Traumatized

Catherine Liu is one the most courageous, brilliant, and radical thinkers in America today. In elegant, scorching, and completely unapologetic prose, Liu demonstrates how therapeutic models of selfhood have been weaponized as tools of class domination, leaving the left in a state of political crisis. – Jennifer Silva, author of Coming Up Short
Historically rooted, intellectually provocative, highly recommended. – Janice Peck, author of The Age of Oprah
At a time when pain and anguish are regarded as ‘lived truth,’ if not the foundational texts of our very selves, Liu has the insight and critical analysis to back up, take a look around, and investigate trauma in a way that really asks the question: Who hurt you? – Amber A’Lee Frost, author of Dirtbag
Resuscitating the legacy of critical theory, Liu demonstrates how the turn to ‘trauma’ results in our paralysis in the face of forces that undermine democracy and destroy our humanity. – Mark Andrejevic, author of Automated Media
Liu makes a compelling case that turning the traumatically personal political is keeping us from addressing the systemic issues that make life in America so hard and-dare I say it-traumatic. – Helaine Olen, author of Pound Foolish
Liu, profoundly and powerfully, takes on the worldwide epidemic of trauma scripts. Her insights, honesty, passion, and courage shine throughout this important book. – Elizabeth Loftus, Former President of the Association for Psychological Science
Traumatized should be essential reading for social workers, psychotherapists, and anyone concerned with how suffering, politics, and solidarity are constructed contemporarily. – Darragh Sheehan, Clinical Social Worker and Psychotherapist
In her follow-up to 2021’s Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu charts the rise of trauma as a ‘tool of social control,’ which she argues is surveillance capitalism’s greatest coup. I’m always seated for a sharp breakdown of any of the many ways powerful people turn the masses against each other (and what we masses can do about it). * Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2026 *

Liu is professor in the Departments of Film and Media Studies/Visual Studies, Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine, where she also served as director of the UCI Humanities Center.

She is the author of:

• Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton
• The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique
• Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class

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