Reading X González’s, March 24, 2018, “March For Our Lives” speech—their words and silences—as an entry point into what I term a crip theory of trauma, this essay argues that the dominant narratives about and around Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) say more about the compulsivity of the “proper” citizen subject than they do the actual embodied experience and debilitation of trauma itself. The text reconceptualizes trauma narratives, like González’s, through critical disability studies to argue that certain cripistemologies—or crip ways of knowing—trauma arise that are not otherwise available or readily accessible. Most notably, by rejecting dominant pathologizing forces and embracing crip ways of knowing, this analysis brings forth a new working definition of trauma, as an embodied, affective structure. These ways of knowing offer crucial insights for efforts to grapple with the ongoing forms of trauma enacted and perpetuated across the globe, and are particularly urgent against a political and cultural landscape that, as my reading of González’s speech makes clear, in many ways refuses to hear, see, and learn from the knowledge that trauma produces.
Articles by Angela Carter
As a Ronald E. McNair scholar, Angela M. Carter became the first person in her family to graduate from college when she earned a BA in English, with honors, from Truman State University in 2009. In 2015, Angela earned a Master’s Degree from the University of Minnesota in Feminist Studies. In 2019, she completed her PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota (UMN). Broadly speaking, Angela’s academic interests include: trauma studies, critical disability studies, social justice pedagogies, feminist epistemology, and queer/crip theory. Angela’s work at the intersections of trauma and disability has previously appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly. She also co-authored a chapter on navigating structural ableism in graduate school which appears in the anthology Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education, published in 2017 by the University of Michigan Press. Since completing her PhD, Angela has worked as an Access Consultant at the Disability Resource Center at UMN. She has also continued in her role as a co-founding member of the UMN Critical Disability Studies Collective, an organization working to foster an academic community around critical disability studies throughout the Minnesota university system.