I recently watched an iai talk from Catherine Liu on identity politics and how it’s led to faux empathy the capitalist class can exploit. How we’ve turned our trauma into our identities. Essentially over-identifying with trauma and using it as a way to gain social standing/credibility.

And it nailed something about how I feel about “own voices” fiction that I didn’t previously have language for.

A critique I often found I had with Own Voices fiction was this forced outing of identities. If you wrote a character with a specific identity, it was paramount that you shared that identity with your character.

I’ve always been wary of the push to self-disclose ones identities. While I’m not against intentional self-disclosure like making sure others know what pronouns you prefer, I do think it should be up to individual discretion and not forced. If someone wants to disclose that information, that should be up to them, and there are plenty of instances where someone may not want to. Even in the safest spaces it may still not be safe enough for us to disclose some of the most vulnerable things about ourselves.

But when it comes to “own voices” fiction…I feel like we begin to blur the line between willing self-disclosure and leveraging trauma to gain social standing. What started as an effort to diversify fiction — something positive at its core — quickly became a way to harass and target authors for made-up transgressions of not being enough like your character, or for being so like your characters that you invite all the -isms and -phobias to the party.

Byrd, you might be saying, that seems extreme.

It does and it still happens.

It happened so much that major publishers that championed the coining of Own Voices have abandoned it in favor of more accurate descriptors. Completely dispensed with it as a genre label to use. All in favor of connecting an MC’s marignality to the author’s marginality more directly.

One thing that I think it’s important to highlight is who does Own Voice benefit?

Ostensibly, it’s supposed to benefit those authors of marginal identities. That was it’s intent. It was a noble intent. A worthwhile intent. But intent is rarely actuality.

In actuality all it benefited were large and indie publishing houses that saw an opportunity to gain virtue off the backs of those they claimed they were representing. Catherine Liu, in her talk, points out how this is only enriching the PMC (professional managerial class) and consolidating trauma into the hands of neo-liberalism.

She calls this the Trauma Culture. It’s a descriptor that I think is quite apt in this context. Own Voices is about taking the trauma, identifying it, and selling it to people so that it can be digested more easily. It never addresses the trauma or examines the underlying causes for that trauma’s existence — which Catherine proposes is the whole purpose of Trauma Culture. Trauma as a culture, as an identity we wrap ourselves in, is a distraction from the real perpetrator of trauma: wage labor.

It would never be within the publisher’s best interest to sell you a narrative that they can’t benefit from.

Often, the focus of #ownvoices discussions revolves around the author themselves. Is the author sufficiently traumatized enough to write this story? Does the author have the right to claim certain marginalized statuses? Should an author from an otherwise privileged position write a story that features a marginalized group the author can never belong to?

No one asks: should the publisher be publishing yet another story about marginalized people written by someone not from those marginalized groups? Does the publisher have the authority to dictate which stories should be published over others? Is the publisher sincere in their efforts to be more inclusive in their publishing?

The PMC of the publishing world thrives on the idea that they are the arbiters of taste and acceptability. They are the paragons.

When you sign a deal with them, they are giving you the nod that you are traumatized and marginalized enough to talk about this subject. To write about this topic. To get to share your perspective with the rest of the world. To earn a pittance from what you may have experienced.

That is, until the voices of those in the trauma culture dissent and your deal gets pulled because of “push-back.”

After that point, you’re on your own, and you’ll be lucky if your manuscript sees the light of day again. The dissenters get to pat themselves on the back for having been right. The publisher barely lost any money. But you, the writer, will now forever be asked to dance to the Trauma Culture Tango to prove that you’re allowed to write stories.

This is what Trauma Culture has brought to the publishing world, wrapped in the veneer of #ownvoices and inclusion. What started as a well-meant attempt to center diverse voices in fiction has been corrupted by the PMC to make them more money.

This isn’t new to the publishing world. This didn’t start with Own Voices. Own Voices is just the latest edition of a tried and true method that sells.

All Own Voices did was add a new star to the constellation known as Misery Lit.

Misery lit has existed in the world of non-fiction for a long time. It’s exactly what it says on the label: a category of literature that turns people’s real life trauma into narrative. Easily digestible, feeding you just the right flavors of pain, asking nothing of you other than to consume it and forget about it. It’s tragic, you get to feel bad, and then you can pat yourself on the back for having witnessed something horrible without being involved directly.

You don’t have to confront the Abuse System. It exists, right here on these pages, and when the story is done you get to hear about how wonderful everything turned out. In the end, after all, we all overcome our trauma in heroic ways that don’t need the system to change, right?

Much like the issues with Own Voices, Misery Lit fell into many of the same traps.

