All My Friends Live in My Computer: Trauma, Tactical Media, and Meaning 1978818963, 9781978818965

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All My Friends Live in My Computer

All My Friends Live in My Computer Trauma, Tactical Media, and Meaning

SAMIRA RAJABI

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Rajabi, Samira, author. Title: All my friends live in my computer: trauma, tactical media, and meaning / Samira Rajabi. Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020031053 | ISBN 9781978818958 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978818965 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978818972 (epub) | ISBN 9781978818989 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978818996 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Psychic trauma and mass media—­United States. | Digital media—­ United States. Classification: LCC BF175.5.P75 R36 2021 | DDC 155.9/3—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020031053 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2021 by Samira Rajabi All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­r utgersuniversitypress​.­org Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

 For my big, beautiful, messy, wonderful ­family, My partner in life, & My pups. You are all my heroes.

Contents Prologue ix

Part I  Trauma and Media Theory 1

Introduction: Seeing through Suffering: Digital Mediation and the Suffering Subject

2 ­There Are Many Ways to Suffer 3

Putting It Out ­There: Tactics of Meaning Making in Digital Media

3 15 32

Part II  Meaning Making Online 4

The B ­ attle We D ­ idn’t Choose: Angelo Merendino and Mediations of Grief, Disease, and the Trauma of Bearing Witness

59

5

Nothing Can Stop You: CrossFit, Trauma, and the Digital Remaking of Ability

72

6

Bullied by the Nation: The Symbolic Trauma of Ira­ni­ans Living in the United States

90

7 Conclusion

124

Acknowl­edgments 135 Notes 139 References 143 Index 151

vii

Prologue Songs of dead laughter, songs of love once hot, Songs of a cup once flushed rose-­red with wine, Songs of a r­ ose whose beauty is forgot, A nightingale that pipe hushed lays divine: And still a graver ­music runs beneath The tender love notes of t­ hose songs of thine, Oh, Seeker of the keys of Life and Death! —­Hafez

When difficult t­ hings happened in my f­ amily, my f­ ather, an immigrant from Iran, often had a poem from his cata­logue of favorites at the ready. He called on the wisdom of the poets he had grown up with to try to help us make sense of what was happening, and to give meaning to and make meaning from the challenges we faced. When my heart was broken, he would read me poems in Persian about the fragility and importance of love. When I was met with challenges at work, he offered me poems on the importance of commitment to a goal or ideal. When I was diagnosed with a brain tumor and sick for many years, he would read to me of the nature of life and death. He taught me to make meaning from the challenges I faced, and in so ­doing he taught me to see the way ­others do the same. It was in d­ oing the research for this book, and the doctoral degree that inspired it, that I learned that my ­family was not unique in working tirelessly to make meaning from the difficult ­things that happened in life. In fact, I learned that meaning is at the heart of so much of what p­ eople do in their day-­to-­day lives—­meanings that are constructed for us and that we construct using our social groups, alongside our thought leaders, and in our interactions ix

x  •  Prologue

with popu­lar culture. I know this visceral need for meaning exists and persists not just from my research, but from my life. When I fell ill while working ­toward my doctoral degree, I immediately went online and found a community of sufferers like me, grappling with how they would wind through the catastrophes that took hold of their lives. When bad ­things happen, the meanings we all use to or­ga­nize and govern our day-­to-­day existence can be called into question by the confronting nature of our suffering. In this book I ask: What do ­people do, using digital media, to respond to the big questions traumas force them to ask? The journey to answer that question turned out to be precarious for me as both a scholar and a person who is no more immune to the whims of trauma than any other. In the fall of 2017, as I was writing this book, my m ­ other was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. I returned to work a few days ­after my ­family shared the difficult news with me, feeling weary and unsettled. Through bleary eyes, I looked at my calendar in a strident effort to work through the pain. I was scheduled to edit what would ­later become chapter 4 of this book—­a chapter about a young w ­ oman named Jennifer Merendino, who died a fast and tragic death from breast cancer. The stories told in this book, including Jennifer’s, are the stories of everyday ­people who go online to makes sense of the way the world can be so hard to live in. Trauma, as we have come to know it in our society ­today, leaves virtually nobody untouched. The year 2017 was one of many traumas for me, my ­family, and my community—­just like it was for many o­ thers. In addition to the painful diagnosis of my ­mother’s cancer, my f­ amily also suffered what I ­will call in this book a symbolic trauma, a form of suffering encompassed within the concept of trauma, but distinct in what ­causes it and what perpetuates it on suffering bodies. Our symbolic suffering started with the Trump administration’s executive order, more widely known as the travel ban, and to some the “Muslim Ban.” In January of 2017, Trump signed the executive order barring immigrants from a changing list of Muslim-­majority countries from coming to the United States (Laughland 2017). The murky executive order was immediately and sloppily enforced across the country; green card holders, dual citizens, and travelers who’d gone through ­g reat lengths to obtain visas had no sense of ­whether or not they w ­ ere safe. Though the cause of the trauma was the symbolic vio­lence enacted by the United States of Amer­i­ca, the feelings of suffering w ­ ere very real, very visceral, and very painful. This suffering, like some physical traumas and most ­mental or emotional traumas, was invisible, and the news media made legible only ­those sufferers whose stories could be narrated according to the tropes of tragedy so commonplace in ­today’s twenty-­four-­hour news cycle. Immigrants from the countries on the list, like my f­ amily from Iran, suddenly felt antagonized and unwelcome in a country we had worked hard to be a part of. Previous champions of assimilation to the American Dream in my

Prologue • xi

f­ amily fell s­ ilent as ­people that looked like us ­were turned away at airports. The life we had always known had suddenly become contingent on the whims of a reality-­star-­turned-­president. The compounding stress of multiple types of trauma in my own life and the concurrent flooding of my own social media feed with stories of other traumas at the hands of the state made clear that this book is more vital now than ever. Trauma has been relegated to the corners, a medical prob­lem in need of a fix. When trauma comes to the fore in popu­lar culture, it is tritely referred to as if a dismissive throwaway, in trigger warnings, and as a casual aside. I agree that trauma needs medicine, and indeed it is at the fore of the public imaginary, but our attention to it in mainstream conversations is haphazard at best. Society has long traumatized p­ eople in ways that go unacknowledged as traumas. States and institutions are callously and unceremoniously overlooked as perpetrators of harm, as violent actors wounding the body politic. When the vio­lence of the state is not recognized as causing traumatic harm, that harm goes unacknowledged as having embodied effects, as causing suffering. Digital media is illuminating this suffering e­ very single day. Suffering bodies have gone online to find space and meaning, and to make their bodies legible when their traumas, and the way trauma is socially understood, threatened to box them into a narrative that could be easily disregarded. This book ­will bring to light the larger geopo­liti­cal stakes of suffering bodies and the way their digital mediations offer fertile ground through which to understand how humanity is negotiating trauma socially, po­liti­cally, and interpersonally. Trauma, w ­ hether it happens to the body or mind, makes the ground beneath the person or p­ eople suffering from it feel shaky. The world ­doesn’t make sense to a trauma sufferer and often this is not just ­because of the individual experience of trauma but b­ ecause of the way we have come to know suffering writ large. I have taken on this proj­ect of tracing digital mediations of trauma to understand how it is that ­people use media when they most need meaning. I link clear examples of embodied suffering and the gestures it motivates to the symbolic suffering caused by symbolic vio­lence to highlight how trauma can inform media scholarship. Media have long been a site for meaning making. In All My Friends Live in My Computer, I outline the way digital affordances and user participation function in tandem across bound­aries, places, and types of suffering to make meaning, to allow suffering to be seen, and to make legible ­those broken, othered, unruly bodies that our social constructions seldom make room for.

All My Friends Live in My Computer

Part I

Trauma and Media Theory

1

Introduction Seeing through Suffering: Digital Mediation and the Suffering Subject I first came across the meme that read, “I love my computer ­because all my friends live in it,” on a Facebook page for survivors of brain tumors that I was perusing for course research during gradu­ate school. Next to the text was a cartoon drawing of a w ­ oman, with hearts for eyes, hugging her computer. At the time, I was in the hospital for my own brain tumor, my laptop g­ ently perched on pillows on my lap, my head propped on ice bags, as I attempted to stay connected to the world beyond the hospital walls. I chuckled and thought to myself, “Yea, kind of,” and I continued to scroll. I ­didn’t think too much about that meme again u­ ntil I was confronted by the case of Jennifer Merendino and the deep engagement digital users had with images of her journey through breast cancer. I recalled the meme again as I witnessed an injured athlete named Kevin Ogar catalyze a community through the digital mediations of the catastrophic injury he sustained during a CrossFit tournament. Over and over this singular meme kept coming to mind as I bore witness to users engaging in digital media, as though they w ­ ere my friends, each time life challenged them and confronted them with trauma. Again, I was reminded of the meme when, in January of 2017, I started to see countless posts across social media platforms about what was being called a “Muslim Ban,” as I realized ­people from a handful of countries listed by President Trump ­were being held 3

4  •  Trauma and Media Theory

at airports without due pro­cess (Bromwich 2017). As I dove into t­ hese vari­ous stories over the years, I discovered an uncharted landscape of suffering bodies, leaving testimony in the comments sections of YouTube videos, in the retweets of power­ful images, and in the shares of viral media artifacts, memes, and articles. Often, even the most fleeting connections I observed w ­ ere ripe with vulnerability and raw with emotion, while still seeming to create an affinity among users through the shared experience of suffering. It was as though the suffering fostered connection and created space to articulate something new, something necessary, and something meaningful. ­Humans are fallible and ­human life is fragile. Encountering the world with fallible bodies and minds guarantees that ­those bodies w ­ ill not remain unscathed by the vari­ous physical, ­mental, social, or cultural ills of the world. In a person’s lifetime, it is inevitable that they ­will experience hurt. It is what they do with that experience of hurt that is meaningful for this book. Digital media have become a repository for short-­form testimonies of suffering. It is time to account for what ­these testimonies do in digital space. In some ways, existing in the social world, especially for many marked and marginalized bodies, is to exist in a perpetual state of trauma. For the bodies that do not conform, and often cannot conform to the social, normative bound­aries constructed in and through culture, the world is a precarious place, and indeed, a dangerous place. This danger, however, d­ oesn’t render p­ eople completely impotent; rather, as I w ­ ill demonstrate in the pages that follow, it enables them to make new meaning. Digital media are cultural, participatory, po­liti­cal spaces that ­people engage with to make meaning from trauma, suffering, and life’s vicissitudes. Within the global cultural imaginary, trauma is a central way of engaging with the world, particularly the past. Trauma has been one of the central ways we survey the past b­ ecause it is central to how ­people experience the world, and experience notions of humanity (Fassin and Rechtman 2009, 20). The notion of trauma has changed over time and its space in social, cultural public life has increased in the last several de­cades. Much of the recent attention to trauma grew from the experiences of the Holocaust and then, in the United States in par­tic­u ­lar, the Vietnam War and September 11 terrorist attacks (Fassin and Rechtman 2009, 26; Rothe 2011). The language of trauma, and thus the ways of experiencing it, grew predominantly from medical, psychiatric discourses, even as it has become common in popu­lar culture. This proj­ect enters the conversation around trauma with a clear and fundamental investment in its de-­medicalization in order to place trauma within the social, po­liti­cal, and global context in which it takes place. That is, this scholarship disengages trauma from the normative bound­aries of medical “fixing,” and instead examines how it progresses, shifts, and changes in culture. This gesture is necessary ­because it is often overlooked that the experience of suffering is always po­liti­cal (Bennett

Introduction • 5

2005; Cvetkovich 2003). Without diminishing or demeaning the need for medical attention to traumas, t­ here needs to be a dual investment in the social and cultural experience of trauma to recognize how suffering bodies resist narratives of their suffering. All bodies are bound by social norms, borders, cultures, and more. In addition, trauma sufferers are bound by the rhe­toric and discourse that surrounds pain, victimization, and trauma in medical fields but also in public space. Mediation of trauma needs to be examined at the individual, social, and symbolic levels b­ ecause they serve as symptoms of disjunctures in the fabric of social life. Thus, as a lens for examining meaning production in digital space, digital media about trauma offer a rich tapestry of testimony that is productive in understanding media participation and digital affordances.

Media Studies from the Lens of Trauma Suffering demands to be seen. When locked away, trauma seeps out, insidiously injecting itself into the suffering subject’s everyday life and even the most mundane experiences. The confronting nature of trauma, combined with the pervasive need to presence oneself in digital space to constitute a curated identity (Couldry 2012, 51), leads to the widespread mediation of trauma. The current mediatic moment, constituted through capitalism and driven by technology, leads t­ hose who suffer to negotiate their experience online. It is in digital space that trauma sufferers contend with the central dialectic of trauma: the visceral need to share one’s suffering and the simultaneous impulse to deny its gravity (Herman 1997, 1). Knowledge is produced through actively engaging with the world; everyday experience functions as a teacher to suffering subjects who must learn to remake meaning. When p­ eople experience trauma, they become “epistemically privileged in some crucial re­spect” ­because of what ­they’ve felt and experienced (Wylie 2003, 339). Suffering bodies become privy to this “epistemic privilege,” therefore triggering a re-­evaluation of the vari­ous schema by which life is led and, by extension, mediated. Sufferers’ lives become instantaneously governed and defined by the pain, uneven memories, and up-­and-­down experiences informed by a sense of victimhood. Understandings of victimization come from received social and cultural frameworks, frequently told through media. Th ­ ese encounters with received culture force suffering material bodies to situate themselves in their symbolic universe, often necessitating a re­orientation of the symbolic. Digital media enable one negotiative space through which ­these new circumstances can be articulated, mediated, re-­mediated, and contested or resisted. Trauma, in changing the everyday lives of its sufferers, then shifts the everyday media produced using digital technology to account for life’s vari­ous contingencies—­ contingencies informed by the clash between one’s material real­ity and a new

6  •  Trauma and Media Theory

and changing recognition of the symbolic world. Mediation, for many, is an alternative or addendum to more conventional, therapeutic forms of coping with trauma, indicating that trauma is a useful optic through which to examine why and how media capture ­human imagination and participation when suffering is prolific. The what, why, and how of posting online, as well as the who, exactly, sufferers are posting for, become markers of identity that negotiate, resist, and re-­mediate conceptualizations of the sick, the sufferer, and the victim as they seek legibility within a globalized circulation of meanings and ideas. Digital media are spaces where stories are shared and meaning is made. This space is a bastion for resistive discourse while still being a massive, ideologically inflected marketing machine intent on reinforcing the most oppressive expressions of society. Recent events, from the suspicions of election tampering to the ­battle cry of w ­ omen to be taken seriously as victims in the #metoo movement, have highlighted the varying shades of the possibility and refusal inherent in digital space. In all of this, one ­thing has remained consistent: digital space is an impor­tant place for the articulation, contestation, and negotiation of both personal and public life. Approximately 70  ­percent of Americans use social media, and some estimates count at least half of the world’s population to be online (Smith and Anderson 2018). What binds many of the current online movements and debates is the stories that underlie them. Le Guin (2004) says that, in stories, as dominant narratives become imbedded in society, they become internalized, yet imagination and an ability to envision alternatives to the pre­sent real­ity help overcome oppression. Though digital tools may reify dominant discourses around material bodies, as spaces for stories, they provide users a way to imagine alternate possibilities. Le Guin is deeply in ­favor of telling stories and making meaning: “The exercise of imagination is dangerous to ­those who profit from the way ­things are ­because it has the power to show that the way t­ hings are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though l­imited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative lit­er­a­ture has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller” (Le Guin 2004). Trauma c­ auses an inherent questioning of the way ­things are or perhaps the way ­things have always been. Though suffering ensues, t­ here is a space for the construction of alternative meanings. Invisibly marked bodily experience comes to light in digital media ­because of platform-­enabled testimony. This book uncovers how much of this trauma testimony is part of a careful dance of creativity and testimony alongside the co-­optation and commodification of suffering. In this dance, meaning making is a mundane but resistive act, any analy­sis of which must bridge social and cultural context with the individual deployment of technology and media, positioning politics at the heart of the experience of suffering. The cases that make

Introduction • 7

up the empirical argument in this book highlight the dual possibilities inherent in mediation of trauma—­the reinscription of oppression on already marked and erased bodies, and the alternative re­sis­tance and subversion of norms around what it is to be a victim in the modern social imaginary, as it is cultivated and constructed online. Digital users who come to the Internet a­ fter trauma engage digital media to re­orient themselves and their shifting physical, ­mental, and emotional landscapes to the world around them. This move can be tactical and subversive in the way that it creates small shifts in the discursive conceptions of trauma and the traumatized subject, as well as how the traumatized subject recognizes and inhabits the world. Conversations around the resistive possibility of the Internet have perpetuated in the last de­cade of scholarship. In this book, I offer a unique epistemic position that recognizes the importance of everyday mediation and the primacy of the individual in social media while recognizing and accounting for the systemic forces that inform, influence, and complicate digital life. The data note that social space online allows for expression of public imagination and thus accordant meanings to slowly shift, take hold, or be cemented. A post-­structural feminist framework lends itself to an examination of discursive possibility among digital communities of sufferers. The digital acts of sharing, of being seen, of being made legible, and of expressing voice are subsequently explored. Ultimately, this book is less about trauma than it is about media. Trauma, in this study, serves as a catalyst through which to explore how digital media operate for users during contingent life moments. Primarily, this is an exploration of how media studies can account for the way mediation and re-­mediation work online to foster identity exploration and production, and how digital media enable users to express ideas about their bodies in spaces that ­don’t require physical mediation but have consequences for material life.

