This paper rethinks trauma through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, tracing how eugenic, ableist and other oppressive logics – long embedded in the architecture of modernist life – resurfaced in pandemic policies and systemic responses. Drawing on digital/multimedia stories alongside follow-up interviews with 14 diversely embodied women and nonbinary people, we explore how trauma moved through bodies of difference across the pandemic's official arc. Beginning in April 2020, amid Ontario's first shutdowns, we resisted the capitalist imperative toward productivity and turned instead to the slow, relational work of storytelling. Through virtual story-making workshops and follow-up interviews, participants reflected on the emotional, embodied and political dimensions of creating stories in pandemic times. Their multimedia creations revealed the multilayered violences enacted through state, institutional and organizational responses, and the uneven distribution of harm visited on nonnormative life. We propose a theoretical orientation that moves beyond binary accounts – structuralist-culturalist versus individualist – to reconceptualize trauma as a multiscalar phenomenon: the afterlife of violence that reverberates across space–time. In attending to collective harm and the necessity of collective healing, this work gestures toward more equitable, livable futures and affirms storytelling as a method of resistance and care.
Rice et al. (Mon,) studied this question.