Traumatized : The New Politics of Public Suffering

Author: Catherine Liu

Cultural studies

Published on 29 September 2026 by Verso Books in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 192 pages
210 x 140 | 300g

What happens when an idea born of genuine suffering is weaponized as a tool of social control? Traumatized is the story of how shell shock became PTSD, how Oprah turned pain into profit, and how 'authenticity' became the ultimate brand. It is a history of surveillance cap­italism's greatest coup: convincing us that wounds define us and that accom­modating each other's trauma is more important than challenging the powerful.

Catherine Liu delivers an unflinching diagnosis of our current crisis, rooted as it is in the collapse of liberal politics, the ascendance of performance fragil­ity, and the rise of emotional display as a surrogate for political action. Sharp, provocative, and urgently necessary, Traumatized argues that we must re­ject a politics of permanent victimhood since it destroys solidarity and leaves us defenseless against the systems that cause real harm.