Defining Trauma I define trauma as something that shifts the way individuals conceive of their worlds (Fassin and Rechtman 2009, 33; Janoff-­Bulman 1989, 115). Trauma makes it so the constructed world no longer makes sense to the person who suffers. The world-­making schema that articulated entire ways of knowing life shatter and without being remade, social life becomes near impossible (Janoff-­Bulman 1989, 115). ­There are two central terms deployed widely in this text: trauma and suffering. Suffering is key to trauma, and it is used in trauma studies to indicate two main dimensions of distress. Suffering is first “a disvalued state to which certain organisms are susceptible b­ ecause of their biological makeup: suffering is association with somatic pain and the moments of consciousness that accompany or anticipate this pain” (Young 1997, 245). To suffer, in its second and most

8  •  Trauma and Media Theory

relevant definition, is to be caught in “states that are variously described as psychological, existential, or spiritual and that are identified by such words as ‘despairing’ and ‘desolated’ ” (245). ­These states of suffering are based on constructed social or moral dimensions and codes that determine who is eligible to suffer. While the concepts of suffering and trauma are distinct, suffering is at the heart of trauma, specifically, suffering that is understood through social structures and frameworks. Walsh (2007) notes that “the word trauma comes from the Latin word for wound. With traumatic experiences the body, mind, spirit, and the relationships with o­ thers can be wounded” (207). Th ­ ese wounds function based on social and cultural understandings of what it means to feel pain. Trauma can also come from a fear of pain, which is caused by “bodily state and memory” (Young 1997, 247). According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of ­Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5) categorizations of trauma for post-­ traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), triggers for PTSD include one or more of the following: direct experiences with a traumatic event, witnessing a traumatic event in person, knowledge that a close ­family member or friend experienced a traumatic event, or the experience of first-­hand repeated exposure to aversive details of traumatic events (not through media) (American Psychiatric Association 2014).1 Trauma, based on this discussion, can be somewhat broad in the way it is experienced and felt. While the categories laid out by the DSM-5 do not explic­itly include the experiences of trauma as encountered through media, ­these categories can be deployed to account for experience-­mediated traumas, particularly t­ hose that take place in the seemingly intimate spaces of social media. I argue that while the trauma in the case studies is caused by offline, material experiences, for many, encountering traumatic events in the media as participants, audiences, and active users can in and of itself be traumatic. Trauma exists not just at the individual level but also at the community and collective levels. It can be felt secondarily through witnessing in the media. ­There is much to be discovered through an understanding of how trauma sufferers and vicarious and empathetic sufferers engage with digital communities (Walsh 2007; Meek 2011). Just as ­there are vari­ous levels at which a suffering body encounters trauma, ­there can be multiple types of mediations of trauma from multiple levels of trauma sufferers. Individuals suffer trauma when they are faced with “extreme events such as criminal victimization, disease, accidents and natu­ral disasters” or other experiences that can lead to “anxiety, confusion, helplessness, and depression” (Janoff-­Bulman 1989, 113). From this definition of individual trauma comes an understanding of the effects of trauma. Resonances and mediations of trauma are often felt beyond just the immediate trauma sufferer’s body, in many dif­fer­ent ways, by multiple parties, on and offline. In contrast, cultural trauma is understood on a more collective level. “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been

Introduction • 9

subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their f­ uture identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander et al. 2004, 1). In individual and cultural trauma, ­there is a common thread—­some kind of extreme event that leads to a change in the understandings of everyday consciousness and interaction, h ­ ere referred to as changes in meaning-­making schema. This change fundamentally stems from suffering, the experience of which “engenders a crisis of meaning” that results from the destruction of an individual’s previously held meaning structures (Egnew 2009, 171). Importantly, understandings of trauma are constructed in and through repre­sen­ta­tion, which is directly linked to meaning. An individual’s trauma cannot exist outside of the way that individual exists socially. Meek (2011) argues that traumatized subjects are not living embodiments of historical truths and their testimony is not a historical testament or literal trace of some real­ity; instead, he argues, traumatized subjects are revealed through “intertextual constructions. . . . ​Historical trauma is not grounded in memory traces but in the interpretation of what may be ‘forgotten’ in the texts of mass media, academic criticism, psychoanalysis and critical theory itself’ ” (1). Trauma is therefore not a singular occurrence. Alexander et al. (2004), in their discussion of cultural trauma, identify trauma as “an empirical, scientific concept, suggesting new meaningful and causal relationships between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions, and actions” that “also illuminates an emerging domain of social responsibility and po­liti­cal action” (1). This book enters the conversation at this juncture to examine how that emerging domain shifts or changes online. Alexander et al. (2004) go on to explain that trauma “is a socially mediated attribution” that in fact d­ oesn’t have to occur at all; it must simply be ­imagined (8). In fact, while trauma can happen in real time, the attributions of trauma can happen before an event or ­a fter an event, as a “post-­hoc reconstruction” (Alexander et  al. 2004, 8). Mediations of trauma are a part of a cultural pro­cess that is affected by power structures and the interaction of h ­ uman agency with ­those structures, as well as memory and imagination (Alexander et al. 2004, 11). This work builds on scholars such as Alexander et al. (2004), Egnew (2009), Meek (2011), and Rothe (2011) to examine trauma, culture, and media through a uniquely digital lens. Rather than place par­ameters on what qualifies as trauma, in this book I take trauma to broadly include all ­those experiences that dismantle meaning-­ making schema and call into question the social, cultural, and physical understandings of how differing bodies and identities fit into the larger world. In so ­doing, I inherently position the traumatized subject in a marginalized position. Of course, this marginality cannot be taken in isolation and must be conceived of within its intersections with other identity markers. I offer that, given trauma’s popu­lar ubiquity, it has to include any event or experience through which

10  •  Trauma and Media Theory

an individual or collective actor’s sense of well-­being is shattered, even if that means they d­ idn’t experience the embodied trauma themselves but experienced it vicariously through the media, digital or other­wise (Alexander et al. 2004, 3). In the case studies that make up chapters 4–6, I trace the way trauma is a catalyst forcing the central figures in each of ­these cases to articulate meaning around what they went through, what they think and feel about it, and what it means to them and their larger communities, as well as what is or is not dif­ fer­ent and/or subversive about the meaning they have constructed for themselves. Trauma, as a lens for analy­sis, situates the mediations of suffering in each of the cases within the broader stipulations of power in identity politics.2 Sufferers who go online inhabit a complex symbolic space where legibility of bodies and their ability to exist offline is negotiated. Often ­those who witness trauma articulate a sense of hope and frame the sufferer as someone who must triumph over their suffering to maintain that hope. Using triumph and the notion of overcoming as a means to come to terms with trauma, even the trauma of ­others, functions to position the actors in the cases according to socially constructed meanings. Some offer their own subversive meanings, while ­others inhabit the narrative of overcoming so frequently ascribed on their bodies, and for o­ thers still, it is some combination of the two. Using empirical data to understand where digital users situate themselves, e­ither consciously or unconsciously, according to normative frameworks is useful in determining the way witnesses to trauma participate in the communities that loosely form around one unifying ­factor: trauma.

Empathy and Digital Mediation For so many consumers of media, seeing trauma through the media elicits an emotional, empathetic response that enables the spectator to not feel the protagonist’s trauma; rather, “they feel the pain evoked by empathy—­arousing mechanisms interacting with their own traumatic experience” (Kaplan 2005, 90). Empathy does not indicate that one has experienced the trauma themselves, but the trauma has interacted with their previous social experiences to produce a new space of emotional reaction and meaning making. A person can be an empathetic witness and ­later vicariously suffer. Alexander et al. (2004) highlight that “­human beings need security, order, love, and connection” (3). Thus it makes sense that, as Walsh (2007) explains, “the effects of trauma depend greatly on w ­ hether t­ hose wounded can seek comfort, reassurance, and safety with ­others. . . . ​Coming to terms with traumatic loss involves making meaning of the trauma experience, putting it in perspective, and weaving the experience of loss and recovery into the fabric of individual and collective identity and life passage” (208–210). ­W hether one stays an empathetic witness or

Introduction • 11

becomes a vicarious sufferer through media depends in part on their access to supportive resources. Egnew (2009) elaborates, highlighting that meaning making is central to counteracting the “chasm of meaninglessness” caused by suffering and trauma, noting, “Suffering is also transcended by investiture with meaning. ­Because suffering arises in a void of meaninglessness, discovering meaning transforms the experience” (172). H ­ umans are invested in meaning. ­Humans in many parts of the world are also invested in the digital tools that help them make meaning. Trauma is one analytical way through which to bridge the visceral need for meaning with the tools that foster the participatory pro­cess of meaning making.

Relevance to Media Studies and Interdisciplinary Study of Trauma and Media The above definitions of trauma and its attendant experiences, as well as the theories that follow, illuminate the complex and varied ways the current mediatic moment allows for digital identity negotiation and self-­presencing a­ fter traumatic events. The trauma explored in each case study ­will display how trauma operates through media, si­mul­ta­neously recognizing the authenticity of agentic users sharing their testimonies online, as well as identifying and exploring the limitations of the technologies in facilitating ­human commitment to communities of care. In sharing testimony of something as personal as a traumatic event, an event that shatters the very schema individuals use to narrate their lives, users make a certain ideological commitment to communities that, though loosely formed, provide some meaningful engagement for involved parties. Due to the complex nature of the digital, however, ­these users also can carefully choose how vulnerable to be, and over time they curate their suffering according to previously held constructions of meaning around suffering and what a good sufferer looks like, as well as new meanings that emerge through their digital interactions. Each case w ­ ill highlight vari­ ous levels of trauma as well as vari­ous ways users engage in digital meaning production to negotiate who they are in light of what they have been through, felt, or seen. Media and meaning are a hot topic nowadays. From Banet-­Weiser’s (2012) analy­sis of Brand Culture in Au­then­tic, to Milner’s (2016) “The World Made Meme” and Couldry and Hepp’s (2016) Mediated Construction of Real­ity, the way meaning and media interact is at the forefront of scholarly pursuit. This book offers a new way to examine the politics of digital meaning making. If trauma is po­liti­cal, the fundamental need for meaning it produces in its destruction of meaning-­making schema has po­liti­cal consequences. This lens offers media studies a new way to recognize what media do for ­people in their

12  •  Trauma and Media Theory

individual lives but also to articulate how individual digital participation is part of a larger creation of and re­sis­tance to normative, po­liti­cal discourse. This book offers a new way to examine the politics of digital meaning making.

Chapter Summaries The chapters align this media studies research with supporting fields to illuminate the way interdisciplinary study can account for rapidly changing, hypermediated spaces. I ­will first bring forward interdisciplinary and foundational research that is vital to understanding what it is about trauma and cultural vicissitudes that makes life feel contingent and forces t­hose who suffer to make meaning. I ­will then bring ­those vari­ous lit­er­a­tures in conversation with media studies specifically to highlight the way affordances of digital spaces enable ­those who suffer to make sense of their life. The case studies ­w ill then illuminate the possibility for change inherent in social media and other platforms while being cognizant of all the simultaneous oppression inherent in ­those tools. The chapters in this book are divided into two main sections. The first section examines the theoretical underpinning developed and explicated by the empirical data that make up the case studies for this book. In chapter 2, I examine trauma, highlighting what I term symbolic trauma as an impor­tant category through which to understand trauma. This new category of trauma bridges the often-­contentious definitions of trauma and attempts to account for the embodied suffering caused and perpetuated by symbolic vio­ lence (Bourdieu 1991) built into social institutions, spaces, and practices in the digital age. Chapter  3 explores the digital affordances and attendant media studies theories that bring trauma sufferers to the digital and enable meaning making. From meme culture to pro­cesses of visual mediation, chapter 3 covers, in depth, the spaces and places online as repositories for testimony and the digital user as meaning maker. The second half of this book examines a variety of case studies of trauma and symbolic trauma, in which dif­fer­ent kinds of ­people, with dif­fer­ent social locations and varied intersectional identities, take disparate experiences and mediate them using similar platforms, making similar gestures. With three stories told in three chapters, each story follows a traumatic event spurred by a physical or symbolic wound. Chapter 4 explores the photo story, made by Angelo Merendino, of his wife Jennifer’s ­battle with breast cancer. This chapter looks at global mediations of Jennifer’s trauma, highlighting the way one ­woman’s trauma has consequences for the larger politics of suffering across bounded nations. The placeless suffering the photos express is captured in the re-­mediations in multiple languages across multiple digital platforms. Chapter  5 takes on the tragic accident of CrossFit athlete Kevin Ogar at a fitness

Introduction • 13

competition, resulting in his paralysis from the waist down. A ­ fter his accident, Ogar’s digital popularity skyrocketed and mediations of his trauma became a catalyst for CrossFit athletes to both unify ­behind their sport and engage ability and disability in new (and old) ways. Both chapters  4 and 5 explore the way a physical wound enters an as-if space to be reconciled and the social, cultural, and po­liti­cal stakes involved in that mediation. While the traumatic experiences d­ on’t look the same for Merendino and Ogar, they ­were both expressed, mediated, re-­mediated, and shared broadly online, across vari­ous contexts. In each of ­these cases ­there is evidence of the way the possibility to shift and change meanings to si­mul­ta­neously cement ideologies and to subvert them takes flight in digital media. The stories that t­ hese cases examine highlight vari­ous levels of trauma that are experienced and expressed through media. In each case, the primary sufferers and all t­ hose that witness and participate in the communities perform vari­ous roles in circulating, branding, re-­mediating, and materializing the suffering that has occurred. ­These cases highlight the way suffering bridges time, space, and place, bringing together productive audiences online to mediate pain and negotiate their understandings of what it is to be a victim and a sick person, and to live in a wounded body. In examining mediation of physical wounds, t­ hese cases illuminate the way a dynamic theory of media and trauma, specific to digital media, can provide a clear sense of how and why users go online to express themselves, to cope, and to potentially heal from the vari­ous ills of life. Additionally, t­ hese cases offer a lens into how trauma forces a degree of re­sis­tance in mediation ­because of the way it engenders a crisis of meaning. Fi­nally, chapter 6 examines cases of symbolic trauma as told through diasporic media in the Ira­nian American population. Told through the stories of multiple Instagram users impacted by the 2017 executive order that ­limited travel from Muslim-­majority nations, the chapter specifically examines how trauma functions both as a po­liti­cal tool for oppression through symbolic vio­ lence, but also as a resistive tool for community action through meaning making (Walters, Helmore, and Dehghan 2017). The Instagram users in this chapter include comedian and actor Maz Jobrani; leader of the National Ira­nian American Council, Trita Parsi; a digital artist who draws ­under the ­handle Diaspora Letters; and other digital media accounts such as Before We W ­ ere Banned and Banned Grandmas. ­These cases are brought together to highlight the suffering inherent in the symbolic vio­lence enacted on Ira­nian ­people in the United States and ­others impacted by the travel ban. Additionally, this case makes clear that trauma need not be located in the body of the person mediating it for it to have consequences for their ability to make sense of the world and thus inhabit it in healthy ways. Most of the ­people in the posts examined ­were not banned themselves—­they live in the United States already and w ­ ere not traveling at this time; however, the psychological suffering caused by a

14  •  Trauma and Media Theory

symbolic wound was substantial enough to break down their meaning-­ making schema. In other words, they ­were no longer legible in their world and their world did not make sense, and thus they went online to remake a world in which they could freely exist in the country in which they live. Symbolic trauma highlights the cause of the trauma—­the symbolic vio­lence that creates a symbolic wound—­and highlights that this po­liti­cal victimization of subjects ­causes material, embodied suffering and thus must be analyzed and examined as trauma. Symbolic trauma is always trauma, though not all trauma is symbolic. Thus, scholarly analy­sis of the mediations of t­ hese traumas accounts for the way social institutions wound subjects, and how discourse can offer possibilities for t­ hose subjects to cope with their suffering. The pro­cess of meaning making that happens as a result of the disjuncture between the social world and the possibility for subjects to materially exist in that social world is a pro­cess of po­liti­cal negotiation of the boundedness of everyday life. The case of symbolic suffering of Ira­nian Americans expands on the cases of the physical traumas examined in chapters 4 and 5, indicating the way invisible traumas enacted by the state come to be embodied and felt much in the same way other traumas are. In addressing ­these traumas, the actors in ­these cases stake a claim around how othered bodies are able to exist in the world. In empirically examining the theory of symbolic trauma developed in chapter 2, chapter 6 makes strides in de-­medicalizing trauma and situating suffering within the systems of power that cause it, exacerbate it, and then erase evidence of it. In making the suffering of the Ira­nian diaspora manifest, this chapter highlights the way illegibility impacts social, po­liti­cal, and cultural life. Fi­nally, in the conclusion, I bridge the varied lit­er­a­ture and cases to highlight the importance of everyday meaning making. Symbolic trauma has consequences for real p­ eople and the way they socially, culturally, and po­liti­cally inhabit their world. Sufferers’ everyday tactics make clear that they ­will not go quietly into the night, nor ­will they allow their suffering to continue to be invisible. In examining the voice enacted by symbolic trauma’s victims, the cases critically examine and complicate social media use, particularly as deployed for activism and in politics. This book w ­ ill define and contextualize vari­ous ways of understanding and knowing trauma and its attendant experiences, as well as provide a buoyant theory based on a broad range of interdisciplinary scholarship and grounded by textual research. With this, I illuminate the complex and varied ways the current mediatic moment allows for identity negotiation and self-­presencing a­ fter traumatic events, as well as the construction of collectivities. Often what I term meaning making constitutes what many of us see in our news feeds on our vari­ous social media ­every day, and for that reason it gets subsumed by the larger media torrent. In this book, I critically engage with ­those banal mediations to truly understand what it is they mean.

2

T­ here Are Many Ways to Suffer So act with courage against the grain of your error, Throw not away the shimmering shield of your suffering soul, Do not endanger yourself with the shadow of ­imagined terror, Enter the path begrimed as you are and you s­ hall become ­whole. —­Farid Al-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds

In an article featured on the website of Cure, a cancer magazine, Kevin Berry, a thirteen-­year mantle cell lymphoma survivor, details what it is like to live “the horror of Day One,” or diagnosis day (Berry 2018). In stunning and breathtaking detail he narrates the feeling of being told he has cancer. He gives the reader insight into the moment of rupture, the shock of a sudden gash in the flesh that is one’s way of being, one’s way of living, and life itself. He carefully offers the new cancer patient a summary of what this trauma w ­ ill feel like. The numbness that follows on day two, and the action that ensues on day three. In this brief article, Berry offers a summary of the way trauma shocks the system and suffering perpetuates, like an open wound that the body and mind work hard to heal. The moment of pain is the moment of trauma, but pain persists, and suffering endures. Trauma shifts the way suffering bodies engage the world in fundamental and irrevocable ways. Life and death are tinged by the effects and experiences of trauma. This trauma is often mediated in vari­ous ways in order to reclaim meaning or, more often, to produce new meanings that enable suffering subjects to 15

16  •  Trauma and Media Theory

engage in their social worlds. In this chapter, I bring to the fore a new way of positioning what constitutes trauma in order to push scholarship in media studies and trauma studies to engage in an overtly po­liti­cal analy­sis of trauma. Symbolic trauma, as developed in this chapter, is the experience of trauma caused by symbolic vio­lence as first explored by Bourdieu (1989). Symbolic trauma is a category within trauma, or what Janoff-­Bulman (1989) articulates as the life events that dismantle implicit understandings of the world, replacing them with “anxiety, confusion, helplessness, and depression” (113). The need for the category of symbolic trauma comes from the erasure of the suffering ­people encounter at the hands of institutions and systems of control—­suffering that is not always considered trauma. The realms of politics and trauma have interacted in past scholarship and t­ here is a current move in trauma studies to situate traumatic experience in its sociopo­liti­cal context (Rothe 2011; Cvetkovich 2003; Kaplan 2005; Alexander et al. 2004), yet trauma is often relegated to the medical field, as something to be cured. Traumas caused by symbolic vio­ lence, thus requiring cultural, social, and po­liti­cal cures, are often not designated trauma, and thus, the suffering bodies that are laid waste to are often invisible. In the following analy­sis, I engage in a deep dive of trauma, bringing it into conversation with critical theory in order to uncover its thickness and cultivate it as a mediated category that acts on the body. I examine trauma from the perspective of several critical traditions from feminist disability studies as articulated by Garland-­Thomson (2002) to crip studies and disability studies as conceptualized by authors such as McRuer (2006), as well as a phenomenological perspective informed by Merleau-­Ponty (1996). I argue that the impacts of trauma function in much the same way as identity categories such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and, most centrally, disability. The experience of suffering becomes a category that sufferers unite within, finding ­others who have suffered as they have, building collectivities through which to engage their experience. I examine existing understandings of trauma as well as urge new ways of knowing trauma and its accordant meaning-­making pro­cesses. In this chapter, and for the remainder of this book, the term trauma is used to convey what scholarship generally refers to as traumas of the mind or body caused by some experience of suffering in the material world—in other words, wounds to the body (this can include the psychological). In this sense, trauma refers to an experience of explicit trauma, which includes categories explored in the introduction such as illness, physical impairment, vio­lence, ­mental health, and collective traumatic events as they relate to the body, identity, and ability. Trauma in this text is also an umbrella concept that encapsulates other types of suffering. I push scholarly notions of trauma to include symbolic trauma—­a trauma that occurs from a symbolic wound, even as it may have material, embodied effects. An offshoot of symbolic vio­lence (Bourdieu 1991), the

­There Are Many Ways to Suffe • 17

category of symbolic trauma builds explic­itly on previous theories developed by scholars such as Alexander et al. (2004) and Kaplan (2005) that develop the idea of cultural trauma and extends t­ hese theories to examine digital space and instantiations of suffering afforded to users of digital platforms. The theory developed h ­ ere extends the work of Alexander et al. (2004) and Kaplan (2005) through in-­depth engagement with theories from feminist disability studies to theories dealing with affect and embodiment through digital media. This extended trauma theory then offers a framework to account for trauma, caused by social and po­liti­cal institutions and policies, that is insidious, invisible, symbolic, collective, cultural, and often perpetuated through the media. While it is not new to declare that trauma is po­liti­cal and social, po­liti­cal and social traumas are often overlooked, especially when the bodies that suffer them do not use the heavi­ly medicalized language of trauma to articulate what they have endured at the hands of symbolic vio­lence. In turn, ­those that suffer from symbolic trauma negotiate their suffering in media, making the media central to how culture comes to conceive of the pain of symbolic, social wounds. Central to the arguments put forth in this book, this chapter focuses in depth on the politics of trauma—­particularly when examining what counts as trauma and the affective space trauma takes up in individual and collective sufferers’ lives, as well as the way space and time shift when trauma occurs. Considering the links between trauma and memory, I survey the deeply intertwined relationships between memory and politics. I explore the ambivalence and instability trauma c­ auses, as well as the possibility for meaning making that ambivalence creates. In uncertainty, trauma sufferers find possibility. The ambivalent spaces inherent to digital and social media enable trauma sufferers to make meaning. Examining this instability at the level of trauma and the level of media is a new direction for scholarship, the basis for which I develop h ­ ere.

