As has been the case since it first emerged, psychic trauma speaks only that truth about the victim that society is prepared to hear…survivors of disasters, oppression, and persecution adopt the only persona that allows them to be heard–that of victim. In doing so, they tell us less of what they are than of the moral economies of our era in which they find their place.
From Didier Fassin & Richard Rechtman’s The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (2009: 274, 279)
Jennifer Carlson, PhD 