Can a concept of trauma be returned to the working class, the abused and the exploited? Is it too late? Does anyone even care anymore? Jenny Wu leafs through the theorist’s new book, Traumatized
Traumatized opens with a critique of a 2021 livestream by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, during which the US democratic socialist representative compared the attack on the American Capitol earlier that year to her own experience of sexual assault – pulling what was for Catherine Liu a shameless political stunt. The film and media theorist goes on to explore the foundations of anti-child-abuse advocacy in the Victorian era, when the first American child-protection charities were modelled after the British Royal Society for the Protection of Animals, before discussing how college-educated feminists ‘took over’ the movement from working-class feminists during the 1970s and scripted trauma into a sales pitch; how PTSD came to be a medical diagnosis; how Oprah Winfrey sold stories of trauma on daytime television; and how the discipline of trauma studies was invented by devout mentees of Yale literary scholar Paul de Man to save his reputation after his writings for a Nazi newspaper were posthumously uncovered.
A toxic admixture of 1960s rebellion and 1980s entrepreneurialism, trauma culture is, for Liu, a perniciously pseudo-political, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific and ahistorical American export. Within such a culture, suffering ‘has no meaning outside of the individual’s lived experience’ and serves only the ‘defensive and deluded’ Professional Managerial Class (PMC) – the white-collar left liberals that were the subject of Liu’s Virtue Hoarders (2021). Trauma culture sidelines the working class and obscures the violence of their immiseration, which, in Liu’s view, is the most widespread form of suffering in the world today. Where are, after all, in mainstream discussions of justice and reparation – which, Liu would argue, focus myopically on identity politics – the acknowledgements of the 2008 financial crisis? Economic exploitation creates ‘psychological damage that trauma culture cannot repair’, she writes.
Trauma, when properly processed through public consciousness – rather than that of personal emotion and religious mystification – becomes a collective burden and bond that can catalyse real material redistribution. But if there is a line between playing up the ‘sacred status’ of victimhood for profit and clout and ‘playing the victim’, as those who file complaints are often accused of doing, Liu toes it with deliberate indelicacy. Traumatized, its title dripping with sarcasm, sets out to portray those whose suffering has been made public – from AOC and Oprah to Palestinian children in occupied Gaza – without a hint of sentimentality. In doing so, its tone runs counter to that of recent discursive currents such as the #MeToo movement: founded around 2006 by working-class women; ‘taken over’ in 2017, like feminism itself, by the PMC. Where others might let the revelation of atrocity absolve a victim of further political responsibility, Liu presses them to speak in an objective and historically informed way, particularly when they have the public’s ear.
As for the PMC, one senses that Liu is not writing to convince them to renounce their trauma scripts; this ‘corrupted’ constituency is a lost cause. The good news for Liu is that the left liberal narrative is already unravelling. Observing with some glee that ‘trauma culture foreign policy’, for example, ‘is being undone today’ – a time when ‘low-level gangsterism rather than virtue hoarding’ defines the American worldview – ‘not by the left, but by MAGA’, she seems eager to welcome the long-awaited overthrow of PMC mores, regardless of by whom.
Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering by Catherine Liu Verso, £16.99 (hardcover)
From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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