Experiencing Traumas As explained in chapter 1, trauma occurs when an experience in the world destroys the way that life and its meanings had been understood. Life makes sense in the day-­to-­day b­ ecause individuals and groups build “assumptive worlds,” or abstracted structures, that function to provide knowledge and meaning in the everyday (Janoff-­Bulman 1989, 114). Traumatic events take away ­these assumptive worlds by breaking down the under­lying assumptions that allow them to make sense. Traumas “shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to other,” thus undermining belief systems that imbue meaning into ­human experience and violating any faith that existed in the divine or natu­ral, leading to existential crises (Herman 1997, 51). This is the dismantling of meaning-­making structures. In the introduction,

18  •  Trauma and Media Theory

I identified the way trauma and suffering are linked both in experience and language; ­here, I analyze two intersecting ­causes of trauma, the physical and the symbolic. The first is well recognized in popu­lar culture as causing trauma: physical wounds are many and unavoidable. The second is equally catastrophic, but less widely recognized for the suffering it c­ auses. Both forms of trauma shock bodies and cause a rupture in the fabric of daily life. For many disenfranchised populations, suffering has gone on for years, as equal rights have been denied and social and structural vio­lence has been perpetrated. Th ­ ese populations have suffered but this suffering becomes traumatic at the point of rupture, the point at which the shock of the visceral inability to exist within the status quo outweighs the rational impulse to keep ­going based on previous ways of knowing the world. Symbolic trauma is the sudden subjection to, experience of, or awakening to social, po­liti­cal, and cultural vio­lence perpetrated and perpetuated by institutions of control.1 This suffering does not exist in the body or mind differently from other experiences of trauma; however, as a framework for analy­sis, it situates trauma centrally in the po­liti­cal and marks a form of suffering that systems of power are invested in keeping in the shadows. Key to the way trauma is felt and experienced is the way ­people remember, both individually and socially. Collective memory informs culture, politics, and the way suffering is perceived, represented, and made legible in communities. Politics then link collective memory and trauma. Psychological trauma exists within a social context just as memory does. Memory is, as Bell (2003) notes, “anchored in common experience” (65). For individual victims of trauma, the social contexts of support and thus meaning making can come from ­family, friends and other interpersonal relationships. Cultural traumas, however, are always inflected by politics, and indeed all trauma is an affliction of the powerless. Herman (1997) argues, “To hold traumatic real­ity in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins victim and witness in a common alliance. . . . ​For the larger society, the social context is created by po­liti­cal movements that give voice to the disempowered” (9). ­W hether individual or cultural, traumas are constituted through a social, symbolic order. The following section ­will articulate and explore symbolic trauma. Symbolic suffering is a trauma even when it is not recognized as such. In fact, symbolic trauma acts on bodies in the same way more general traumas do. The ­causes of symbolic traumas are not physical wounds, they are social wounds. While all traumas are experienced in the body and through social systems, t­ hose traumas that occur b­ ecause of a breakdown of the social systems often go unrecognized as trauma. ­These forms of suffering can be severe and life changing, yet they do not cleanly fit into medical and social categories of trauma. Symbolic trauma offers a lens through which scholarship can deeply

­There Are Many Ways to Suffe • 19

engage with trauma at the level of social and cultural systems, as well as a category through which to capture the invisible suffering of oppressed bodies.

Symbolic Trauma While scholars such as Meek (2011), Rothe (2011), and Kaplan (2005) have pushed study of traumatic impact in media to examine politics and discursive formation, in mainstream discussions trauma gets characterized in apo­liti­cal terms. The call to position trauma as po­liti­cal is often heard but quickly subsumed by what Couldry (2010) terms the “opacity of society” that places a premium on narratives that focus on the individual, and their personal failings, at the expense of the social, po­liti­cal, or cultural (125). Even when the politics of repre­sen­ta­tion are critically engaged, the ­causes of and responses to trauma for the ­actual material sufferers are often medicalized and thus the need for a therapeutic outcome is assumed. The medicalization of trauma, paired with the way trauma has come to the fore in popu­lar culture with trigger warnings, routine references to post-­traumatic stress disorder, and concerns with re-­ traumatization, diminishes other social and symbolic outcomes of trauma for suffering bodies—­specifically discursive change. When a body is traumatized, social, cultural, and po­liti­cal feelings, meanings, and constructs shift in response. Even when the trauma is located in the physical body, the unrepresentability (Scarry 1985; Durham 2011) of the pain endured forces the trauma beyond the physical, capturing the ­mental but also the social. Similarly, symbolic traumas, while not caused by a prob­lem in or of the body, can cause material suffering in bodies. Just as physical traumas cause confusion, pain, helplessness, or confusion, symbolic trauma c­ auses similar feelings (Janoff-­ Bulman 1989). In part, ­these feelings can be dealt with using the language of therapy and medicine, yet this form of suffering cannot exist in the medical realm alone. Suffering caused by symbolic vio­lence requires a shift in the symbolic, discursive systems of meaning to facilitate coping. Chapter 6, in discussing the symbolic trauma endured by the Ira­nian American diaspora through the Trump travel ban, highlights symbolic suffering as felt, experienced, and mediated socially, po­liti­cally, and culturally. This gesture, adapted from Linton’s (1998) disability studies, reframes trauma as “a designation having primarily social and po­liti­cal significance” (2). Symbolic trauma, as a new application of an existing concept, situates trauma in a par­tic­u­lar politics by dually refusing its medicalization and clearly identifying the ways systems of symbolic vio­lence create shocking ruptures in daily life, thus traumatizing bodies. The category of symbolic trauma, while perhaps not wholly novel, is vitally necessary for suffering bodies, as it gives them a language to articulate the suffering caused by

20  •  Trauma and Media Theory

symbolic systems. With the language of trauma taking hold in mainstream spaces, offering a new terminology through which to legitimize the suffering of individuals who are a part of groups irreparably impacted by policies, cultures, and social and symbolic systems is the first step in enabling their healing, and perhaps even empowering advocacy. Puar (2017) writes that debilitation of populations, in its vari­ous forms, intends to “make power vis­i­ble on the body” (x). Further, she argues that the term debility captures what ­here is conceptualized as symbolic trauma, noting that debility, among marginalized, targeted bodies, “foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled” (Puar 2017, xiv). Puar’s argument is crucial to the concept of symbolic trauma ­because it pushes disability studies’ articulation of disability into the social, cultural, and po­liti­cal while also highlighting the damage done to material life when even that articulation of disability is foreclosed. The theory of symbolic trauma is built on Bourdieu’s theories of symbolic power and vio­lence. Symbolic power is a concept that accounts for modes of social and cultural domination, which are tacitly imposed and that ­people accept (Bourdieu 1991, 170). Ultimately, symbolic power, according to Bourdieu (1991), is “the power to make ­people see and believe” social divisions, categories, and ways of knowing the social world that are implicit (221). According to Thompson (1991), “Symbolic power presupposes a kind of active complicity on the part of t­ hose subjected to it. . . . ​Symbolic power requires, as a condition of its success, that ­those subjected to it believe in the legitimacy of power and the legitimacy of t­ hose who wield it” (23). Symbolic power functions effectively ­because, in general, ­people have a tacit ac­cep­tance of the status quo and opt to do and say t­ hings in a fashion that maintains what he terms a habitus (Bourdieu 1979, 1989; Gould 2009). The maintenance of the social space, or habitus, involves a complex negotiation of what Bourdieu calls fields, or social contexts. Social systems of power thus make ­people’s practices through structures, and practice in turn remakes social structure (Gould 2009; Bourdieu 1989). This then lends itself to the outcropping of the systems of relations inherent in symbolic power—­symbolic vio­lence—­a “gentle, invisible vio­lence unrecognized as such, chosen as much as under­gone” (Thompson 1991, 24). Symbolic vio­lence is the imposition of symbolic power on groups; it is an instrument of social control. I argue that symbolic trauma occurs when agents can no longer accept the systems of symbolic power. Symbolic trauma marks a rupture of the status quo of symbolic vio­lence; t­ here has been too much vio­lence and the stability of the habitus becomes contingent (Gould 2009). For symbolic trauma to happen, ­people who have been oppressed or dominated can no longer maintain the practical sense of what to do and not to do for the maintenance of social life, b­ ecause the degree of vio­lence under­gone is no longer tenable in their day-­to-­day existence. Symbolic trauma as both an experience and something

­There Are Many Ways to Suffe • 21

p­ eople attempt to make meaning from ­after suffering requires a degree of recognition of the structures of symbolic power. ­People who suffer this type of trauma recognize they have been subjected to and embedded in a system of power in which they may have had some complicity and they choose to discontinue or at the very least name their suffering and break with their previous tacit acknowl­edgment of power. Meaning making a­ fter symbolic trauma indicates that the symbolic vio­lence was severe enough to shock the sufferer, to create and shift their everyday experience, and thus to create a flash point in their memory. This wound dismantles the fragile relationship between oppressor and oppressed and accordingly dismantles the meaning-­making schema that enabled that world and its configurations to operate. Notably, as the consequences of symbolic vio­lence, ­these traumas may not be overtly acknowledged, though their consequences may be felt emotionally or physically. Symbolic trauma has effects on the material body ­because it ­causes ­mental and emotional suffering and may very well lead to physical vio­lence, and thus physical wounds. The Cartesian division of mind and body is eclipsed by the traumatic experience. ­W hether suffering a physical or symbolic wound, the body suffers, as does the mind. Symbolic trauma leaves few traces on the body; rather, it manifests in an inexorable inability to exist in bodies that are made invisible. Th ­ ese bodies are punished, marginalized, and deleted from view. Deletion of marginalized bodies is not a novel concept. Turning to Foucault (2012), scholarship can trace the way the body dis­appeared from view, for example, in the development of punitive systems over time, with focus thus shifting to the soul. Unrepresentability of pain and erasures of suffering bodies through symbolic vio­lence then became a central affective marker of symbolic vio­lence, “the expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the ­will, the inclinations” (Foucault 2012, 16).2 This punishing of the body through the mechanisms of the soul allows for social control through invisible, symbolic power. This, too, is how symbolic trauma functions. In erasing the material body and rendering its suffering invisible, symbolic forces are able to act violently on bodies, regulating the conditions in which ­people are allowed to exist. Puar (2017) discusses this notion in terms of the rhe­toric of “disability yet to come” which is “built on an entitled hope and expectation for a certain longevity” (12). This assumption of longevity is symbolically stripped from bodies that are caught in what Puar (2017) and McRuer (2018) theorize as “exceptionalism” that, according to McRuer “completely depend upon a ­limited identity politics that incorporates some identities while positioning o­ thers as inadmissible, or incomprehensible” (46). The outcome of this for individuals and collectives is a tangible form of social suffering caused by the way bodies function in the social and po­liti­cal imaginary. Indeed, Ahmed (2012) notes institutionalized oppression can lead to immobility, necessitating

22  •  Trauma and Media Theory

physical and emotional ­labor to extract one’s body from normative spaces or to find ways to inhabit them, particularly as “you notice them as you come up against them” (175). As suffering is built and coded into social space, as the case study in chapter 6 demonstrates, suffering bodies creatively disentangle their bodies from this suffering through meaning-­making pro­cesses engaged in online. This complex pro­cess is, in some ways, akin to healing, as it is meaning that invests one’s life with purpose (Lee 2008, 779). While symbolic trauma may not leave any physical wounds, it is a nonmedical, social trauma steeped in a politics that forces its sufferers to make a choice: to stay invisible or to make new meanings that render their bodies legible and shift discourses of power.

Trauma, Space, Place, and Time/Memory The category of symbolic trauma provides a useful optic through which to analyze vari­ous mediations of world events with an eye t­oward suffering and a par­tic­u ­lar instantiation of meaning making. Trauma and symbolic trauma, while distinct, have conceptual overlaps in the way they are felt and experienced po­liti­cally and socially. The jarring experience of trauma dismantles previously sedimented notions of space, place, and time. In the introduction, I demonstrated that traumatic experiences break meaning-­making schema; in so ­doing, the experience of trauma also breaks down understandings of time as it has been imposed on bodies and identities through state and social systems. Trauma has its own time that “is inherent in and destabilizes any production of linearity. Trauma has to be excluded for linearity to be convincing, but it cannot be successfully put to one side: it always intrudes, it cannot be completely forgotten” (Edkins 2003, 16). Trauma time is impor­tant ­because it is unsteady and subject to change, and it destabilizes productions of linearity that serve to normalize trauma in the everyday. Indeed, disability studies also call attention to the way linearity of time enforces normalizing narratives on non-­normate bodies. “The disability immediately becomes part of a chronotype, a time-­sequenced narrative, embedded in a story . . . ​by using the concept of the disabled moment, I want to defamiliarize disability, denarrativize it” (Davis 1995, 4). Indeed, trauma time performs a similar gesture. Edkins (2003) argues, “The pro­cess of re-­inscription into linear narratives . . . ​is a pro­cess that generally depoliticizes, and that ­there is an alternative, that of encircling the trauma” (15). To encircle trauma is to recognize its unrepresentability, to remove it from its received narratives. Trauma manifests itself differently over time and depending on the context in which it is remembered and thus re­imagined. Analy­sis of mediation of trauma must recognize this trans-­temporal, trans-­spatial nature of trauma, and be prepared to situate the traumatic experience in a complex cultural context that constantly shifts, always producing new traumatized subjects through its mediations. In fundamentally shifting life experiences,

­There Are Many Ways to Suffe • 23

trauma creates a new identity category for subjects in the way it “produces new forms of po­liti­cal identification based in dif­fer­ent experiences of victimhood, shared suffering and witnessing” (Meek 2011, 6). Th ­ ese subjects exist at the intersection of remembering and forgetting in the way trauma both demands they speak and insists they cannot. In fact, even in medical understandings of trauma, the central dialectic of trauma is understood to be “the conflict between the w ­ ill to deny horrible events and the w ­ ill to proclaim them aloud” (Herman 1997, 1). This dialectic of trauma positions the experiences and mediations of trauma as always negotiating between remembering and forgetting, voice and silence, tangible and intangible, and po­liti­cal and apo­liti­cal. Trauma acts on, in, and through memory both ­because of the way trauma distorts time and also ­because of the sociality and constructedness of active memory production. Young (1997) identifies fear as coming from two places, the bodily state and memory. He argues, “Memories are acquired ontoge­ne­ tically through the organism’s own experience with pain, and they are acquired phyloge­ne­tically through inherited fears” (Young 1997, 253). Often the way traumas have been remembered across socie­ties and generations is through pro­ cesses of forgetting or denial. Thus, “suffering is voiceless in the meta­phorical sense that silence becomes a sign of something ultimately unknowable . . . ​ ­because it happens in a realm beyond language” (Morris 1997, 27). Trauma is also contested and unpredictable; Edkins (2003) notes, “­A fter traumatic events, ­there is a strug­gle over memory” (16). This strug­gle is situated in larger social and po­liti­cal ways of knowing the world that are inflected by identity politics, particularly the politics of who is eligible to suffer and how. Memory is an active pro­cess that constantly negotiates between the instability of “trauma time” and the active engagement of ­people in their social world. Benjamin (2006) conjures memory as an active pro­cess, one in which ­there is a certain degree of theatrics. Memory is a per­for­mance of the past, a manifestation of an active engagement with the past; the pre­sent constitutes our understanding of the past and allows us to negotiate f­ uture possibilities based on t­ hese performative memories (Benjamin 2006). Recognition of trauma’s sociality requires a recognition of the contingency of both post-­traumatic social experience and memory. Traumatic experiences can change relationships between agents and place, even if their material bodies are not the “place” where traumas occurred. Place and space are central to trauma in the way they are both dually dismantled and made by traumatic experiences. This “double tracking” indicates an awareness to the world as one interacts within it, as well as to an affective world that is further away and inflected through bodily perception (Bennett 2005, 97). Scholarship has pushed notions of place, considering its interactions with time, “as complex, dynamic and relational” (Knott 2005, 156). Understanding bodily perception of place requires attention to space in ways that Cartesian mind–­ body dualisms problematically did away with (Knott 2005, 157). As Knott

24  •  Trauma and Media Theory

(2005) argues, “The body is at times the place where a cultural order plays itself out; it may become a repre­sen­ta­tion of that order, and w ­ ill certainly be conditioned and disciplined by it” (158). Space then should not be divided into its accordant parts, but should take account of the physical, m ­ ental, and social (Knott 2005, 159). In phenomenology, space is the “means by which the position of ­things becomes pos­si­ble” (Merleau-­Ponty 1996, 254). Space always precedes itself and a person’s orientation to space depends on their perception. Bodies exist in space in meaningful ways: “the spatial level is, then, a certain possession of the world by my body, a certain hold my body has on the world” (Merleau-­Ponty 1996, 261). Bodies exist in space, and consequently, traumatic experiences can dismantle space, changing perceptions, in turn shifting the way bodies inhabit space. Merleau-­Ponty (1996) discusses the spatial level: “At the core of the subject, space and perception in general mark the fact of his birth, the perpetual contribution of his corporeality, and a communication with the world more ancient than thought. . . . ​The lability of levels gives not merely the intellectual experience of disorder, but also the living experience of vertigo and nausea, which is the consciousness of, and the horror caused by, our contingency. The positing of a level is the forgetting of this contingency, and space is established upon our facticity” (265). Basic, embodied existence is predicated on an ac­cep­tance of the spatial level, and meaningful existence at that level depends on a forgetting the contingency of everyday life, of bodies in the world, and of existence in ordering social structures. Importantly, then, space and memory are inextricably linked in meaning-­making schema that orient individuals and groups to their social world. Bourdieu (1989) articulates space as the often invisible “system of relations” that order social interactions. Within t­ hese spaces, “the vis­i­ble, that which is immediately given, hides the invisible which determines it” (16). Social space is not benign; it is inflected with power in the way that “agents are distributed in the overall social space . . . ​according to the overall volume of capital they possess” (Bourdieu 1989, 17). In addition to being socially constituted in everyday interactions, space is a conceptual dimension, which, according to Knott (2005), “may float ­free of any physical mooring, but which uses the notion of space meta­phor­ically and may provide a means of imagining and giving expression to ­human possibility, cultural difference, the imagination itself, as well as social relations” (159). Pushing space beyond the ordering relations of the social enables us to understand how its fluidity lends itself to studies of trauma. ­Later chapters ­will highlight how digital mediations allow for unique negotiations of space ­because of the spaces they in fact create. The current discussion, however, is about the way trauma impacts space. If social space is meant to order social life according to vari­ous power dynamics, yet it is also dynamic with discursive possibility, trauma interacts with

­There Are Many Ways to Suffe • 25

space at the level of what Herman (1997) calls intrusion. This intrusion operates at the level of experience, memory, and meaning. Trauma shifts the sufferer’s relationship with time and space b­ ecause “the trauma repeatedly interrupts. It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma” (Herman 1997, 37). Trauma, in time and space, oscillates between a visceral need to deny the trauma, thus somehow reconstituting meaning-­making structures, and a need to share the trauma to recognize its insidious nature. This oscillation produces an instability, causing the sufferer to exist in a space of “unpredictability and helplessness” (Herman 1997, 47). Trauma then positions outside of the space of their everyday life. Space can be seen as ordained, regulated, and interpreted through discursive power relations. De Certeau (1984), for example, sees existence in daily life as everyday tactics of the weak that shift space by seizing par­tic­u­lar moments in time. He argues, “Tactics are procedures that gain validity in relations to the pertinence they lend to time—to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organ­ization of a space” (n.p.).3 Trauma shifts the way sufferers engage with time and the way they perceive spatial relations by creating a crisis of meaning. The search for meaning, working through the active pro­cess of memory, enables sufferers to make tactical moves in space, shifting the way time operates, forcing their meaning into a new discursive space. Returning to Merleau-­Ponty (1996), he notes, “Our body and our perception always solicit us to take the landscape they offer as the center of the world. But this landscape is not necessarily the landscape of our life. I can be ‘elsewhere’ while remaining h ­ ere, and if I am kept far away from what I love, I feel far from the center of real life” (338). Often perception of the world is clouded by past experience, memory resurfacing and causing feelings of longing, desire, and other emotions that indicate a distance from some meaningful aspect of life. For trauma sufferers, their experience of suffering removes them from the perceptual experience of everyday space and places them in a space of instability where, ­either as individuals or in groups, suffering bodies are left to constantly negotiate between a fragmentally remembered past and an uncertain f­ uture.

