"…part of what she documents are the aftereffects of maintaining secrecy."

ann cvetkovich on jean carlomusto’s to catch a glimpse in an archive of feelings: trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. maintaining secrets can be traumatic.

"more so than distinctions between private and public trauma, those between trauma as everyday and ongoing and trauma as a discrete event may be the most profound consequences of a gendered approach."

ann cvetkovich, an archive of feelings: trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures

"because trauma can be unspeakable and unrepresentable and because it is marked by forgetting and dissociation, it often seems to leave behind no records at all. trauma puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression, such as testimony, and new forms of monuments, rituals, and performances that can call into being collective witnesses and publics."

ann cvetkovich, an archive of feelings: trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures 

hysteriarama:

“A PTSD clinical diagnosis defines trauma as an overwhelming event that produces certain kinds of symptoms in the patient. Poststructuralist theory defines it as an event that is unrepresentable. I want to think about trauma as part of the affective language that describes life under capitalism. I’m interested in how shock and injury are made socially meaningful, paradigmatic even, within cultural experience. I want to focus on how traumatic events retract outward to produce all kinds of affective responses and not just clinical symptoms. Moreover, in contrast to the individualist approaches of clinical psychology, I’m concerned with trauma as a collective experience that generates collective responses. I am compelled by historical understandings of trauma as a way of describing how we live, and especially how we live effectively.”

—

Ann Cvetkovich “An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures” (via clairebearstare)

(Source: claire-adactyl)

(art-of-drowning)

jenny holzer, 1980-1982