Jenny Wu Reviews Catherine Liu's 'Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering' for ArtReview

Key facts

• Catherine Liu's book Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering is published by Verso at £16.99 (hardcover).
• Jenny Wu reviewed the book for the September 2026 issue of ArtReview.
• The book opens with a critique of a 2021 livestream by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who compared the attack on the American Capitol earlier that year to her own experience of sexual assault.
• Liu traces anti-child-abuse advocacy to the Victorian era, when the first American child-protection charities were modeled after the British Royal Society for the Protection of Animals.
• Liu argues that college-educated feminists 'took over' the movement from working-class feminists during the 1970s and scripted trauma into a sales pitch.
• Liu claims the discipline of trauma studies was invented by devout mentees of Yale literary scholar Paul de Man to save his reputation after his writings for a Nazi newspaper were posthumously uncovered.
• Liu describes trauma culture as a pseudo-political, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and ahistorical American export that serves the Professional Managerial Class (PMC).
• Liu's previous book, Virtue Hoarders (2021), also examined the PMC.
• Liu writes that economic exploitation creates 'psychological damage that trauma culture cannot repair.'
• Liu notes that the #MeToo movement was founded around 2006 by working-class women and 'taken over' in 2017 by the PMC.
• Liu observes that 'trauma culture foreign policy' is being undone today 'not by the left, but by MAGA.'