story into a larger narrative about national trauma:
I was 18 years old when my father passed away, also a traumatising event. I was with him… A big part of our responsibility is in healing, a great thing about healing trauma is that you can stop those cycles of harm…. sometimes your trauma is internalising and it stops the world from experiencing your brilliance.
In the world painted by AOC, everything from the death of a parent (a sad but not uncommon matter of loss) to white supremacists tearing into the Capitol to internalising one’s trauma is on the same plane. All of it, if unchecked or left unhealed, can only have devastating results, according to her. Trauma is everything, there is no beyond it, it circumscribes our psychic horizons. We are always our trauma, and our trauma is always us.
In the second video, she begins her revelation with a noticeably shaky voice:
The other thing that I want to say … is that to friends and loved ones close to me…I want to apologise to them .. sorry if you are learning things about me that you didn’t know before. The reason I say this … these folks who tell us to move on…these are the same tactics as abusers and I’m a survivor of sexual assault. And I haven’t told many people that in my life. But when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other [sic]… all of our experiences make us who we are and that’s also to say that most people live with trauma. It is to say that there is a community of so many people who can understand.
So when I see a party who cheered on violence that killed 5 maybe now six people … when we are still losing people when we don’t know how many people are going to develop PTSD .. these people are just trying to tell us it’s not a big deal.These are the tactics of abusers.
At this point, her face changes, as she takes on a dramatically resolute look and shakes her head as she emphasises her words:
How I felt was, “Not again. I’m not gonna let it happen to me again, I’m not gonna let it happen to the other people who’ve been victimised by this situation again and I’m not letting it happen to our country, ever. I’m not letting it happen.” [Emphasis mine]
These parts of the second video take us from the shock of disclosure, to extending the trauma to the audience by making it relevant to everyone watching and relying on the fact that a significant portion of her audience will identify with her (“a community of so many people who can understand”), to then returning to the national stage by stitching her trauma onto the events of January 6 and making them contiguous to each other: “I’m not gonna let it happen to me again…to the other people…to our country.”
It’s difficult to watch a woman speak of such issues for 300 whole minutes, cumulatively, and imagine that all or any of this is calculated. But it’s also impossible to watch the videos in sequence, in the context of the gap in time between them and the backlash AOC witnessed, and the great difference in tone and tenor between the two and not realise that the story of her trauma is calculated to shift the needle of sympathy towards her.
Faced with a revelation of such startling news and import, who except the most craven and heartless could be expected to continue with any criticism of her?
Left unresolved at the end of a long, turgid screed that serves as little more than an exercise in emotional manipulation is the question of the relevance of her personal story to the events of January 6 and what anyone else is to do with this narrative. As a queer, left, feminist friend put it to me, “What am I even supposed to do with this?” The answer, of course, is: nothing. All we’re meant to do is listen, aghast, saddened, and presumably penitent if we’d been among those who might have doubted her story in any way. Together, the videos forestall any possibility of ever questioning AOC on any topic.
But a larger question remains: what effects does the insertion of a story into such an account have on, well, American history, on how women and minorities are expected to carry their trauma, and on the stories that Americans continue to tell themselves about the riots in January?
Left unchecked and without any critical response, such a manipulative use of trauma can never be empowering or revealing of human-ness: it only increases the demand that minority groups like women of colour justify their existence through the constant narration of their trauma. In the weeks following the second video, AOC’s fellow legislators, and at least one who aspired to be such, began to reveal their own traumas and public displays of emotions would expand to white men. Trauma may be becoming a political qualification.
I’m so tired
I haven’t slept a wink
I’m so tired
My mind is on the blink
—“I’m so tired,” The Beatles
Rashida Tlaib was crying, and she continued to cry for several minutes, sobbing through testimony that was hard to follow, with words about her mother with an eighth-grade education mixed in with what it felt like to receive death threats as a Palestinian-American. The video showed up everywhere for a while, a legislator weeping copiously on the floor of the House. On Democracy Now, Tlaib’s tearful speech was played without commentary or an interview with her: all that was needed was the brown woman sobbing.
Tlaib’s display of emotion came about because AOC, in the wake of January 6, organised a special session of the House so that legislators might testify about their experiences that day. Tlaib was in fact not anywhere near the Capitol that day. Perhaps heeding AOC’s words that the “trauma” of the day extended to everyone even beyond a 500 mile radius, she testified to her ongoing sense of vulnerability about death threats. Tears have become something of a requirement now, for anyone in public office, or hoping for such. During the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Congressman Jamie Raskin cried as he spoke about the events of January 6, and of having lost a son to suicide on New Year’s Eve. He said he had been in the Capitol with family members on the 6th and was separated from them in the rush, worrying that they might come to harm. He spoke weepingly of his own family tragedy and his fears for his loved ones. More recently, Merrick Garland, now the nominee for Attorney General, choked up as he spoke of his grandparents fleeing antisemitism to find refuge in the United States.
All of this serves to personalise the events of the day, but is that the outcome we want or need? In an op-ed for the New York Times, Michelle Cottle writes that “A.O.C. and Jamie Raskin Reveal That Politicians Are Real People,” as if markers of authenticity are necessary for politicians (unsurprisingly for someone on the editorial board of a historically pro-Israel and anti-Palestine newspaper, Cottle somehow missed Tlaib’s realness). Ilhan Omar spent a portion of her early life in a refugee camp and came to the U.S as an asylee: Will we now expect her to recount all of her undoubtedly horrific and painful experiences in order to justify supporting her political work? What good does it do to the political terrain to know that politicians are human, and that they face the kinds of loss and tragedy that befall average people?
