tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784 packbat packbat 2021-02-19T02:22:08Z tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:320693 2021-02-19T02:22:08Z 2021-02-19T02:22:08Z distressed public 0 <p>Content warnings for discussion of trauma, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, and suicide.</p> <p><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/161127/can-historians-traumatized-history">"Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?" from The New Republic</a>.</p> <p>This paragraph in particular jumped out:</p> <blockquote><p>It is bad advice to say that politics, sex, and religion ought to be kept out of polite conversation, but nobody wants you to bring up a genocide at a dinner party. “The extent to which my research is ‘dark’ and therefore not polite dinner conversation means I’m repeatedly isolated in piecing through the material,” Elena Gallina, a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford and researcher of sexual violence in wartime, told me.</p></blockquote> <p>It makes me think of the equation from <a href="https://packbat.tumblr.com/post/160768353165/hobbitsaarebas-fabulousworkinprogress">that old Tumblr thread about abuse, PTSD, and emotional neglect</a>: "Overwhelming Experience + Isolation + Shame = PTSD".</p> <p>If historians are expected not to be traumatized by traumatic history? This, we would expect, would make their trauma worse.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=320693" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments