Catherine Liu, Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, discusses her forthcoming book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Suffering (Verso, 2026), wherein she elucidates the emergence of trauma culture, tracing it back to psychoanalysis and the reification of mental health in post-war America. Analysing the fetishisation and recognition of feelings, Liu historicises the explosion of psychoanalysis in the United States in the 1950s and the rise of New Left in the 1960s, which advanced “the personal is political,” an idea quickly adopted by second-wave feminists. Observing how the discourse of trauma has permeated all areas of society, such that feelings have been prioritised over knowledge and “centering feelings” has replaced scientific inquiry, Liu critiques how the professional managerial class thrives on rebranding, promoting credentials, and creating new identities, all in order to advance the collapse of the separation between work and leisure. Noting how workers have fought for years to maintain a separation of work from leisure time, Liu muses on the invasive, destructive force of the Silicon Valley New Left and professional middle-class feminists who have driven the insistence of a non-differentiated space where “we are always at work”, therefore our private lives are expected to be “on display through our performance virtue.” She examines the dynamics of how anti-normativity and transgression function within the writings of Michel Foucault, since they invariably strengthen normativity. Nonetheless, Liu vituperates the bastardisation of these valences under the scope of identity politics, which forces the merging of one’s personal life, politics, and intellectual practices.
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