Politics of Trauma and the Contingency of the Everyday Trauma has largely been depoliticized through its medicalization as well as the way trauma is normalized through its inscription and reinscription “into everyday narratives” (Edkins 2003, 15). This pro­cess of depoliticization operates through symbolic power b­ ecause trauma and its effects are often invisible, especially in cases of symbolic trauma. Systems of domination allow privileged, non-­sufferers to go on with their daily lives while erasing the strug­gle of trauma sufferers to exist in the most basic ways. Everyday tactics of trauma sufferers

26  •  Trauma and Media Theory

then become resistive acts ­because of the symbolic insistence that par­tic­u ­lar bodies cannot, and need not, participate in the everyday. The very nature of trauma ­causes it to make contingent the routinized actions of the everyday. In its creation of catastrophe, trauma makes even the most mundane actions po­liti­cal. As noted by Edkins (2003), “it has become plain to a survivor that the appearance of fixity and security produced by the social order is just that: an appearance” (8). Even semiological systems as ingrained as language lose their effectivity in the wake of suffering—­there are no words to convey what trauma has done (Edkins 2003, 8). This is what Scarry (1985) identifies as the unrepresentability of traumatic experience and pain. She argues that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a ­human being makes before language is learned” (4). Trauma’s unrepresentability is caused by the very nature of trauma itself. The unrepresentable nature of trauma forces and gives rise to new ways of expressing and testifying to traumatic experiences. Cvetkovich (2003) notes that trauma “demands an unusual archive, whose materials, in pointing to trauma’s ephemerality, are themselves frequently ephemeral” (7). Everyday experiences of trauma are “experiences of socially situated po­liti­cal vio­lence” that forge “overt connections between politics and emotion” (Cvetkovich 2003, 3). Positioning trauma in the everyday while si­mul­ta­neously acknowledging its unrepresentability and its insistence on intruding into time and space enables a par­tic­u­lar post-­structural analy­sis of an affective politics of trauma (Cvetkovich 2003, 18). For suffering bodies, and thus oppressed bodies no longer able to be represented in and by social frameworks, many basic and mundane everyday practices, from talking to moving around in the world to shopping, are tactical in character. De Certeau (1984) says that a “tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” (n.p.). Taken in contrast to what he terms strategies, tactics are momentary moves of the powerless who must capture possibilities as they appear in time. In contrast, strategies are actions bound up in power that elaborate discourses: strategies are made by institutions and enact symbolic power, tactics resist. De Certeau (1984) argues that “the space of a tactic is the space of the other,” in par­tic­u­lar the other who goes “unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized” (n.p.). At the intersection of tactics, affect, and politics sits the politics of trauma, recognizing that affective reactions to difficult events are based on a po­liti­cal sense of who is legible as a sufferer in society and who is disallowed from the expression of their suffering. Bennett (2005) discusses the “politics of trauma,” arguing that trauma is lived, felt, and remembered “in relation to a ­whole series of interconnected events and po­liti­cal forces” (18). Like many scholars such as Salcedo (quoted in Bennett 2005) and Edkins (2003), I reposition trauma as a par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal experience, and as such it cannot be read outside of

­There Are Many Ways to Suffe • 27

politics, including mediations of identity and repre­sen­ta­tion. As Bennett (2005) says, rather than see trauma as “embodied in an atomized subject, we are able to move trauma in to a distinctive po­liti­cal framework . . . ​we might now begin to plot this mode of subjectivity in a larger global picture” (18). Thus, any analy­sis of trauma needs to be textured by readings of “global and micro-­politics” (Bennett 2005, 18). The politics of trauma, as negotiated and mediated online, is embedded in a digital as-if space. This space inhabited by trauma sufferers is akin to what Bhabha (1994) terms the “third space.” The third space, combined with the idea of hybridity, lends itself to a de-­medicalizing of disability and trauma. Bhabha (1994) says, “Culture only emerges as a prob­lem, or as problematic, at the point at which t­ here is a loss of meaning in the contestation and articulation of everyday life” (50). Bhabha’s attention to meaning implicitly refers back to the meaninglessness of traumatic life. For t­ hose in liminal space, identity categories and thus cultural difference must be “enunciated” in order to problematize binary divisions and produce meaning. Notably, to Bhabha, enunciation is embedded in a par­tic­u­lar time and place, but to make meaning requires communicative acts to go through a “Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot ‘in itself ’ be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces in an ambivalence in the act of interpretation” (53). Positioning cultural difference in resistive politics requires this type of negotiation with a third space that, in making meanings ambivalence and the creation of an “enunciative split” with the subject of enunciation, in turn “destroys the synchronicity and evolution which traditionally authorize the subject of cultural knowledge” (Bhabha 1994, 53). The linearity of time regiments, ­orders, and determines cultural knowledge and discursive meaning. Thus, the dismantling of time and space and the inhabiting of an ambivalent third space allow for a negotiation of new meanings. One that is arguably central to the po­liti­cal response to trauma.

Cripping Trauma: Feminist Post-­Structuralism and Crip Studies as a Framework for Trauma Trauma sufferers live in a world where meaning and thus everyday interactions, movements, experiences and socialities are contingent, fragile, and in need of restoration, remaking, or renegotiation. The orientation t­ oward trauma in this proj­ect comes from the intersection of several critical disciplines of study that question systems of power that stigmatize and mark bodies. ­These critiques center around identity politics and are situated in a long-­fought-­for shift in conceptual frames to a systems-­level analy­sis (Garland-­Thomson 2002, 4). Feminist disability studies, feminist post-­structuralism, and crip studies are reviewed ­here in order to highlight how trauma is constructed through social categories

28  •  Trauma and Media Theory

of difference. Framing trauma in the language of disability studies enables the contestation of the normative frameworks traumatized bodies are forced to adhere to as well as make vis­i­ble traumatized bodies and subjects that are plainly not seen b­ ecause of the way symbolic systems of power erase them. Feminist post-­structuralism interacts with disability and crip studies in affording scholarship possibility through instability in discursive frameworks. Building from structuralist notions that language and discourse constitute lived realities, post-­structuralist thought notes that the meaning-­producing relationship between signifier and signified is unstable. Feminist post-­structuralism is specifically invested in this instability as it provides a space through which to recognize the ways society inferiorly positions certain bodies (Arslanian-­ Engoren 2002, 513). This framework, however, contends that t­ hose categories are not fixed, therefore allowing for opportunities to interrogate power and shift discourses around certain types of bodies. Identity is formed as a response to how one is hailed or named; thus, the way individuals are hailed often places them in a predetermined subject position (Althusser 1971, 174; Jaggar 2008a, 451). Often, when individuals step into their subject positions, they misrecognize themselves as being in charge of that subject position, erasing traces of power and falsely articulating themselves as the author of their own subject position. This becomes of crucial importance to ­those who have been through or witnessed a trauma, as their negotiation of their meaning-­making schema is directly linked to their changed subject position. Who is able to speak, with whom, and when depends on the vari­ous subject positions of users (Jaggar 2008a, 451). Misrecognition of the self makes invisible t­ hose discourses that constitute dominant, mainstream meaning, and this in turn can create a crisis of agency, enhance and enforce dominant discourses, and stifle other ways of knowing. For sufferers of trauma, it is impor­tant to be able to articulate alternative ways of knowing that get outside of constructed categories of meaning and identity so that suffering bodies can re­orient themselves through meaning making. Trauma is a disabling pro­cess. Feminist disability studies do not situate ­either femaleness or disability as a lack or deficiency; rather, it bridges ways of conceiving of both gender and ability and brings to light the interrelationships between intersectional oppressions. Our semiological understandings of disability and gender are predicated on difference; notably what they are not, and how they are interpellated, as Garland-­Thomson (2017) notes, “without the monstrous body to demarcate the borders of the generic, without the female body to distinguish the shape of the male, and without the pathological to give form to the normal, the taxonomies of value that underlie the po­liti­cal, social and economic arrangements would collapse” (420). Feminist disability studies highlight how notions of passing and coming out as victim, sick, disabled, or victimized function to mark disabled bodies in order to control, fix,

­There Are Many Ways to Suffe • 29

or erase them. To be traumatized is to be disabled, and to be disabled is to fall outside of social, normative frameworks. Traumatized bodies are conditioned to believe that trauma must be erased, hidden, or overcome. In using feminist disability studies t­ here is a recognition of the vio­lence of coming out and passing as disabled is parallel to the way survivors are often compelled to name their vari­ous traumas using oppressive language and often reinscribing trauma on their bodies. My impulse to reclaim the language of trauma comes from the investment in the reclamation of the language of disability. For example, “cripping” is a way to reclaim the language of disability in a generative way (McRuer 2006). Culture can be “cripped” in the same way that culture can be queered (McRuer 2006). While it is unlikely, according to McRuer (2006), for individuals to begin referring to themselves as “crip” as many have done with the term queer, he creates a new space through which meanings and repre­sen­ta­tions of “compulsory able bodiedness” can be put to rest (49). Linton (1998) indicates disabled bodies are considered “more dependent, childlike, passive, sensitive, and miserable and are less competent than ­people who do not have disabilities” (25). In “cripping” this cultural and social construct, disabled bodies can resist through their everyday life in tactical ways that produce new meanings. Crip theory provides a framework to account for bodies that are not legible in the dominant social discourses, except in discourses of courage, fixing, and overcoming. For example, the ideology of the super-­crip is often employed, though not always deliberately, in order to make that disabled body legible by the dominant discourse. The super-­crip defies odds in order to emerge stronger than they w ­ ere before the trauma that left their body outside of the confines of the constructed notions of normal (Swartz 2013). Positioning bodies as super-­crip then shifts their narratives of suffering outside of a politics of identity and symbolic power and instead positions them as a hero that had to overcome the odds to achieve greatness (Swartz 2013, 1158). The depoliticization of bodies robs disabled, traumatized bodies of cultural capital in the way it offers only a par­tic­u­lar repre­sen­ta­tional currency (for example, with the super-­crip) (Puar 2007, 4; McRuer 2018, 44). In her concept of “sexual exceptionalism,” Puar (2007) argues that the “sexually exceptional subject is produced against queerness, as a pro­cess intertwined with racialization, that calls into nominalization abject populations peripheral to the proj­ect of living, expendable as ­human waste and shunted to the spaces of deferred death” (xxvii). Working from McRuer’s (2018) reworking of Puar’s (2007) notion of “sexual exceptionalism,” McRuer posits “disability exceptionalism” as “ ‘deployment of disability’s depoliticization as cultural capital’ ” (44). ­These pro­cesses are embedded in systems of symbolic power but also biopower that seek “to control, monitor and optimize life through science, medicine, technology and social engineering” (Meek 2015, 6). Indeed, Puar (2017) situates “disability as

30  •  Trauma and Media Theory

a register of biopo­liti­cal population control” that functions to extract value from “populations that would other­wise be disposable” (xvii). McRuer (2010) argues that disability studies must recognize “uneven biopo­liti­cal incorporation” that marks some bodies for life and ­others for death using the same rhe­ toric and repre­sen­ta­tion in dif­fer­ent times and spaces (171). Both Puar and McRuer discuss tactics as a way to resist the positioning of disability as lack. A queer, feminist, crip study of trauma interrupts geopo­liti­cal marking of disabled bodies and recognizes how actors inhabit ­these constructs in tactical ways in their everyday meaning-­making pro­cesses. Difference, in the ways it is constructed socially, culturally, and po­liti­cally, demands to be cured. Clare (2017) argues that “defectiveness justifies cure and makes it essential” (21). Critical feminist disability studies dismantles the demand for cure by highlighting the power it wields and the trauma it c­ auses. This proj­ect is invested in positioning against the rhe­toric of overcoming, instead highlighting the way trauma, even as it disables, creates instability and thus space for po­liti­cal pro­gress in everyday tactics. Rather than overcoming, and indeed in stark contrast to overcoming, I position trauma and disability as unfinished. Aranda et  al. (2012), in their effort to de-­medicalize resilience, argue that an unfinished resilience is “always in a pro­cess of remaking or becoming” (555), thus inhabiting the pro­cesses of meaning making with possibility for discursive re­sis­tance.

Trauma, Its Politics, and What This Affords Scholarship In this chapter I have offered a way to engage in a crip, feminist analy­sis of trauma that contends with complex relations of power while still paying attention to material suffering. Trauma is widely studied across disciplines, yet t­ here is no concrete media studies analy­sis that takes trauma as the lens through which to examine symbolic systems of oppression and embodied experience and action. Trauma, in its de-­medicalized form, like disability, functions akin to other identity categories that recognize socially constructed, normative ways of bodily existence and pushes back against them. The theory offered h ­ ere situates suffering in critical traditions; thus, it does not relativize traumatic experience and, like other identity politics, resists ghettoization by restricting analy­sis by unmarked, untraumatized bodies. This careful negotiation of trauma considers the systems of power that make some forms of suffering in some bodies legible while wholly erasing the suffering of other bodies. The unruly body, the sick body, the body that ­doesn’t conform in size, shape, and color to social, cultural, and po­liti­cal frameworks is ostracized, damaged, and made to feel helpless and confused. The dominant world is full of meanings that cannot account for the experiences the unruly body has lived. Davis (1995) notes, “The nightmare of that body is one that is deformed, maimed, mutilated,

­There Are Many Ways to Suffe • 31

broken, diseased” (5). ­These bodies exist and are created each day among the powerless (Herman 1997, 33). Trauma and symbolic trauma are po­liti­cal b­ ecause of the way bodies are made to experience pain and suffering through received narratives around the eligibility of victims, what illness looks like, what overcoming looks like, and more. Much of ­these received notions are part and parcel of the deeply ingrained medicalization of trauma that forgoes attention to the social. In fact, Herman (1997) argues that for knowledge to be produced around even a psy­chol­ogy of trauma, it needs to happen in the “context of a po­liti­cal movement” (32). Creation of the category of symbolic trauma allows for this politics to be more readily seen, as well as works to make victims of symbolic traumas legible. So often symbolic suffering is erased ­because it is, like many disabilities, invisible on the body, yet ­these experiences impact everyday interactions in catastrophic ways. Explic­itly felt traumas can also be symbolic; inequity in access to resources, for example, prevents some trauma sufferers from testifying to their physical experience, foreclosing on their ability to make meaning in the wake of their suffering, and rendering their embodied experience invisible. Symbolic trauma can also lead to other types of trauma. An injury caused by symbolic vio­lence can indeed cause physical symptoms such as helplessness and confusion, but more than that, symbolic vio­lence can lead to real vio­lence. Th ­ ese categories can be, but are not always, discrete. Like many other theories in identity politics, they must be taken on a continuum and their intersections must be carefully navigated to account for the vari­ous ways bodies suffer and the meanings that are made in response. This chapter began with Kevin Berry, a cancer survivor, who testified online to the moment his trauma began. In another contribution to Cure, Berry counts the days since his first bone marrow transplant (Berry 2015). This cancer “count up,” sponsored by the Moffitt Cancer Center, indicates the way trauma and its long-­term suffering shifts patient relationships to time. “I realized what a g­ reat idea it is to count your life in days. Years fly by and months last an instant, but we live in the ‘now,’ ” he writes, arguing that this shift in his calculations of time allowed him to make sense of the “valley of the shadow” that had shrouded his life in “darkness and fear” (Berry 2015). Berry was not given a choice in his diagnosis or the three recurrences he experienced. Trauma never gives the suffering body a choice, but w ­ hether physical or symbolic, suffering begs for meaning. Berry sought meaning in the cancer count up, in the local cancer community, and in a digital community he found with his contributions to Cure and his personal blog. Trauma shifted his relationship to the world, so he remade it.