It wasn’t such a hit in the US, but Misery Lit was a hit in the UK. Waterstones and Borders and Tesco all had sections dedicated to this hit new trend. Many of the top 100 books in the early 2000s were Misery Lit titles.

And just as quickly as it soared, it also fell dramatically once the hoaxes were revealed for what they were.

In a market that is primed to take off, that rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars daily, you’d be a fool to not try and get a piece of the pie. Publishers started taking on all kinds of tragic stories. If they thought it could sell, they would happily look the other way. Not that they really ever looked that hard anyway.

Everyone suddenly had a misery story they could sell. Memoirs in general were a hit. You didn’t have to think of a creative story, really, there was a formula to this and if you could just “sell your story” to the publisher you had a high likelihood of being picked up for a contract.

How do I know? Because for a brief time I was surrounded by people who thought they could capitalize off of stolen trauma.

I do mean that it was stolen too. That’s not me questioning survivors. It’s literally something that happened again and again in the genre.

If it wasn’t a therapist literally stealing a client or friend’s trauma, then it was the writer claiming to have experienced trauma they never did. It’s a feature of the genre, not a bug. As early as 1830 we’ve had people claim trauma that wasn’t theirs to claim.

All Own Voices did in response to this was do a tiny bit more demanding of accountability in the tale telling. An admirable ask for a genre so consumed with forgeries…but it hasn’t really panned out any different than its predecessor.

Fake identities. Claiming marginalized identities. Using trauma narratives to sell. Repackaging abuse into easily digestible stories that don’t demand the reader do anything to dismantle or challenge the circumstances that led to the trauma. Is it really any different than the Misery Lit category that preceded it?

And publishers don’t have to do the legwork of confirming anything or fact checking. If the audience buys into the identity the author is selling, then the book gets released. If the audience doesn’t buy it, then the book gets cancelled. The publisher — likely backed somewhere along the line with Big Publisher money — can just shrug off whatever outcome happens.

The PMC continues on and all they have to say is “we hear you, we made a mistake, and we’re committed to doing better” without having to do better. You’ll still buy the other books they release. You might end up at another imprint they own without even knowing the arbiters of taste are behind it.

So, what can be done?

I can’t tell anyone to stop consuming anything. Enjoy your trauma stories. Boycott the Big Publishers if you wish. I’m not your parent and I can’t tell you what to do, but I will challenge you to actually stop yourself and reflect for a moment.

Which is more important: the telling of a trauma tale or the appearance of trauma? Are you just witnessing or do you want to be moved to action? Do you need hopeporn or do you want systemic change?

Actual trauma stories rarely have beautiful wrapped up endings. Survivors often have life-long impacts from their trauma that can cause acute or debilitating mental health issues. Even the most resilient will still encounter things in the world that they aren’t fully healed from.

The thing is, as we’ve seen time and time again, these stories do something for the human psyche.

We need to believe in resilience. We need to believe that when bad things happen to people, especially people who are marginalized or otherwise disempowered — that those people can move on and heal from those experiences to live fulfilling lives. We need to see the horrors in the world, learn the shape of depravity, so that we can learn to stay away from things that cast those shadows.

What’s wrong with Own Voices and Misery Lit isn’t that it exists. It’s the stolen trauma and traumatic demands for authenticity. It’s the way these two things bolster Trauma Culture, perpetuate it, and demand no change to the system that could potentially threaten their profits.

So, if you want to do something about this, start with: How do I engage with, perpetuate, and allow Trauma Culture to continue?

Yes, it puts the onus on the consumer and nothing will change unless the systems behind these things changes. I know that. It doesn’t absolve you from thinking about and/or changing the way you engage with these things though.

All I can offer you in these times is that. When literacy and critical thinking skills are so low, I offer you a moment of reflection into your media consumption habits and the things you demand of its creators. I think, if you take the time to sit and think, you’ll find that the demands of Trauma Culture aren’t all that appealing in the long run and don’t move the needle any closer to solving the underlying problems.

There’s far more to it than that. Discussions online lately around sexual assault and who is allowed to portray it, along with how it gets portrayed, have led into discussions about how this kind of policing of content is leading us to censorship. I agree with them. This is what the PMC wants out of Trauma Culture — for us to effectively censor ourselves from talking about the Abuse System and the harms it causes. If we do a good enough job doing their work for them, then we’ll always be distracted away from the real problems and never challenge them.

I hope that I’ve given you something to think over. We don’t have to agree. I think there’s plenty of nuance in the topic that’s worth discussing and I hope you’ll have those conversations.

Until next time, stay safe and sane.