We might insist that Tlaib’s tears humanise the Palestinian struggle, but Israel has known about Palestinian conditions for decades, and its continued oppression in the region, its dehumanising of Palestinian life, has continued and will continue regardless of how many public tears are shed. The solution to Israel’s domination is not to cry about it, but to effect political change through political demands, something that the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement understands well, as do the countless activists behind groups like Students for a Just Palestine.
As for Raskin and Garland: if the case cannot be made for the impeachment of a president or the investiture of an Attorney General without tears, is either worth fighting for? During his presentation, Garland said he supported a moratorium on federal executions because “a most terrible thing happens when someone is executed for a crime that they did not commit.” But he’s wrong: The terrible thing that happens is that someone is executed, regardless of their guilt or innocence—the death penalty is always state-sanctioned murder. Garland’s weeping about his grandparents, his entirely misguided statement about why executions are a problem, and the new drive towards emotional testimonials are not disconnected: together they represent ways in which the brutality of history can be erased under a blanket of sorrow and tears. Garland might cry about his grandparents finding refuge, but it’s up to us to remember that the United States actually rejected Jews seeking asylum from the Nazis, causing them to return and many of them to die. The political use of trauma only serves to erase history and politics.
Your inside is out,
And your outside is in.
Your outside is in,
And your inside is out
—“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” The Beatles.
AOC’s revelation is being widely lauded for making women’s trauma visible, but this is a careless reading of a long, often tedious and repetitive narrative (180 minutes, in case we forget) that stitches her personal narrative onto a nationalist one. We can be sympathetic to what AOC faced, acknowledge that she must have gone through horrific experiences in the distant and near past, and also maintain a healthy cynicism about the extent to which she is manipulating both a larger and a personal narrative of trauma as a politician. To be blunt: we can remember and preserve for and with her a memory of her trauma, and we can also question and scrutinise what that memory’s place in a political narrative serves to do in reinstating a particular form of American identity post Trump.
Believing her is not the point of the matters of January 6. The idea of healing from trauma is useless and only continues the project of American imperialism. AOC appears to make something visible, but what she makes visible is a process whereby she can only become legible through the visibility of her story. In the process, she also makes certain things invisible, including the brutality of America, before and after Trump. Which is to say: She materialises trauma in order to dematerialise the brutality of the American state. Trauma is no longer a remembering and moving on to some form of healing: it has become a way to cut and expose open wounds for perpetuity and to effect a forgetting of crucial histories and contexts. Under the terms set by the tear-soaked stories relayed by politicians like AOC, trauma is now a wilful form of amnesia. The two videos together form a Byzantine narrative that circles back on itself: They allow us to imagine nationhood and national belonging as a strange amalgamation of personal suffering and national trauma. Trauma is amnesia, a way for us to forget contexts and history and dwell only on the hyper-personal.
AOC is a politician, and does not require any additional legibility as a woman who has suffered sexual assault. Rashida Tlaib is a politician, and her story as a Palestinian-American does not require additional legibility through a veil of tears. Raskin is a politician and does not require additional legibility as a grieving parent in order to convince his fellow legislators to impeach Trump (an attempt that failed spectacularly). Politicians are politicians, not the pals we drink beer with: they are simply there to act on the legislative agendas they campaign on and for which we support them. The rise of The Squad is an important development in American politics, and encourages us to believe that generational shifts are not just necessary, but possible.
But younger politicians like these six already come burdened with the expectation that they constantly prove that their lives are not just exemplary but tragic enough to merit legibility and visibility. There are costs of placing such burdens on them and on any other politicians or public figures: it means that the issues they fight and stand for the most— like ending poverty and inequality—can only be fought for if they first prove how heart-rending all of that is. If we cannot understand the horrors of war, poverty, illness, and assault of any kind in the abstract, surely that speaks to a depravity in our public life. If we cannot imagine what suffering feels like without making someone perform it for us over and over again, surely it’s we who are the most inhumane and cruel, more so than those who inflicted the abuse in the first place, because we insist that the suffering become permanent public displays? What does it mean for the world we want if we cannot fight for the rights and dignity of other humans, without first making them cry for us and without us crying over them?
This piece, once a tangled mess of thoughts and ideas, owes everything to the fine editorial labour of Liz Baudler and Matt Simonette, who are not responsible for any errors or problems.
I’m also grateful for the input of Seth Pierson, Sanaz Raji, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Rashna Batliwalla Singh, and G. Spears during our conversations. Sanaz additionally noted, on her private FB wall, that Vicky Ford, Tory Minister for Children & Families revealed her childhood eating disorder in an interview about children and COVID. As Sanaz puts it, “It is fascinating how the Tories have been able to finagle the language of trauma to present themselves as a compassionate and humane politicians, not the political party of childhood starvation or the very austerity politics that has contributed to zero funding for mental health services, and contributed to the UK’s disastrous COVID response.”
This points to the disconcerting globalisation of the mobilisation of trauma to the worse political ends, by all parties.
See also my “What Does Your Politician Mean to You?” for more on AOC.
For more on my work on trauma, just type the word into the search engine here. A good place to start would be “Your Trauma Is Your Passport: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Global Citizenship.”
Piece edited on February 28: the cumulative length of the videos was 180, not 300 minutes.
This piece is not behind a paywall, but represents many hours of original research and writing. Please make sure to cite it, using my name and a link, should it be useful in your own work. I can and will use legal resources if I find you’ve plagiarised my work in any way. And if you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