3

Putting It Out T­ here Tactics of Meaning Making in Digital Media In late August of 2012, I laid awake in my bed in the ­middle of the night watching YouTube videos about a man named Daran. Daran had an acoustic neuroma, a rare benign brain tumor that wreaks havoc on the body by pushing impor­tant structures of the brain out of its way. With my laptop perched on my chest, I anxiously watched as Daran, his wife Lorinda, and his friend Justyn detailed Daran’s journey in a series of ten-­minute clips. In the twelve-­video series, white-­lettered captions over stark black screens give the viewer details on Daran’s diagnosis, diet, the length of his brain surgery (20 hours), and the vari­ous complications Daran suffers. Daran shares his journey with his brain tumor for strangers on the Internet. He does so ­because, as he says, he ­didn’t want it to be “scary” (Davidson 2009). I came to ­these videos b­ ecause I had under­gone an MRI that day, and my ­sister, a medical doctor, and I had deduced from our amateur readings of my scan and some help from her digital database that I had an acoustic neuroma as well. I devoured all twelve videos, watching some over and over again in a sort of diagnosis-­induced, desperate binge watch. The last screen in the last YouTube video had Daran’s email address on it. I emailed him that night, telling him that I thought I had what he had. When I awoke ­after a brief sleep, I saw that he had written me back with a cheery disposition, telling me to take care, urging me to find a way through the inevitable bumps on my journey to come. He would not be the only brain tumor 32

Putting It Out ­There • 33

patient I found online. At the time, his was one of a handful of patient stories I found and engaged with on vari­ous levels. All around me ­were attempts to humanize a diagnosis outside of sterile YouTube videos of surgeries and hospital diagnosis pages that leave the person suffering the trauma out of the narrative. I dove head first into this mediated space, adding my own voice to the cacophony, trying to find my own meaning, trying to make sense of the emptiness that suddenly snaked its way through my insides. I had been wounded by this trauma and I needed help, I needed my world to make sense again. Six years ­later, I found myself again awake in the night, clicking through YouTube videos trying to make sense of yet another trauma. I had the same sinking feeling of anxiety swelling up inside me. I was hurting and tears streamed down my cheeks, but this time the wound was not to my body. I had just received an email from an Ira­nian cousin who lives in London. Her email sent just days e­ arlier had been e­ ager with news of her itinerary to come visit my f­ amily in the United States. This email was curt and straightforward, her tone had shifted. She told me she would no longer be able to come visit my ­family for my wedding. The United States Embassy had called her and told her the most recent version of the travel ban, the executive order that barred entry from several Muslim-­majority nations (Executive Order 13769, 82 FR 8977), would prevent her from making her trip. As the ban had been ­going through litigation, I had been hopeful that the country would see the folly in this problematic law, but the ban had been upheld and travel to the United States for Ira­nian nationals and many ­others would be curtailed in­def­initely (Laughland 2017). I was no longer able to push away my discomfort about the travel ban. I was more than just sad. The very understanding I had been raised with about the United States of Amer­i­ca, the narrative of the American Dream that undergirded so much of my f­ amily’s recent history eroded quickly with very l­ ittle to take its place aside from confusion and desperation for answers. My stomach churned as I sought a way to make sense of the sudden rupture of my life’s real­ ity. I felt unsafe, unwanted, and unrecognized, as a second-­generation Ira­nian American, by the country my parents always proudly praised as their own. In my distressed digital search for anyone who could make this make sense to me, I stumbled on a trailer for an upcoming Netflix special by the Ira­nian American comedian Maz Jobrani. In it, he talks about protesting the first instantiation of the travel ban in his non-­White body, the fear of it, the precariousness of it. While he is joking, he mediates my pain; I watched with rapt attention knowing I had to now remake my world given this new real­ity. I began reading the comments and saw once again that I was not alone in this space of suffering. I had to make sense of how to exist in a world that had suddenly changed for me in so many ways, as did many ­others like me, and many ­others in much more serious and challenging positions than me. I knew then that this

34  •  Trauma and Media Theory

suffering would be mediated by many. I stayed up all night reading, watching, and engaging all that social media had to offer about the ban. I, like so many ­others, had to make meaning from this so I could keep moving forward in my life, and in my body, which was suddenly disallowed from existing in my home country. My story is not unique. I am not alone in my turn to digital media for answers when life forces questions I never wanted to ask. Traumatic events leave indelible marks on bodies and minds. Trauma enters into the fabric of a sufferer’s being—­narrated and remembered in complex, often-­collective ways across social strata. Traumatic events, particularly ­those on a large scale, capture the rapt attention of collective audiences and are often experienced, defined, mediated, felt, negotiated, testified to, and remembered through media. Couldry and Hepp (2016) note that “a way of capturing this deep, consistent and self-­reinforcing role of media in the construction of the social world is to say that the social world is not just mediated but mediatized: that is, changed in its dynamics and structure by the role that media continuously (indeed recursively) play in its construction” (15). Media offer a space for trauma sufferers to negotiate the crisis of meaning that dismantles their social world, and media have historically represented and thus constructed understandings of collective, cultural traumas alongside suffering populations. Trauma is mediatized; the media construct meaning around traumatic events, thus orienting the social world to trauma in par­tic­u­lar ways. In this chapter, I survey the trajectory of media and trauma, highlighting key events and pieces of lit­er­a­ture that indicate how media and trauma have intersected, most prominently in legacy media. I then analyze and offer new media theories that account for digital media platforms and media tactics that are deployed in the negotiative, often resistive, meaning-­making tactics witnessed in the case studies that follow in ­later chapters.

Testimony and Repre­sen­ta­tion: Legacy Media and the Narration of Trauma Much of the lit­er­a­ture circulating around the cultural paradigms of trauma revolves around extraordinary traumatic events that had far-­reaching consequences for social, cultural, and po­liti­cal life. Studies of media and trauma tend ­toward the way mass media have covered large-­scale traumatic events, such as the September  11 terrorist attacks or the Holocaust. In scholarship, En­g lish departments largely took up the call to research the mediation of trauma, with a focus on literary works and testimony. While the study of trauma is not primarily h ­ oused in media studies departments, trauma exists in the cultural imaginary in large part ­because of the role of mass media. I trace

Putting It Out ­There • 35

t­ hese connections to then identify and place into context how new media, primarily digital media, operate as spaces for testimonies of trauma and meaning making. Rothe (2011) argues that “popu­lar trauma culture emerged when the genocide of Eu­ro­pean Jewry was incorporated into the collective memory of the United States ­because American Holocaust discourse generated the dominant paradigm that would subsequently by employed to represent the pain of ­others in the mass media” (7). The very public, national appropriation of suffering led to the large-­scale repre­sen­ta­tion of suffering as necessitating a happy ending, a degree of survival, and a level of redemption. Suffering became legible only when it offered a happy ending and when the trauma was resolved. This power­ful framework for the repre­sen­ta­tion of trauma has become a part of trauma culture in mainstream media, even as that mediation shifts formats. The normalization of the extreme suffering of Holocaust victims moved audiences through their engagement with “the Holocaust spectacle” (Rothe 2011, 8). Viewers ­were positioned as vicarious Holocaust victims, using the suffering of o­ thers to navigate the t­ rials and tribulations of their mundane, everyday lives, rather than to bear witness to ­actual testimonies of sufferers. “Overcoming victimization—­increasingly termed survival, even if the victim’s life was not threatened—­thus replaced traditional notions of accomplishment and heroism. While the heroes of old altruistically risked their own lives to save another’s, the objective of the modern-­day antihero is simply to survive” (Rothe 2011, 8). The media are central to this pro­cess of shifting trauma narratives from articulations of a traumatic experience to the normalization and subsequent reinvention of trauma and suffering as a space for epic achievement in the everyday. This narrative of triumph and overcoming persists in legacy media and is reproduced in digital media. Overcoming is a staple of the neoliberal media space that Couldry (2010) describes, a space in which the immea­sur­able value of individual stories of triumph eclipse the need for narrative resources, that accounts for naturalized categories of difference that foreclose on the location of speaking many marginalized voices so desperately require (122, 125). Interdisciplinary scholars who study trauma also attend to its mediation. I survey that lit­er­a­ture briefly h ­ ere in order to build on it in developing a theory of trauma and digital mediation. Kaplan (2005) writes about the “impact of trauma both on individuals and on entire cultures or nations, and about the need to share and ‘translate’ such traumatic impact” (1). Arguing that trauma produces new subjects, she notes that it is “hard to separate individual and collective trauma” (1). Kaplan notes that trauma comes in many forms and from many places, but one central source of trauma is the media. She offers the impor­ tant argument that trauma happens for bystanders and friends, and frequently media viewers feel traumatized by what they see, thus “focusing on so-­called mediatized trauma is impor­tant” (2). Media act on trauma in many in­ter­est­ing

36  •  Trauma and Media Theory

ways. For example, in large-­scale traumas such as the Holocaust or the September 11 terrorist attacks, a ­great deal of content circulates, creating a constant barrage of information that often leads to a fear of exploitation. Th ­ ere is a concern in scholarship that events become “fixed” with certain meanings, causing testimonies of trauma to become static and immovable within frequent, dominant repre­sen­ta­tions of that event, experience, or even type of event. Kaplan’s (2005) discussion forces considerations of which discursive frames around trauma, victimization, and intervention become acceptable, and what kinds of narrations and testimonies of trauma enter into the social imaginary (2). Media produce trauma sufferers, and traumatic experience produces subjects that are articulated in and through media. In chapter 2, I discussed the dialectic of trauma (Herman 1997). The trauma sufferer is trapped between the visceral needs to deny and testify to what they have been through (Herman 1997, 1). Though mass mediated testimonies can be problematic, trauma sufferers benefit from sharing and eliciting witness. Kaplan (2005) is careful to recognize that though repre­sen­ta­tion of trauma can fix meanings and exploit trauma, “it would be wrong to rule out the importance of empathy and sharing trauma just ­because the United States media exploit catastrophe” (22). In fact, Kaplan argues that the witnessing of trauma, while it may produce vicariously traumatized subjects, may be useful in producing spaces that are productive for change. The discomfort that watching trauma ­causes “may have a socially useful effect” (Kaplan 2005, 122). Vicarious traumas compel viewers to take responsibility in the shared trauma (Kaplan 2005, 124). This type of witnessing, however, must not operate on the level of the individual, but function to take individual trauma and extend it to the structures that produce it. Trauma discourse must be understood through a geopo­liti­cal analy­sis of the ways it “may participate in structures of power and exclusion” (Meek 2011, 3). Notably, a sort of distanced positioning of viewers “enables attention to the situation, as against attention merely to the subject’s individual suffering, and this positioning thus opens the text out to larger social and po­liti­cal meanings” (Kaplan 2005, 125). Mediation of trauma testimony is not solely about repre­sen­ta­tion and witness for the viewers. Sufferers make themselves legible through sharing. This allows them to feel that their suffering served a purpose. Often trauma sufferers attempt to articulate and testify to their traumas in order to foster awareness, but also often they do it simply to cope. ­There is possibility inherent in mediations of trauma as perpetuated through the tactical, everyday gestures of survivors. Walsh (2007) finds that strong connections, formed through sharing, counteract the feelings of “insecurity, helplessness, and meaninglessness” that the wounds of trauma inflict (208). He argues that making meaning of traumatic loss and experience is essential to provide users with the resilience needed to counteract the helplessness and terror they have endured. Community

Putting It Out ­There • 37

formation, Walsh argues, can help recovery and awaken both sufferers, empathetic viewers and vicarious trauma sufferers, “to redefine our identity . . . ​ and take initiative in caring actions to benefit o­ thers” (Walsh 2007, 223). Media platforms may make available affordances that can function tactically, enabling trauma sufferers to produce meaning a­ fter traumatic experiences perpetuate a crisis of meaning. However, the language of trauma cannot be used to erase po­liti­cal significance in ­favor of grieving, mourning, or coping (Meek 2010, 4–5), nor can analy­sis overlook the inability for marginalized populations to give account of themselves (Couldry 2010, 125), particularly in mainstream, legacy media platforms. Trauma sufferers inhabit a complicated and contested media space (Rothe 2011). Trauma is normatively constructed in culture; thus, the gesture of articulating, sharing, and making public one’s suffering in order to overcome, contest, or cope with a traumatic event of some kind is a common trope in repre­sen­ta­tions of media and trauma. So too is the insistence that the suffering belongs on the body of the sufferer without consequence for society, the larger body politic, or the larger geopo­liti­cal system that obscures or sheds light on suffering depending on the rhetorical, po­liti­cal function a person or groups suffering may serve in the maintenance of symbolic power.1 Media about trauma that circulate often indicate to audiences and sufferers that to “overcome traumatizing experiences and transform weak victims into heroic survivors, the traumatic memories must be narrated” and ­these narrations offer audiences a “suspicious thrill of borrowed emotion” (Rothe 2011, 1, 4). This narration of trauma, however problematic its repre­sen­ta­tion, is the site where meaning is made. While trauma exists in the clinical sense, the way it is culturally and socially understood explic­itly depends on the way it is articulated. Traumatic experiences, like all mediated experiences, are never wholly fixed, and like all repre­sen­ta­tions are constitutive of themselves (Hall and Jhally 1997).

The Visual and the Visceral: Theorizing New Media and Trauma Just as trauma was demonstrated in chapter 2 to transgress the bound­aries of linear time and constructions of or­ga­nized space, media about trauma are not linear or chronological. Media theory can capture the unique social, spatial, and temporal nature of trauma. Trauma is characteristically contingent and changing. No trauma exists socially and culturally u­ ntil it is represented, testified to, or made part of a narrative. Narrating trauma cannot happen outside of mediation. Notably, even when the trauma is vicarious or what Meek (2011) terms virtual trauma, it is constituted through its mediation. Madianou and Miller (2013) note that mediation is part of a dialectical relationship between users and media, highlighting how “mediation tries to capture the ways in which communications media transform social pro­cesses while being socially ­shaped

38  •  Trauma and Media Theory

themselves” (174). Trauma and media exist in a cyclical relationship: trauma “remains haunted by the presence of a more general media culture” (Meek 2011, 3). The very nature of trauma prevents a linear mediation or repre­sen­ta­tion of it. Trauma interrupts the fabric of the day-­to-­day narrative of an individual’s or group’s daily life or lived experience; in that pro­cess, it displaces narratives in both time and space. The experience of trauma is as uneven as its repre­sen­ta­ tions ­because trauma is not always felt or fully felt at the time it occurs, it is “intrusive and insidious” (Meek 2011, 5). Analy­sis of mediation of trauma must recognize this trans-­temporal, trans-­spatial nature of trauma and be prepared to situate the traumatic experience in a complex cultural context that is constantly shifting, always producing new traumatized subjects through media (Meek 2011, 6). Scholarship then must attend to the fact that “modern visual media, have helped to create conditions in which trauma has assumed such significance” (Meek 2011, 8) and find the ways that modern media may enable productive space for meaning making for trauma sufferers. Narration of trauma, its meanings, and its contestations functions beyond verbal and written testimony. Visual communication allows for repre­sen­ta­tions of trauma that can communicate the visceral crises it engenders and understandings of the contingent, logic-­defying nature of trauma, and in a way, the visual expressions of trauma instantiate the traumatic events. Images call users to them in certain specific ways, shifting viewers from mere witnesses to sufferers, having the ability to take from viewers something they did not realize was available to be taken: their ways of making meaning. The provocative nature of visual repre­sen­ta­tions of trauma form an active mediation and viewing pro­ cess. In social, digital media, the intimacy of the relationship between the viewer and what they see only serves to make the voice of the visual more confronting. Zelizer (2010) argues that images of trauma and suffering implicate audiences and acquire them. She notes that the subjunctive, or as-if, moment is particularly impor­tant to images that are difficult, contested, or hard to look at. The subjunctive moment “forces an event’s meaning through the display of images that are contingent. What all of this suggests is that the voice of subjunctivity—­and its concomitant invocation of emotionality, contingency, and imagination—­become particularly useful around events that are unsettled” (Zelizer 2010, 15). This allows the visual to take on meanings and repre­sen­ta­ tions beyond their denotative meanings: a user can invent and reinvent an image. Images, Mitchell (2005) tells us, “seem to come alive and want ­things” (9). He argues that images bind us in a “paradoxical double consciousness” in which “we need to reckon with not just the meaning of images but their silence, their reticence, their wildness and nonsensical obduracy” (10). Positioning images as living organisms, Mitchell forces scholars to examine not just the way mediations of trauma take place, but also the way the image objects take on meanings and

Putting It Out ­There • 39

impact audiences. Elkins (1997) similarly argues that while the eyes are commanded by our desires, so too are images per­sis­tent in their interest and use. While eyes can “understand only desire and possession,” the objects they stare at are spaces of nourishment in the way that the desire to possess with the eyes creates the very objects in their view (Elkins 1997, 25, 29). Th ­ ese “observer-­objects” want to speak to the viewer, they call to the viewer and force the viewer to recognize that seeing is not a passive act; rather, it is “hunting” and “dreaming.” Seeing creates the object and is then created through the interaction with the object. According to Elkins (1997), “this seeing is aggressive, it distorts what it looks at, and it turns the person into an object . . . ​seeing is not only possessing . . . ​seeing is also controlling and objectifying and denigrating” (27). When looking out at the world, the viewer and the object constitute one another (Elkins 1997, 12). Trauma is already constituted through media and vice versa. Visual repre­sen­ta­tions of trauma also then form a space of self-­acquisition on the part of the suffering body: the media are the outlet through which the sufferer is made legible, and through which the sufferer may recognize their own suffering. In other words, active seeing is one way for sufferers and witnesses to give meaning to trauma, to recognize their own suffering, and to position it within its cultural context ­either normatively or resistively. This active seeing is a part of what Mitchell (2005) calls the “double consciousness” of the living image, a simultaneous belief in and disavowal of what images portray (11). This is compounded by the trauma sufferer’s simultaneous recognition and denial of their own circumstance of trauma. Difficult imagery begs to be remade, to be imbued with new meaning, to ­settle the unsettled. Difficult imagery forces its viewer into a sacred relationship with imagery, a relationship where interactions with the visual produce unique meanings. That is why p­ eople look at trauma, and often why it is a part of cultural, collective memory, and why many cannot seem to look away. Visuals, in enabling sacred interactions with images, facilitate media rituals that orient suffering bodies t­ oward meaning-­making pro­cesses. The potential for reinvention that the acquisitional nature of the visual offers for both trauma sufferers and witnesses is compounded by the possibility play in digital discourse. In playful, as-if, digital space trauma sufferers who need meaning are invited through platform affordances to reinvent, re-­mediate, and remake meaning. The following section explores the parallel instability of trauma and digital media, both of which allow for meaning making, discursive production, and possibility for remaking the traumatized subject.

The Importance of Mediation for Trauma As media communication technologies proliferate, individuals and groups that previously convened around mass media are fragmented and atomized,

40  •  Trauma and Media Theory

forcing new ways of navigating the world. The traumatic moments that further dismantle previously held systems of meanings function alongside the laments and worries of changing, modernizing socie­ties, grappling for authenticity. Taylor (1991) terms this state of being as “the malaises of modernity,” noting that individualism and freedom have caused a “breaking loose from older moral horizons” or chains of order to give the world a means of making sense (1, 3). The breakdown of vari­ous moral ­orders leads to an “ethic of authenticity,” in which p­ eople without overarching moral systems of order must individually make moral, intuitive judgments on right and wrong, and attaining this is part of what ­humans have to do to “be true and full ­human beings” (Taylor 1991, 26). Trauma exacerbates this pressure for meaning making, firmly situating individuals in the contingency of their circumstances as both modern subjects and suffering bodies. In part, this search for meaning and order takes place online. It is in the narration of trauma that digital sufferers (­those driven online to testify to and mediate their traumas) make meaning. Though suffering dehumanizes, suffering bodies may retain their agency in many re­spects. The experience of trauma, however, can make ­these bodies invisible, or perhaps co-­opt their traumatic experience as a ploy in entertainment, a narrative device simply meant to move a story along. Digital media affordances offer digital sufferers a playful space wherein they can explore received notions of what trauma or suffering looks like, as well as to negotiate their place in the broader world given the catastrophic feeling that broke down their sense of place in the world. The previous chapter situated trauma in the language of disability in order to analyze the way mediations of trauma may be a part of a “cripping” of traumatic experience, and, as such, a reclamation of trauma and agency. This cripping happens in meaning making, and while not exclusively a digital pursuit, social media are often central to the mediations and re-­mediations of suffering in this proj­ect. The nature of digital media technologies makes pos­si­ble certain kinds of affective gestures, its affordances allowing for quick and playful mediations that remake meaning using gestures often decried as the sole domain of digital trolls and mindless, millennial time wasting. In this section, I offer an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, grounded in media studies, for understanding media affordances specifically as they relate to trauma in order to provide fertile ground for l­ ater analy­sis. Meaning-­making schema are not vis­i­ble to p­ eople in their everyday existence ­until they are called into question. When traumatic experience dismantles the invisible structures of the world in substantial ways, p­ eople have to actively remake ­those structures or invent new ones in order to survive. Online, users engage technology in times of suffering, taking the narrative of their suffering and representing it back to themselves and out to o­ thers. In this pro­cess of putting themselves out t­here, the traumatic experience is remade through the

Putting It Out ­There • 41

media. If the trauma and the media are mutually constitutive, so are the technology and the user. The intimate nature of trauma collapses the boundary between the suffering body, the experience of suffering, and the narrations and mediations of that suffering. Appadurai (2015) urges scholars not to exclusively focus on the work of users that engage the technology, but to see the technology as being a part of what constitutes ­those agentic acts of users as they relate to media. Using the analogy of religion, Appadurai (2015) argues that religion mediates “between the invisible and vis­i­ble,” thus media are a technology of religion, bringing together ideological concepts with embodied experiences and physical spaces (228). Using the term “mediants,” he goes on to argue that ­these mediants, or technologies of communications, and the way they interact with “actants” (users with agency) “allow us to foreground the socialities that emerge through specific materialities” (Appadurai 2015, 228). Thus, the technology, and the interaction between the technology and specific users who pursue a cause via that technology, for the purposes of this exploration—­meaning making a­ fter a trauma—­places power in both the a­ ctual physical form (in this case the technological platform) that mediates and in the user who engages that mediation. Given the feminist, crip positioning of this proj­ect, the argument put forth by Appadurai (2015) has to be complicated based on identity politics. Much of what may be perceived as giving agency to mediants and actants si­mul­ta­neously, through recognizing the power of technology, may also constitute an erasure of identity categories of marginalized bodies, as well as subsume impor­tant po­liti­cal categories that subvert dominant power structures. Fanon (2016) articulates the inability of Black bodies, for example, to be seen outside of the white man (15). He says “I came into this world imbued with the ­will to find a meaning in ­things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects” (15). When certain bodies are not able to be seen or see themselves except in relation to dominant modes of control, ­those bodies also cannot freely engage in technological mediation of their trauma or their suffering. In granting power of meaning making to technology, the theory of mediants and actants assumes in some ways an equality of access and interpretation. Further, even as technology speaks to users in certain ways, that user’s perception of the way materialities of technologies operate is situated within their par­tic­u­lar social location, based on their identity categories and their position in relation to dominant culture and repre­sen­ta­tional politics. Notably, “mediation and materiality cannot be usefully defined except in relationship to each other. Mediation, as an operation or embodied practice, produces materiality as the effect of its operations. Materiality is the site of what mediation—as an embodied practice—­ reveals” (Appadurai 2015, 224). Mediation also produces materiality as the effect of repre­sen­ta­tion and through discourses of power and social systems of control.

