Abstract

Trauma is a concept widely recognized, explored, and dissected by scholars, clinicians, and everyday people all over the world. Considering the never-ending exposure people have to trauma in the modern world, this exploration seeks to reconcile how trauma is constructed, experienced, and understood in a world structured by systems of power and domination. By engaging in a critical analysis of the socio-cultural trauma construction process (as defined by trauma scholars in the field of sociology) this work details the connection between where individuals and groups are situated in a transnational system of intersectional domination and how they construct, articulate, and experience traumas. Through use of racial analysis and engagement with multiple historical and fictional examples, I detail the necessity of thinking critically about axes of power when theorizing trauma in the social sciences and beyond.