(This contains references to gendered violence, and discussion of the politics of trauma. Any missteps are mine and not those of people cited.)
This newsletter only exists because I find twitter exhausting. But it has been a lot harder to digest the past couple of days in particular in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder. In some ways, this difficulty is necessary. People want to talk about it. People need to talk about their experiences. But it is frustrating that there seems to be no way to do this without re-triggering one another over and over again. All of this is amplified, of course, by the pandemic, intensifying the sense of isolation and the riskiness of public space this event has drawn out.
The cops harassing people trying to organise vigils or marches really brings this home - they recognise how this implicates them, even if not all of these organisers do. This recognition becomes surveillance, and refuses any expression of trauma that isn’t generalised howling into the void, or perhaps new legislation that expands the police’s own power, such as this misogyny hate crime bill. Yasmin Nair has written recently on the political weaponisation of trauma, in her case, around an individual politician.
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?
I don’t follow political coverage close enough to know if any particular MP or party figure has appointed themselves representative of women’s abuse in this specific moment, but the dynamics described seem similar, paraphrasing slightly, welding a personal story onto a larger national one. The move from the specific case of Sarah Everard to more general cases of women’s harassment and abuse is of course necessary before there can be any attempt to address the structural dynamics at play, but in the process it risks refracting these experiences through the generalised subject of British womanhood; white, cis, middle class, only increasingly so over the past few years too. The Labour MP and popular feminist Jess Phillips omitting trans women from her list of women killed in the UK where a man has been charged or convicted, read out as part of a speech in parliament, only confirms this - that Phillips has a long history of racism and anti-Blackness seems not coincidental here. I’m not even gonna think about the ramifications of handing the police power to enforce “a curfew for men”.
In ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Respond to Racism’, Audre Lorde writes,
Any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger [...] And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other’s anger, please remember that it is not our anger [that is, Black women’s anger about racism] which makes me caution you to lock your door at night and not to wander the streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in academic rhetoric.
This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. (p. 122)
The risk that the expression of abuse trauma could bolster forms of reactionary nationalism oriented around protecting white womanhood does not go away if trauma is left unspoken. People need to be able to talk about this. But the public sphere, dominated by the ruling class, is hostile to these conversations, and only permits them when they can be directed towards their own power. Threatening vigil organisers with criminal charges is only the most literal form this has taken in this instance - but it is not, thereby, the most brutal manifestation of state violence in this empire. In the long term, these manifestations highlight that we need serious mass movements that can defend trauma-practices from the state. (Sorry, I know I am a broken record, but we really do need mass struggle.)
But whilst I certainly think a crowded public demonstration would make me feel better, the fact of a mass movement - which can take many forms, more or less feminist or attuned to the realities of abuse - is not a substitute in itself for practices of recognition, consolation, mourning, and accountability. Whilst, as Nair argues, the current popular forms of framing trauma threaten to obscure the conditions in which it arises, and even to substitute for politics as such, we also cannot escape trauma in our politics. Personal experience and numerous theoretical and organisational legacies warn us otherwise. It is going to be there whether we like it or not. We need ways of thinking about it, and practices around it, that can direct trauma in ways that don’t just reiterate violence against one another, but direct it towards clear targets, as Lorde says, creative, destructive of our enemies, but not self-destructive.
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I cite the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. There is a pdf of a different edition available here - the essay is only 10 pages long and worth reading in full.
I am grateful to my friend AJ for feedback on this piece.