42  •  Trauma and Media Theory

The way bodies are framed by users in digital media is part of a larger discussion of the way bodies have been ushered into a neoliberal, cap­i­tal­ist logic of self-­repair, self-­realization, and self-­reliance. The legacy of Protestantism, for example, in terms of both meaning and identity production as well as health and healing has played a central role in the way suffering is conceived of in many cultures, particularly North American cultures (Klassen 2011). Healing has come to be an imperative, the language of which admonishes ­those who do not heal as having failed. It is the “ubiquity of healing that makes it carry such heavy burdens—­mending the body, psyche, and spirit, ending off ever changing viral and bacterial threats to live, and restoring justice and right relations” (Klassen 2011, n.p.). Healing then becomes a culturally constructed normative framework that urges t­ hose suffering from any kind of trauma that is medicalized to make their experience mean something. Notably, Klassen (2011) argues that “twentieth-­century Protestantism, especially in its liberal forms, has long been characterized as having . . . ​a theology in which ‘self-­realization’ was more of a goal that overcoming sin” (n.p.). Many digital users posting about traumatic events are on culturally compelled journeys of self-­realization. They are searching for a new world-­making schema that accounts for their previously held beliefs, their traumatic experience, and their embodied experiences. ­People’s lives, as articulated online, are interpolations of their offline bodies and their vari­ous social-­and ritual-­based meaning-­making systems, systems that inherently change with traumatic experiences. Th ­ ose that go online to make meaning are deliberately cultivating space for shifting expressions of voice around their varying embodied experiences of trauma. Embodiment has recently come to the fore in much of media studies, as the shifting landscapes of technology shift the ways bodies exist in the social world. Media research needs to account for what Moores (2012) calls a “politics of bodily knowledge and experience” that enters into power structures and has ­great consequences for “collaborative place-­making practices” on digital platforms (90, 105). In ­these pro­cesses of ­either self-­revelatory or potentially resistive meaning making, the technology facilitates repre­sen­ta­tions of the material body. Banet-­ Weiser et al. (2014) recognize the dual investment in “voice” and in “practices of listening” necessary in order to comprehend the affordances of the online space and of a collective online attention (1074). Based in the senses and with a nod to ability, the online space, even in the analogies used to discuss it, is one interpolated by bodies. Kraidy (2013) notes, “Technology publicizes corporeal dissent . . . ​the ­human body is the indispensable po­liti­cal medium” (287). Users often seek a space where disembodied articulations of self can empower, change, or foster new meanings around their physical, material circumstances. Kraidy (2013) goes on: “The body is the medium through which strug­gles for power, identity and legitimacy are physically fought, socially constructed and ideologically refracted” (289). Trauma forcefully reconstructs meanings around the

Putting It Out ­There • 43

physical body and lived experiences, disabling t­ hose bodies and then inscribing socially constructed understandings of what suffering looks like on them. The trauma is then played out on their body, yet their body may be too traumatized to be the only space in which their material real­ity is negotiated, Material bodies need another site through which to articulate, contest, or even affirm the way their bodies exist within social regimes. Digital platforms can functionally serve as that place as they become a space where even disabled bodies can express voice.

Digital Spaces of Possibility: Media Affordances and Everyday Tactics Digital space can function to inscribe and reinscribe a sufferer’s traumas on them and on their communities through repeated viewing, re-­mediation, and the meme-­ing of trauma. However, in testifying, sharing, narrativizing, meme-­ ing, and even creating vicarious sufferers and media witnesses online, users are potentially producing spaces of community, comradery, and even po­liti­cal action. Users are making socially significant gestures that explore status quo assumptions around suffering, while exploring articulations of what it means to suffer. Nonmedical traumas circulate alongside cancer stories and narratives of po­liti­cal vio­lence, creating a tapestry of suffering that situates the varying types of trauma in everyday life, experience, and media use. Users cultivate spaces through their interactions with digital technology to make their suffering legible and to articulate meanings, both alternative and mainstream, around trauma. Contrary to the often problematic mass repre­sen­ta­tions of trauma in which sufferers are forced to claim the status of survivors, online spaces offer nuanced and complex ways to articulate suffering, thus allowing digital sufferers to position themselves in relation to their suffering and dominant discourses around trauma. Th ­ ese media users may in fact position themselves as triumphant survivors, or lacking victims, or they may inhabit vari­ous degrees of ­those roles at dif­fer­ent times. Though users may not wholly contest dominant ideas of what it means to suffer and what types of suffering are socially acceptable, in their negotiations of the meanings available to them and the new meanings they produce t­ here are fissures and contestations made within online spaces that are significant and subversive. The meaning produced is often as a response to dominant medicalized meanings that are part of the received narratives around traumatization and experiencing trauma. Users position themselves on a sort of continuum of suffering. ­There are t­ hose that suffer in a way that conforms to the dominant discourses around acceptable trauma and ­those that entirely and unapologetically contest ­those discourses. For some, particularly symbolic sufferers or marginalized sufferers, in even claiming the language of trauma they shift the discursive bound­aries of what it is to suffer a traumatic

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experience or loss. Many perform a combination of gestures of fitting in with normative frames and resisting them, depending on time, place, space, and their distance from their trauma in their experiences of everyday life, all of which is contingent, fluid, and always changing. Polymediatic online spaces are t­ hose through which users can self-­select the mediated form of communication that best enables them to articulate a par­ tic­u­lar message at a par­tic­u­lar time (Madianou and Miller 2013). Within this media format, digital sufferers express voice in varied ways. Returning to Couldry’s (2012) notion of presencing, p­ eople cultivate social networks in order to “manage their presence (and presence to ­others) over time” (49). In so d­ oing, individuals utilize their networks to put into “circulation information about, and repre­sen­ta­tions of, themselves for the wider purpose of sustaining a public presence” (Couldry 2012, 50). In putting their suffering out ­there, ­these digital sufferers express voice and create and then maintain a sense of who they are, ­either an aspirational non-­traumatized version of themselves, a newly minted subject that disavows the need to cure what ails them and celebrates difference, or some other manifestation of self that gives their life circumstances meaning. Couldry (2010) argues that voice, or “giving an account of oneself and what affects one’s life” is a central part of what it means to be ­human, and the effective opportunity to have one’s voice heard and taken into account is a ­human good (vi). For t­ hose expressing their voice, it is impor­tant to know that their voice m ­ atters (Couldry 2010). For suffering invisible bodies, this need is even more visceral and inflects social media use in impor­tant ways. Morris (1997) highlights that voice stands in opposition to silence. The idea of silence is central b­ ecause “suffering, like pain, with which it is so often intermingled, exists in part beyond language” (27). During times of suffering or trauma, individuals become meta­phor­ically voiceless b­ ecause the experience of suffering feels so unknowable. Morris (1997) continues, establishing that suffering actively destroys language, making it “inaccessible to understanding” and leaving ­people inarticulate, voiceless, leading to retreat from social space, and leaving them in “uncommunicative isolation” (27–28). Part of what is significant for sufferers who digitally express voice is the making of the invisible vis­i­ble. It is crucial that the inability of suffering bodies to be a part of mainstream culture becomes vis­i­ble; they are bodies that cannot access society and which society cannot access; they are bodies culturally erased and relegated to medical corners. Online spaces offer a potential for the possibility of legibility for sufferers. Digital voice is crucial as a means through which sufferers are presenced. Returning to Morris (1997), he argues that for ­those in pain, for t­ hose who have suffered, “voice ­matters precisely ­because suffering remains to some degree inaccessible. Voice is what gets silenced, repressed, preempted, denied, or at best translated into an alien dialect. Indeed, voice ranks among the most precious ­human endowments that suffering

Putting It Out ­There • 45

normally deprives us of, removing far more than a hope that o­ thers w ­ ill understand or assist us” (29). The online space fostered by digital media enables users to express voice, to carve out a space where they can authentically express, or at the very least feel like they authentically express their suffering in meaningful ways. When suffering is invisible, oppression is inherent. Online spaces, in illuminating sufferers, even on small scales, interrupt oppression. A ­ fter a traumatic life event or series of events, individual bodies are regulated by norms around ability/disability as they intersect with other identity categories. Digital media, and the vari­ous affordances of digital technology, have the potential to enable individuals and groups to subvert the regulation of their bodies by enabling them to have a voice and give an account of their experiences online. This functions through the polymediatic nature of the online. Polymedia is the “emerging environment of communicative opportunities that function as an ‘integrated structure’ ” through which we can understand “new media as an environment of affordances” (Madianou and Miller 2013, 170). Users intuitively capitalize on t­ hese affordances and select the communities they can access using ­these technologies to find opportunities for expression. Additionally, polymedia conceives of media as a relational tool; thus, distinct media can no longer be understood as existing in­de­pen­dently; rather, they must be understood in relationship to one another (Madianou and Miller 2013, 175). Once individuals have gained access to a certain type of media (bearing in mind that unequal opportunities of access across the world do limit the ability of some to express voice in the way being discussed h ­ ere), the relative cost of each individual act of communication is quite small; thus, new media are proliferated and new choices and means of communication are offered, leading to slippage around the bound­aries of where and how users communicate and thus the meanings they produce (Madianou and Miller 2013, 176). Often users ­will go to dif­fer­ent online technologies for dif­fer­ent reasons, exploiting what each unique platform offers them in relation to their individual needs. ­These media, which allow users to communicate one to many or one to one, and their affordances dictate expectations and ideals about social experience and in turn a user’s place within social structures. For trauma sufferers, their social experiences have been interrupted and corrupted; thus, polymediatic environments allow for the reconstruction of social worlds, and re-­creation of existing ideas and spaces of social expression. Certain types of media are seen as more relevant to certain types of communicational relationships, but “most relationships create a par­tic­u­lar configuration of media that works best for their par­tic­u­lar communicative needs” (Madianou and Miller 2013, 179). In a system of polymedia, the individual’s cultivation of a bricolage of media, through which they mediate certain ideas and relationships, functions as a strug­gle over power and autonomy and for an au­then­tic space to express voice. In this

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multifaceted media environment, some users enter into spaces in which ascribed identities of sufferer can be interrogated, pushed, cemented, or shifted through the ritualized offering of testimony, acknowl­edgment of o­ thers’ testimonies, and interactions between user posts. Media space is complex space of possibility and refusal that rapidly changes, constantly shifting, evolving, and offering new ways to make meaning, while rendering other pervious ways of being obsolete. The media torrent moves quickly, the speed at which digital affordances shift matched only by the digital users’ ability to quickly adapt (or belief that they can quickly adapt) (Gitlin 2007, 22). The ubiquity of digital media makes it seem mundane even as it is remarkable. The mundane and the everyday are valuable spaces for re­sis­tance and the notion of possibility and refusal is inherent in the concept of the micro-­ political act of re­sis­tance. When examining online spaces where potential sufferers witness, experience, mediate, and make meanings that may resist constructed ideas of what trauma victims/survivors or witnesses may be, scholarship bears witness to instances of small-­scale dissent from the bottom up, or media tactics. Raley (2009) calls media tactics the instantaneous and sudden moments of resistive action online that have discursive power in “the spontaneous eruption, the momentary evasion of protocological control structures, the creation of temporary autonomous zones that surely play their part in making pos­si­ble the opening for po­liti­cal transformations” (27). In this re­sis­tance, ­those who feel disenfranchised in some way attempt to regain control and interrupt dominant ideas of identity, ableism, mourning, vio­lence, illness, martyrdom, or any other cultural construct that functions normatively (Raley 2009, 2). Raley (2009) identifies a tactical user as someone who says “See how I try to manage the ties that bind and produce me” (2). Tactical media are media that interrupt and disrupt dominant regimes through “the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes pos­si­ble” (Raley 2009, 6). Tactical media are temporary, ephemeral, and open to the unexpected. Tactical media operate in the symbolic, “the site of power in postindustrial society” and open up space for criticality (Raley 2009, 6). In chapter 2, I discussed the way De Certeau (1984) positions the mundane realities of daily life as tactical for marginalized bodies. In much the same way, media tactics, for traumatized subjects, can be the most mundane moments of expressions of the self as it relates to the world. Trauma makes life so fragile that staking a claim in digital space, marking the suffering body as valuable, impor­tant, or still alive, is a power­f ul resistive gesture that negotiates the politics of invisibility that dictate whose body is eligible to suffer with public empathy and support. Tactical media are micro-­political actions that have no revolutionary expectations, meaning tactical media work within the par­ameters of the structural systems of power while acknowledging and often disavowing

Putting It Out ­There • 47

them. Just as symbolic trauma sufferers find the status quo and system of symbolic power untenable, the tactical media producers “critique and resist the new world order but do so from within by intervening on the site of symbolic systems of power” (Raley 2009, 11). Tactical media are ambivalent and obtain power from instability. Instability, a­ fter all, opens up space in culture for contestation. Within tactical media, the po­liti­cal criticism is subtle or even oftentimes covert (Raley 2009, 15). Some trauma sufferers, conscious of their suffering and thus their oppression, negotiate their circumstances through media tactics. Online meaning making does not exist in a silo; rather, meanings cultivated online operate similarly to what Raymond Williams describes as lived experience: “The peculiar location of a structure of feeling is the endless comparison that must occur in the pro­cess of consciousness between the articulated and the lived” (as cited in Couldry 2010, 94). The articulated for the purposes of this examination exists online, while the lived is experienced both online and offline. ­There is a specific way that the digital space makes pos­si­ble what was not pos­si­ble before for suffering bodies. Through varying sensations and forms, the extent to which media and digital artifacts can operate is substantial. The aesthetic allowances of the online—­the multimodal, multisensory, multimedia artifacts produced online—­enable meaning formation in innovative ways. This production of cultural artifacts enables sharing and progression of ideas, and in so ­doing, the digital media make pos­si­ble that which was not pos­si­ble before: the ability to represent and craft new meaning in personal yet universal ways. Meaning requires a deeper engagement as the primary output of trauma sufferers in digital space. ­Here, meaning refers to the way ­people make sense of the world in order to navigate their lives within it. Meaning, during traumatic times, becomes unstable, changeable, and fluid. As Egnew (2009) notes, with illness, “the conventional expectation of narrative involving a past leading into a pre­sent that foretells a foreseeable f­ uture is ‘wrecked’ by illness. The pre­sent is not what the past was supposed to foreshadow, and the f­ uture is too frightening to contemplate” (171). This shift in pre-­existing meanings and the disintegration of previous understandings of life worlds indicates that the best way to cope with trauma is to establish a new understanding of the event or experiences that dislodged the vari­ous “givens” of everyday life. Personal and collective meaning becomes impor­tant in understanding how individuals and groups navigate times during which their personal and social schemas, which allow them to “get up in the morning, go about a daily routine and strive for long-­ term goals,” are interrupted (Lee 2008). As Emmons (2005) articulates, “The explanations that a person offers concerning ultimate issues—­the nature of life and death, the meaning of suffering and pain, of what ­really ­matters in life—­ have profound implications for individual well-­being” (735). Most p­ eople are resistant to changes in “their basic assumptions about the world and themselves,”

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yet in the case of traumatic life events, “individuals confront very salient, critical ‘anomalous data,’ for the victimization cannot be readily accounted for by the person’s preexisting assumptions” (Janoff-­Bulman 1989, 116). As users seek places to express their positioning in a world of binary distinctions between traumatized and untraumatized, sick and well, or able and disabled, they inhabit a sort of in-­between space. The liminality created in broken meaning-­making schema is a space of both anxiety and instability. Similarly, in moving t­ oward digital platforms, through which they articulate the disjunctures between who they ­were and who they are, sufferers enter into a sort of digital in-­between space that is enabled through technology, and in turn allows users to interrogate their newly created categories of self. The following section explores digital, liminal space as offering possibility for meaning to trauma sufferers. When suffering is abundant, meaning changes based on how trauma has impacted it; the following section attempts to understand how the possibilities and refusals opened up by users online have allowed for a way for trauma sufferers to make meaning and sense of their traumatic experiences.

Memes, Re-­mediation, and Play as Tactics in Digital Third Spaces Roughly three weeks a­ fter my first brain surgery related to my brain tumor, in January of 2013, I saw a meme that made me laugh out loud. In the image, Bill Murray’s character from the 1991 film What about Bob? hangs off of the front of the boat, a look of terror across his face, and at the bottom of the image, akin to the image macro style of memes, in ­giant, white, all caps letters reads the caption “Baby steps.” I remembered my ­family gathering on multiple occasions to watch that movie; I laughed recalling the protagonist’s inability to do the most basic tasks, the way his phobias endeared him to every­one except the one man from which he needed help, and his constant attempts to enact his egomaniacal psychiatrist’s advice to take “baby steps.” What­ever that meme was meant to arouse in that current moment in popu­lar culture, for me it evoked a nostalgia of my ­family together as I grew up, a yearning for a time when I was not relegated to a hospital bed, and a determination to make it through my most daunting task with “baby steps.” I used that image in my health blog, reinscribing the image of Bill Murray with my narrative of suffering. The image no longer told just the story of an endearing patient with phobias attempting to get help from a psychiatrist; instead, the image conveyed a deep longing of a brain tumor patient to recover and return to a life of big dreams. This was the power of this meme in the mutually constitutive liminal spaces of my trauma and of digital expression afforded to me by the versatility of the platforms I was using, a WordPress blog, Twitter, and Facebook.

