trauma: spider in my grapes, tuition due before payday, my shorts fell down in gym class

No matter what you type into Google Images, pictures of women's bodies turn up. I know this is an old cliche, but the truth becomes more startling as your search words become less and less relatable to bodies or sex (obviously, on the internet, body/sex = female/nude). Today I was traumatized looking for an image of an inside out clock. What gives? I said clock.

Speaking of trauma, this week I got weepy reading Ann Cvetcovich's An Archive of Feelings. Cvetcovich employs a collection of creative works from various authors/artists on topics of incest, lesbianism, AIDS activism and care-taking, to theorize trauma. Trauma, she argues, is unfixed. It is daily and unremarkable, on the side of the road, unrepresentable... rather than something we can pathologize (and heal) according to the latest DSM. It cannot be presented with narrative ease as it is usually done in our culture (i.e., survivor of conflict zone will display x/y symptoms for z months). Thinking about trauma in this unconventional way allows us to engage with and appreciate our complicity in traumatic processes. Trauma is not about pity or fixing, but about losses of connection that are non-linear. We all experience loss of connection and we've all had our hands in instigating others' sensations of loss...and these interchanges construct our lives in multiple ways. Overall, I loved the book. Bold intervention into trauma studies, hell of a tough read emotionally.

Going into the Gender/Race/Representation seminar yesterday with emotions flying, I found some clarity for a longstanding internal tension that I discussed in GossipGirl-induced Identity Crisis. In discussion about the visual grasp of trauma and the need for nontraditional representation of trauma in critical/feminist film and video art, we illuminated the importance of finding the sweet spot between text  (in this case, video) and spectator (in this case, moi). THIS IS THE COOLEST IDEA EVER! I took the 'sweet spot' to mean that zone where the text speaks to me, even if it plays to a non-feminist soundtrack (as Shoshana so eloquently put it).

Okay, think Gossip Girl. To me, there is something seriously seductive about the emotionality and beauty of that show. Note: it is a horribly problematic series(!) and I cringe when I describe it as beautiful... but it is in many ways! It is so glamorously produced and edited and lit and soundtracked and the actors are breathtaking. Not to mention, my act of watching this show provides necessary self-care in my depressingly capitalist life. The very process of unwinding alone in the dark with this tacky teen drama on my laptop is wonderfully invigorating and it propels me toward my next day of work.

Trauma aside for 40 minutes, I'm meeting Gossip Girl where I can and it is oh-so-sweet here.