Putting It Out ­There • 49

Memes often get taken up by multiple users and expand beyond their original intent. While memes may be silly articulations of the latest pop culture joke, they often carry with them deep-­seated cultural beliefs. In exploring memes and meme culture—­a culture that inflects digital sharing and re-­mediation across formats and platforms—­scholarship must take up the question of how and why the Internet has become a trusted site for information gathering and personal sharing. This chapter has made clear that digital users go online to presence themselves and express voice (Couldry 2010, 2012). This gesture is even more essential for trauma sufferers who need meaning in order to function in everyday life. What, then, does technology make salient for digital users, particularly digital sufferers? I argue digital space offers a sort of ecosystem of meanings that appear more malleable to suffering subjects than ­those available to them offline. Culture is cultivated online through the act of sharing and participating in the system. According to Balkin (2004), digital space is a system of meaning: It is a cultural system as well as a po­liti­cal system. It is a network of ­people interacting with each other, agreeing and disagreeing, gossiping and shaming, criticizing and parodying, imitating and innovating. P ­ eople exercise their freedom by participating in this system: They participate by interacting with ­others and by making new meanings and new ideas out of old ones. Even when ­people repeat what o­ thers have said, their reiteration often carries an alteration in meaning or context . . . ​they reshape, however imperceptibly, cultural conventions about what t­ hings mean, what is proper and improper, what is impor­tant and less impor­tant, how ­things are done and how they are not done. (5)

Culture is a central repository for ­human experience and meaning, and digital space enables innovation, sharing, and reiteration across discursive, cultural borders and bound­aries (Balkin 2004, 12). Central to this cultural innovation is the reiteration and sharing of old meanings, and the making of new meanings from old ones, the very basis of memes in digital media. Memes, as online phenomena, are based on a concept first developed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins “to describe the natu­ral h ­ uman spreading, replication, and modification of ideas and culture within his Darwinian hypothesis for cultural evolution” (Chen 2012, 7). Dawkins’s model of cultural development was based on the notion that ideas and knowledge would spread through imitation and transfer. Memes capture why digital spaces are captivating, given the re-­mediatory nature of online social media. The proliferation of memes provides insight into the way vari­ous digital technologies and platforms have afforded users the ability to re-­mediate ideas, allowing new

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meanings to emerge. Social media, in allowing digital users to cultivate a space for both creativity and h ­ uman communication, becomes what Piekot (2012) terms “a tool for sustaining and consolidating culture” (187). The nature of digital expression, as Piekot (2012) explains, is “manifested in messages which are created in a way which blurs the boundary between what is true and false or real and artificial; another blurred boundary is that between the original and a copy” (192). What is significant ­here is not the truth of any one form of expression, but rather the meaning it is imbued with and the meaning any one user derives from it. Multimodal, multisensory Internet memes are also intertextual; they constantly refer to previous texts in order to convey new messages and re-­mediate previous ideas (Piekot 2012). Memes have an ability to create meaning on and offline; they do more than just “­free the ten-­year-­old boy in all of us” (Senft, quoted in Walker 2010). Memes, in the third space fostered by the Internet, can shift consumption of media from passive to active, engendering new points of significance and fostering change. Memes make users feel like they are a part of something significant, something bigger than themselves. Knobel and Lankshear (2005) expand, “The power of memes to spread contagious ideas and to infect minds with par­ tic­u­lar ideas is widely recognized, and dif­f er­ent groups have begun experimenting with meme engineering and distribution on quite significant scales” (19). The potential of the digital mimetic culture is more than just the spreading of contagious ideas; rather, it is the proliferation of meanings that have the capacity to mobilize individuals and nurture commitment to social c­ auses and change (Knobel and Lankshear 2005, 19). The meme is not the only online form that encodes cultural information and gives way to evolving meaning. The Internet in general, and social networking sites specifically, through offering flexibility in the use of cultural markers like hashtags, GIFs, and even emojis, provides space through which individuals can perform and play with their identities, with normative discourse, and with the popu­lar, and in so ­doing they re-­create, re-­mediate, and shift cultural ideas in creative, polymediatic ways. Memes function through the logics enabled by the cultivation of digital third spaces as types of hybrid, in-­between spaces between the online and the offline. Based on the concept of the third place (for example, a place between work and home), the third space concept theorizes that ­there are “new digital environments for creating and nurturing forms of community bonds beyond the social spheres of home and work” and that “digital cultures express and mediate our vital need for meaningful social interactions and form an extension of our social experience” (Hoover and Echchaibi 2012). The online realm enables the creation of a third space that allows for meanings to emerge in communities that exist b­ ecause the participants have no other choice but to articulate and name the trauma they have experienced. Chapter 2 included a discussion of Bhabha’s (1994) third space and how trauma plunges its sufferer

Putting It Out ­There • 51

into a hybrid space. Just as suffering fosters an ambivalent inhabiting of liminal space, digital media allow trauma sufferers to inhabit that space through vari­ous online platforms. ­Here, using the framework developed by Hoover and Echchaibi (2012), I expand the third space to the digital. ­A fter living through experiences dire enough to shift the very fabric of a person’s everyday life, digital sufferers are left wanting for an environment in which new schemas can be developed. Th ­ ese spaces are dif­fer­ent from previous conceptual spaces that l­ imited space to the reach of the body; rather, ­these disembodied spaces tend to support freer per­for­mances of identity, thus enabling the meaning making so central to dealing with and addressing trauma. Hybrid spaces challenge homogenizing articulations of culture and allow for constructions of culture through negotiations of meaning. A hybrid space is a space of ambiguity and contradiction that points to a disavowal of authority that other­wise would not allow for this type of signification, and enables individual users and communities that form online to create new norms around what it means to engage with trauma. This hybrid space, through which ­these negotiations can take place, is a space of translation, imitation, and re-­mediation. ­There is very ­little produced that is truly new ­here; rather, meanings overlap and displace one another. In an interview, Homi Bhabha notes that “meaning is constructed across the bar of difference and separation between the signifier and signified” (Rutherford 1990, 210). This meaning operates through a pro­ cess of translation or “a pro­cess by which, in order to objectify cultural meaning, ­there always has to be a pro­cess of alienation and of secondariness in relation to itself ” (Rutherford 1990, 210). Furthering that point, Bhabha tell us that “translation is always a way of imitating, but in a mischievous, displacing sense—­imitating an original in such a way that the priority of the original is not reinforced but by the very fact that it can be simulated, copied, transferred, transformed, made into a simulacrum and so on: the ‘original’ is never finished or complete in itself” (Rutherford 1990, 210). This ability to cultivate a simulacrum that is invested with meaning that is unique from the original meaning is an impor­tant component of the third spaces that online users create through their interactions with and mediations of their traumatic experiences. The centrality of the third space to meme culture, and overall meaning making online, cannot be overstated. Willett, Robinson, and Marsh (2009) indicate that “it is in this third space that the meaning of cultural objects is negotiated and in which dominant discourses can be contested” (64). Borrowing from Bhabha’s third space, Willett, Robinson, and Marsh highlight that within the third space “dif­f er­ent cultural signs and competing discourses exist alongside each other rather than eliding into each other, and in ­doing so, new meanings are able to be produced” (Willett, Robinson, and Marsh 2009, 65). It is not the Internet or social networking sites that form this third space in and of themselves; rather, it is the range of their pos­si­ble uses that allows for

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the formation of a liminal space. The online environment facilitates the creation of the third space. The dimensions of space are no longer confined to the body; space “is also a m ­ ental or conceptual dimension, one which may float f­ ree of any physical mooring” (Knott 2005, 159). In creating meta­phors of space, suffering bodies imagine and express “­human possibility, cultural difference, the imagination itself, as well as social relations” (Knott 2005, 159). Life is demanding in contradictory and polarizing ways; Bhabha’s framework, and its extension to the traumatic and the digital, helps to make sense of how ­people balance the varying demands in their lives (Khan 1998, 464). This notion of third space challenges homogenizing articulations of culture and allows for the individual construction of culture through memes, online forums, social networking, and religious and/or national texts. This space is one of ambiguity and contradiction, a space that allows one to contest an identity that has been avowed to them and form new meanings, as well as foster new understandings of their identity for themselves and o­ thers. ­Going online is no longer simply about keeping in touch or staying connected; it is about participation in social space, events, and collaboration that has the potential to change identities and relationships (Davies 2009, 108). While digital detractors rightly identify the prob­lems the Internet proliferates, including pos­si­ble isolation of vulnerable populations, the possibility for ­human communication, transformation, and voice is power­ful (Bargh and McKenna 2004). In fact, communicating with o­ thers online serves to strengthen offline ties and facilitates the formations of new close relationships in environments that offer relative anonymity and space away from physical stigmas that would other­wise be vis­i­ble (Bargh and McKenna 2004, 583). In a study of online journal writing, Andrusyszyn and Davie (2007) found that journals that ­were shared not only enabled conversations with o­ thers, but led to introspective awareness of one’s self and heightened cognitive awareness (104). Digital spaces allow a broader range of resources for sharing to users, as well as a broader range of means and forms of communication through ­ those resources. According to Börzsei (2013), Internet memes, and I would extend this to social networking/media, “showcase a new kind of understanding of the world, and a new kind of creative and social outlet” (24). While the notion of re-­mediation is nothing new, it has also never been so prominently featured in the mainstream (Börzsei 2013, 25). Social media users, through t­ hese modes of sharing, have developed a culture that is unique to that space, transcends traditional cultural and geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries, and unites individuals based on common interests, thoughts, or concerns (Marshall 2005, 4). The way individual users articulate thoughts, concerns, and petitions online, through memes or other playful and creative forms, allows them to enter into an as-if space where, through the liminality of the space, meaning can be contested as part of a complex set of media rituals that enable users to feel a sense

Putting It Out ­There • 53

of connection to community. Users go online in order to be a part of something, and they participate in order to establish a new meaning-­making schema, and thus new understandings of their lives. In this pro­cess, digital users who respond to trauma are creating and participating in new ritual acts that can serve to shift the previous media rituals. Media rituals serve to construct the myth of the sacred center (Couldry 2012, 61), often obscuring structural power by ritualizing media acts that feel personal and individualized. For suffering bodies, trauma is mediated through mainstream discourses that urge sufferers to survive and thrive in the wake of their tragedies. Images of suffering and trauma are also part of a routine viewing of tragedy that potentially fosters and furthers false notions of the normalcy of global power relationships. That said, the ritualized consumption of mediated traumas is one of many “reference points” that render some bodies and their suffering legible, while ­others are illegible and delegitimized as a part of dominant social categories and value systems (Couldry 2010, 4). While this theoretical framing takes a critical lens in order to dissect the way t­ hese value regimes come to be, it is also impor­tant to account for the way individual online users may be g­ oing to digital spaces and using the affordances of the technology to reimagine social systems of classification. Sufferers that express their pain online enter into a complicated dance of adhering to and railing against constructed ways of knowing their bodies through new media rituals in new spaces, thus creating fissures to society’s sacred center and interpolating themselves and ­others in new, potentially meaningful ways. Couldry (2012) notes that “the basic ­human rituals are very familiar: rituals that mark birth, death, marriage, the joining of a group, communication with the transcendent. Their subjects are linked to the basic h ­ uman needs for order” (71). Rituals stem from meaning-­making schema, the day-­to-­ day engagement in ritual bringing comfort and a sense of routine. Trauma interrupts ­these assumptions, norms, and constructs and calls into question the very fabric of who individuals are in terms of both meaning and its attendant rituals (Janoff-­Bulman 1989, 114; Kirmayer 1992, 328). Digital sufferers ritualize their media use in order to build new meaning and the new meanings they foster often give way to new media rituals that enable them to be recognized by the mainstream culture or feel that ­they’ve been recognized in ways that ­matter to them. In contrast to mediating one’s own trauma, viewing traumatic events has become common in modern mediated culture. The ritualized viewing of trauma can, as Carey (1997) states, “create the forms of social relations into which ­people enter” and impose order on chaos (314). The liminal space created by online spaces is potentially generative and allows for new ritual constructs, and in ­these constructs we see meaning made and memories formed through everyday gestures, movements, and practices. Thus, this theoretical framework does

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not argue that, as trauma sufferers and witnesses, users should not bear witness to and testify about suffering; rather, users and scholars should be critical of the unequal flows of information and the structural power dynamics that are obscured by viewing individuals who have suffered without understanding the context of their traumas. Rituals can help users negotiate existence in constructed, contingent, social worlds, and build social, cultural, and ­family capital that is impor­tant to the narratives individuals and collectivities create about themselves and their communities. Notably, however, ­these digital rituals are not available outside of certain contexts and are not benign of power and this must always be a part of the critiques of ­these spaces. Further, repetition of events does not always serve to enable the cultivation of a sacred center, nor does repetition necessarily generate social and cultural capital for all ­those who engage in t­ hese ritual acts; thus, digital engagement of trauma sufferers must be contextualized and studied on a case-­by-­case basis. Notably, Derrida argues that traumatic events and social wounds are constituted by and constitutive of the everyday. He recognizes the repetition of the everyday experience, what I term ritual, as a part and parcel of trauma itself: “What is a traumatic event? First of all, any event worthy of its name, even if it is a ‘happy’ event, has within it something that is traumatizing. An event always inflicts a wound in the everyday course of history, in the ordinary repetition and anticipation of all experience” (Borradori 2013, 96). In making memes, in mediating their traumas, in creating social media snippets that are easily shareable and re-­shareable, ever shifting and changing, growing meaning as it evolves, ­these users find ways to deal with the wounds of the everyday, the wounds that break down their rituals. Indeed, it is in the very act of ritualizing online sharing and producing meaning through re-­mediation that users cultivate new rituals that, in the third spaces of digital expression, enable space for community formation, coping, and micro-­fissures in the discursive constructs of traumatized subjects.

Conclusion This chapter has developed a strong context in which this research is speaking, and has brought together multiple, interdisciplinary theories of media and trauma to bear in ways that w ­ ill be useful not just in examining the case studies central to this research, but also in exploring multiple cultural vicissitudes that are shared online. First, by situating this theory building in vari­ous critical theories that attend to repre­sen­ta­tion and embodied articulations that interact with complex media institutions, t­ here is a space through which to account for power, privilege, and market ideologies that often empty out meaningful exchanges online. Through a survey of the lit­er­a­ture around trauma and legacy media, this chapter then enabled the reader to imagine the way trauma has traditionally operated in and through media. Fi­nally, in identifying new and

Putting It Out ­There • 55

in­ter­est­ing theories in media studies and adjacent fields, this chapter allows for the bridging of existing trauma theory with media studies to provide a critical framework that can carry the work individuals, especially digital sufferers, perform online, and place that work in its appropriate social, cultural, and symbolic framework. Central h ­ ere is the notion that, while structures are sure to still speak, individuals and repre­sen­ta­tions determine the way trauma, embodiment, and identity are understood, and, even within an oppressive structure, au­then­tic, tactical expressions of self are pos­si­ble. Further, ­these articulations have the potential to create fissures in dominant discourses around who is allowed to speak on trauma and in what way, potentially creating space for more invisible, suffering bodies to emerge. Though ­there must be an awareness that the often false promise of technology may lead users to be complicit in their own oppression, the following research highlights that, despite oppression, ­there is notable and useful meaning being produced online by and for t­ hose who have suffered traumas in their lives and chosen to testify to them in the digital third space. ­Going online when the world as I knew it ­stopped making sense was complicated. For me, it was a constant push and pull against the ideas I’d always heard, and the gut-­wrenching feeling that t­ hose meanings ­didn’t work for me anymore. ­Every interaction in my offline world became a l­ abor of balancing expectation and real­ity: the expectations of bodies to perform, to be able, and to get better, and the real­ity that I may not get better, that the side effects from my traumas would persist but would not make me inferior, and the constant self-­assurance that, though I may not perform at the level I did previously, my per­for­mance still has value. When I symbolically suffered, the expectations and realities w ­ ere even more pronounced. The expectations were to protest, to resist, and to persist in everyday life while in real­ity I felt unsafe, unable, and defeated. In digital space, however, I was quickly able to inhabit the spaces of my received expectations and new realities in fluid ways. I was able to move between them, parse them out in captions, with images, and in jokes, and in sharing them I was able to learn from t­ hose around me with the comfortable distance and anonymity the digital provided. I could live inside my trauma and skirt it as necessary; I could negotiate the bound­aries of my world in a way that was frankly impossible in my physical world. When I was first diagnosed with my brain tumor, I wrote down the precise name of what I had. I learned to spell the name of my tumor so that I could Google it. Initially I thought I was just Googling in order to have information, to ask informed questions when I went to the doctor, to make sure I was on the cutting edge of treatment, and to quell my fears with cold, hard, scientific facts. It w ­ asn’t ­until I spent many sleepless nights engaging with p­ eople like Daran, the first of many digital sufferers I encountered on my journey, that I realized I was never looking for just information—my doctor had provided

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me all the facts I needed. I was looking for meaning. My world ­stopped making sense the night I found out about my tumor. The fragile shell of the domain I’d assembled around me, where papers, grades, and journal articles ­were the most impor­tant ­things on my to-do list, was cracking and I had nothing to fill ­those cracks aside from uncertainty and fear. I needed this experience to mean something. I needed the world to make sense again so I could confidently step out into it again, so I could be seen. My strug­gle with my health, combined with a series of symbolic traumas spurred by the rough rhe­ toric that resulted from the 2016 presidential election in the United States, left me listless. Both physically and symbolically, my body, which once felt normal and privileged, felt marked by difference. I wanted to replace my daily per­for­mances of normalcy with meanings that could account for my body, and no where did I do that more than in the digital communities I ebbed in and out of since I first named my trauma online.

Part II

Meaning Making Online

4

The B ­ attle We ­Didn’t Choose Angelo Merendino and Mediations of Grief, Disease, and the Trauma of Bearing Witness When y­ ou’re suffering, that’s when ­you’re most real. —­The Man in Black, Westworld

Angelo Merendino (referred to ­here as Merendino) describes his wife Jennifer as “not only the most beautiful ­woman I had ever met, but she was full of life and had a way of making you feel like you ­were the only person who mattered” (A. Merendino 2011). His wife was diagnosed with cancer just five months a­ fter he married her in 2008, and she died on December 22, 2011, at 8:30 p.m. (A. Merendino 2011). In his own words, Merendino writes of his relationship, “our star ­didn’t shine long, but man did it shine bright” (A. Merendino 2011). This case study follows the mediations of the trauma of Jennifer Merendino, who was diagnosed with and died of metastatic breast cancer in 2011. Throughout this chapter, I trace the trajectory of the mediations of the trauma of Angelo Merendino, Jennifer’s husband, a photographer and artist, who mediated Jennifer’s story via photojournalistic-­ style photo­ graphs. Merendino’s suffering turned art turned activism highlights the affective blurring of the bound­aries 59

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between trauma, physical suffering, symbolic suffering at the hands of a society that cannot make legible broken or grieving bodies, and the relentless desire to turn suffering into meaning—so that one might be able to say with genuine faith that this occurrence happened for a reason. Following her death, the story of Jennifer’s illness, of Merendino’s grief, and of their mediations of cancer, death, and love became “viral” sensations that ­were mediated and re-­mediated across platforms in digital spaces, thus leading vari­ous digital users to express their own traumatic life experiences as they ­were read through Jennifer and Merendino’s story, as well as to express their vicarious and empathetic suffering in bearing witness to the trauma of Jennifer, Merendino, and their ­family. Merendino aptly titled his blog The B ­ attle We D ­ idn’t Choose, and used it as a vehicle through which to mediate the progression of his wife’s disease and his grief over Jennifer’s subsequent death. He began the blog to share the story of his wife and their love, saying that “by sharing our story, our love story, something beautiful has begun to grow out of something so horrible and unfair. If we ­don’t share our experiences how can we learn, grow and survive?” (A. Merendino 2011). Though the blog is where Merendino began posting about his wife, the mediations of their par­tic­u ­lar trauma extended far beyond just his blog. For example, this story first came to my attention as both a digital consumer and scholar via Facebook in 2013. The Facebook post, which w ­ ill not be shared due to privacy concerns, linked to an article on the content curation site ViralNova. The article, true to the style of such clickbait, was titled “This Guy’s Wife Got Cancer, So He Did Something Unforgettable. The Last Three Photos Destroyed Me” (ViralNova 2013). The ViralNova post highlighted a series of images Merendino took of his wife Jennifer. The photos are black and white, photojournalistic-­style repre­sen­ta­tions of Jennifer and Merendino together, with ­family, in vari­ous moments of daily life and of treatment, and they pro­ gress to portraits of Jennifer from the beginning of her diagnosis u­ ntil her burial. While a clear progression of disease can be seen, the photos, as curated by ViralNova, have no captions aside from the title, which hangs on ­every image in the slideshow format on the website. With just that caption the user and digital viewer is able to put their own meanings onto and into Jennifer and Merendino’s story. Jennifer’s particularities fade, and she is subsumed by the markers of her disease: her bald head, her frail frame, her tired face. In many ways, the ­people who make up the data set for this case inhabited and took on Jennifer’s story of suffering from breast cancer, even while they never met her and only posthumously encountered her image. Often the connections I observed, even while fleeting, felt ripe with vulnerability and raw with emotion. If I, as an outsider, could discern t­ hese power­f ul effects from what I observed and analyzed, it seemed that my research would bear out that ­these expressions enabled the formation of very real meanings, connections, and au­then­tic engagements. It was as though the shared connection of suffering

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created space to articulate something new, something necessary, and something meaningful. While the testimony provided by Merendino in this photo story of his wife is anything but playful, the playful nature of the online environment, coupled with the way the digital realm allows for re-­mediation across platforms and over bound­aries, allowed for Merendino’s photos and thus his testimony to go viral. As the first chapters of this book highlight, digital media offer a particularly salient space for mediation of suffering bodies as the liminality of digital space coincides with and mimics the liminality forced by the rupture of their meaning-­making schema that occurred at the moment trauma descended on their lives. Kraidy (2013) notes that “the body is the medium through which strug­gles for power, identity and legitimacy are physically fought, socially constructed and ideologically refracted” (289). The shock of cancer to the physical, m ­ ental, and material confines of the body offers a power­ful example of the way trauma insidiously functions in everyday life. Embodied strug­gles become even more impor­tant when considering bodily trauma and the shifts in how bodies can functionally and materially exist in the world. This, combined with the way trauma undermines the way p­ eople understand their place in the world, is how meaning-­making structures are dismantled, and makes the pro­cess of cultivating au­then­tic meaning a­ fter traumatic events particularly poignant. Mobasher (2006), building off of the work of Alexander et al. (2004), argues that as part of the pro­cess of trauma, sufferers “must go through a meaning-­ making pro­cess whereby negative meanings are created and attached to some event so that members of the traumatized group accept the claims and feel their identity is threatened” (102). Trauma necessitates a search for meaning—it is no surprise that digital platforms enable exploration of meaning and identity around the traumatic pro­cess inherent to experiencing cancer. Emotions and meaning are socially constructed, as are ways of organ­izing and making sense of the world, so much so that emotional responses to traumatic events are constructed, and can be reconstructed (Jaggar 2008, 381–382). In the case of mimetic, playful, hypermediated digital space, emotions, ways of knowing, and ways of making sense of the world can be re-­mediated. Memes, even when they defy the most popu­lar format of what are commonly termed “Internet memes,” allow users to take hold of certain content, place their own meaning into the content, and build on the original meaning (Milner 2016, 2). Memes and mimetic gestures online allow users to presence themselves in the way Couldry (2012) argues individuals do to “manage their presence (and presence to o­ thers) over time” (49). For Merendino, photographing his wife and her traumatic experience enabled this pro­cess of meme-­ing trauma to take place and take hold. The following sections first examine Merendino’s own mediations and re-­mediations of his experience over time, followed by an examination of vari­ous posts digital users created about Merendino’s story. Th ­ ese vari­ous posts constituted audiences

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turned producers and digital sufferers witnessing Merendino’s testimony, often causing t­ hese digital social media users to suffer vicarious trauma through their empathetic witnessing.

Angelo Merendino: Re-­mediating Jennifer’s Trauma and Mediating His Own Angelo Merendino’s mediations are the primary subject of this research; his images captivated audiences. Stylistically and artistically captivating, the series of black-­and-­white photos told a compelling story of love, life, and death. While ­those images comprise the majority of what spurs the digital engagement this case study examines, it is impor­tant to note that Jennifer Merendino had a blog of her own and was an active agent in advocating for herself and her care, and felt it impor­tant that her husband take and share her photos (Merendino 2014; J. Merendino 2011). Jennifer’s blog made use of the images Merendino had taken of her and attempted to provide medical and life updates without the sterile language of much of the other material Jennifer found on the Internet relating to breast cancer (J. Merendino 2011). Articulating Jennifer’s agency and her self-­awareness in sharing her suffering is impor­tant, particularly when examining pos­si­ble critiques of the Merendinos’ story being part of an overly commodified, neoliberal, digital environment. While their trauma and suffering are part of a neoliberal system of commercialization online, that does not prevent or diminish it from being an au­then­tic and power­ful engagement with newly formed and forming communities, and with trauma and suffering that has possibility and power for shifting the way identity, illness, suffering, and ability are represented in media spaces. The ViralNova piece that introduced Merendino to me was a series of thirty-­ one black-­and-­white photo­graphs. I have selected three for in-­depth examination ­here based on the discourse analy­sis explicated in previous chapters. The first was the fifth photo to appear in the aforementioned photo story. In it we see Jennifer’s hand grasping a call button that is affixed to a hospital bed, in what is clearly a hospital room. Her face is out of focus but the grimace in her expression is unmistakable. Jennifer still has some hair, though her previously long hair has been cut into a pixie. Blankets cover her up to her chin, but you can see the sleeve of her shirt coming out from u­ nder her covers, as she reaches her grip around the call button. Her thumb rests on the button and the detail of her hand is highlighted as the focal point of the image.1 This image provides a sense of the artistry and composition that Merendino achieved when taking pictures of Jennifer while also capturing the visceral, raw nature of Jennifer’s suffering. The next image that helps to highlight the power­ful visual testimony provided by Merendino is an image of Jennifer and Merendino himself. The image

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is taken as a reflection: again, in stark black and white, the viewer sees Merendino’s face obscured by his camera, as his wife braids the head scarf that covers her head, which the viewer can assume is bald from chemotherapy. In the foreground of the image the out-­of-­focus lower portion of Jennifer’s profile creates dimension to the image, while in the background Jennifer and her husband are standing close together, her gaze at her own reflection. Merendino, in the way that he is obscured from view, enables focus to be on Jennifer. ­Here, while Jennifer has clear markings of cancer in that her hair has since been shaved, she has a scar from what can be assumed to be a chemotherapy port u­ nder her clavicle, and she wears a scarf over her head, looks relatively healthy. The final image from the photo story that I discuss ­here differs from the ­others as, though it is without a doubt about Jennifer, unlike the images it is her absence that is striking to the viewer. This image is one of an empty bed, possibly in a living room of Merendino’s home, with the pillow haphazardly placed in the ­middle of it. It has the same striking, black-­and-­white characteristics. The images have a good amount of noise in them, their slightly grainy appearance contributing to the depth. In the case of this par­tic­u­lar image the depth is also reflective of an emotional depth and evokes a sense of emptiness in the viewer. It is, as a part of the photo story, a marker that Jennifer has died, leaving a clear void in both the photo and establishing the grief Merendino was experiencing. Barthes’s (1982) punctum, the feeling of a “sting, speck, cut, l­ ittle hole” when looking at an image and that which is most poignant about the image, is vitally impor­tant to a discussion of ­these images (27). Barthes (1982) asks, “To whom does the photo­graph belong?” (13). This question is central to recognizing the way ­these images of a par­tic­u­lar person went on to narrate and testify to the suffering of many cancer patients and ­others who identified with the feelings, the content, and the suffering they depict. For Barthes, seeing a photo is a pro­ cess, to see is “to do, to undergo, to look” (9). In the images Merendino took, ­there is punctum that captivates and takes the seer from being in harmony with the image. The punctum works to establish an intimate relationship with an image, and when examining digital images of traumatic events, the punctum works to allow viewers of the image to bear witness, feel empathy, and even suffer themselves in what ­they’ve seen. Digital users, then, have a platform through which to communicate their witness, empathy, or suffering and place their own meanings into it. This pro­cess works b­ ecause, as Sontag (1977) notes, “the force of photographic image comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of what­ever emitted them, potent means for turning the ­tables on real­ity—­for turning it into a shadow. Images are more real than anyone could have supposed” (163). The material real­ity of Jennifer’s suffering is interpolated through the material real­ ity of o­ thers who suffer, as well as the real­ity of suffering in viewing, thus

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causing users to feel a responsibility, need, or desire to make meaning out of the difficult ­thing they have experienced, felt, or seen. The two-­way relationship that material bodies form with digital mediants, particularly visual mediants, is highlighted in the way Jennifer’s suffering acquired viewers and allowed viewers to place their own suffering onto her. Merendino described the pro­cess of mediating his story as impor­tant to giving meaning to and helping ­others make sense of a horrible event (A. Merendino 2011). He says of the photo­graphs, “our hope was that if our ­family and friends saw what we ­were facing e­ very day then maybe they would have a better understanding of the challenges in our daily life” (A. Merendino 2011). He goes on to note that ­after posting the images online, “the response was incredible . . . ​some of ­these emails came from ­women who had breast cancer. They ­were inspired by Jennifer’s grace and courage . . . ​that’s when we knew our story could help o­ thers” (A. Merendino 2011). Since his wife’s death, Merendino has given a TEDx Talk (“influential videos from expert speakers” in order to build “understanding of the world” [TED n.d.]), written a book about his story, and created a non-­profit called the Love You Share (Merendino 2013a). The life Merendino’s story has gained online is indicative of the way communities form around illness and trauma, and in witnessing. In sharing his story, Merendino allowed ­others to cope and created the sense that his suffering served a purpose. In other words, he made meaning around his suffering and from his suffering, and reconstituted his meaning-­making schema directly around the traumatic experience. In Merendino’s first TEDx Talk in 2013, he focused on Jennifer’s nearly four-­year strug­gle with breast cancer that started in 2008 and lasted ­until her death in 2011 and their shared desire to shed a more realistic light on what it meant to have cancer (Merendino 2013b). In the talk he stands, in a ­simple purple shirt and black tie, in front of a large screen that proj­ects images of Jennifer in both sickness and in health. Merendino narrated and testified to his story with Jennifer through anecdotes about their relationship and her illness, through stories about their parents, and through sharing her legacy. This power­ful mediation of his suffering shares that suffering with o­ thers and highlights how communications media, in this case the digital videos available online via YouTube, transform the social pro­cesses of grieving while being socially s­ haped themselves. In yet another TEDx Talk in 2014, Merendino discussed the power of social media in cultivating messages, creating community, and allowing something good to come out of something difficult. In this second talk, Merendino silently comes to the stage, places a camera on a stool, and, with heavy breaths, steps out to start speaking. As a beam of light shines down on him, he utters, “Chances are, every­one who is watching this has been affected by cancer in some way” (Merendino 2014). He articulates much of what is being theorized ­here around social and digital media and traumatic experience. Merendino

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identifies the way his life-­making schema collapsed when Jennifer fell ill, as well as the way the experience of illness as a trauma shifted his ability to relate to non-­traumatized subjects around him. He says, “We went from feeling like the world was our oyster, to feeling dif­f er­ent from most every­one in our life” (Merendino 2014). He went on to identify and articulate the reasons he chose to share the experiences with his wife. He acknowledged that, in experiencing trauma and thus his life-­making schema shifting, even ­those closest to him and his wife ­didn’t know how to act around them. As a photographer, Merendino saw the opportunity to use social media (via a Facebook page) to update his ­family and use images to lessen the distance between his experiences with Jennifer and their offline community. He also discussed his own trauma, positioning it as a response to detractors that accuse Merendino of exploiting his wife’s tragedy for capital gain. He identified the time ­a fter Jennifer’s death as the “worst time of my life” and held up his blog as a space through which he could release negative and difficult thoughts from his head. Merendino stated multiple times that his blog gave him a voice and that telling his story through social media gave him a way to use his voice. Merendino saw firsthand how articulating and mediating trauma can offer a productive space that is akin to community: “Social media is a voice we can use . . . ​I’m not a social media lobbyist . . . ​ but our story is a g­ reat example of how content on social media can create dialogue and it can create a community to provide support during difficult times and what is ­great about it is you ­don’t have to share your most personal feelings, you can share what­ever you want” (Merendino 2014). Merendino’s self-­ awareness and articulations of au­then­tic experiences of grief, trauma, and community are part of an articulation of his voice. His recognition of his need for voice and his ability to articulate it through his photography and social media highlight the way digital platforms position users as agents who curate and cultivate a degree of sharing around suffering that ­doesn’t intercede on their simultaneous need for distance caused by their need to remake meaning around life, death, and trauma. Couldry (2010) argues that “voice as a process—­giving an account of one self and what affects one’s life—is an irreducible part of what it means to be ­human; effective voice (the effective opportunity to have one’s voice heard and taken into account) is a h ­ uman good” (vi). Merendino acknowledged that without digital media his story would not have been shared the way it has been. He also seems to acknowledge his need, at a base ­human level, to articulate voice. Merendino (2014), in several ways in the vari­ous talks he gave and blogs he wrote, points to the sense of community he gained from ­going online to make “sense of what makes no sense.” He said that an “online community, a kind of support group formed . . . ​not just support for me, p­ eople see themselves in ­these photos” (Merendino 2014). I argue h ­ ere that this sense of community is made pos­si­ble by the type of space that users cultivate and inhabit in the digital space.

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Notably, Hoover and Echchaibi (2012) argue that ­there are “new digital environments for creating and nurturing forms of community bonds beyond the new social spheres of home and work” (8). This space is a space not only to cultivate community, but in the new digital environments, users negotiate “the meaning of cultural objects” and discourse in meaningful ways (Willett, Robinson, and Marsh 2009, 64). When considering the traumatic events Merendino faced and mediated, it is clear that he used the cultivated community space, made pos­si­ble by the third space of the digital realm, to negotiate his innate need to “share and translate such traumatic impact” (Kaplan 2005, 1). I briefly identified and discussed the neoliberal critique that Merendino contends with when negotiating how and where to share the story of the trauma he endured, as well as in sharing his wife’s traumatic experience posthumously. Previous chapters have briefly touched on the possibility for co-­optation of digital mediation of trauma, particularly as they become removed from their original contexts and inhabit liminal, digital spaces of negotiation. Given that Merendino has responded to this criticism, it is worthwhile to attend to it ­here. It can be argued that in simply sharing content, online users participate in a neoliberal discourse that subsumes their au­then­tic expressions with neoliberal cap­i­tal­ist ideals. For example, Dean (2009) argues that “new media technologies strengthen the hold of neoliberalism” and position p­ eople in an “imaginary site of action and belonging” (48, 43). ­Others, however, complicate the branded neoliberal digital space as holding the simultaneous possibility for au­then­tic engagement and meaning making alongside neoliberal ideology. Mukherjee and Banet-­Weiser (2012), for example, argue that while neoliberalism and commercialism can dilute and hollow out activism and dissent, innovative forms of media and culture have the potential to act on social, po­liti­cal, and other landscapes in meaningful ways (3). Given this, Merendino sits on a precipice where he has embraced a commercialized environment in order to facilitate what he perceives as a greater, more meaningful purpose—­that of highlighting the real­ity of cancer, and, in effect, the need for meaning ­a fter trauma. Though Jennifer wanted her husband to take her pictures and consented to his ­doing so, her blog did not receive the same wide recognition that his did ­a fter her death. Gender thus becomes a useful marker for analy­sis as to why Merendino’s version of their story took off in a way Jennifer’s never did while she was alive or a­ fter her death. While the majority of the posts in this case ­were not examined in depth based on gender, it is worth considering the way a male representing a female who has since passed gained recognition and allowed for meaning making online. Cohen-­Rottenberg (2012) notes that “the wondrous elicits admiration or astonishment by framing a disabled person’s activity as extraordinary” and that cultural repre­sen­ta­tions tend to “communicate the explicit message that being normal is both an unquestionable right and unquestionably

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right” (6–7). Feminist disability studies argue that identification as a w ­ oman in society means that society automatically assigns a component of lack to the person. Feminist disability studies dismantle the automatic, ascribed sense of lack or disability marked by womanhood. That said, to dismantle that discourse means acknowledging its existence. Jennifer, in suffering from cancer, was doubly disabled by normative, dominant, deeply gendered discourses, thus making her suffering illegible to the public in the way it was presented. As her suffering was mediated and re-­mediated by o­ thers, digital users could position Jennifer as a victim of cancer, specifically breast cancer, a gendered cancer, and thus a symbol of that which must be overcome, a positionality she was unlikely to espouse herself during her valiant fight with breast cancer.

Remaking, Re-­mediating, and Meme-­ing: How the Merendinos’ Story Became a Community’s Story In order to facilitate an in-­depth analy­sis of the content that was posted in response to Merendino’s photo­g raphs, I selected twelve random comments, posts, blogs, or images that ­were found on public profiles on YouTube, Twitter, and WordPress. While this section ­will not examine each of them, I highlight themes and identify several examples that highlight the level of engagement with the Merendinos’ images. In many of the posts, however brief, users “meme” Jennifer’s story in the sense that it enabled and compelled them to share their own trauma around cancer, death, or other types of tragedies. For example, one user, V80657, commented on Merendino’s original TEDx Talk, saying that the story that was shared gave them hope: “On March 2, 2014, I lost my next-­of-­ kin b­ rother, although not the love of my life, or love at first sight; his loss devastated me: for he was my lifelong ­brother, friend . . . ​went to private schools together, public high school together, roomed together in College; I loved him, and I still do, even though he is gone. Angelo’s story dwarfs my story of grief, yet provides me hope that a life of purpose can and w ­ ill be meaningful again. Thank you Angelo Merendino. My love & re­spect, admiration goes out to you” (comment on Merendino 2013b). This user spends a considerable amount of their post articulating their own trauma in order to ultimately posit that in witnessing Merendino’s trauma they w ­ ere able to see hope in their own suffering. While this may not amount to coping with their own trauma, this post points to the way users identify their suffering and make that suffering legible. Walsh (2007) argues that trauma inflicts a sense of meaninglessness, and that community formation, or in this case a user’s sense of community in his digital bond to Merendino, can help in recovering from trauma (208). Other users focused not on the disease and the tragedy Merendino mediated, but instead articulated a renewed sense of love and ­were inspired by the love they witnessed in the Merendinos’ story. While some users chose to see

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just the love story in this articulation of loss and cancer, ­others saw both tragedy and love mediated in this story, and thus re-­mediated Merendino’s emotions through their own experiences and their own desires for themselves and ­others. For example, one user, Jessica Hamilton, in part of her comment on YouTube, said that “this has truly changed my look on every­thing in life