Trauma Magic (Digital)

This is the digital file, sent as a pdf. For the print version click here.

Trauma Magic is a collection of essays which takes up trauma as a site of possibility. Exploring a wide range of topics, the essays in this collection value trauma and magic as legitimate embodied knowledges and ways of being in the world. "Being Good Will Never Solves the Problem Because the Problem is Not That I am Bad" explores witchcraft as a space of resistance against child abuse and sexual violence. "Can Theory Be a Spell?" considers practicing magic in the context of academia, asking which ways of knowing are valued and which are not. "Fairies in Ontario: Locality, Diaspora, and Relationship to Land" frames the Irish fairy faith as a producer of ecological ethics, and considers whether a place based faith can be practiced in the diaspora. "All Generations Will Call Me Blessed: Toward a Queer, Feminist Marian Devotion" takes up the lived faith of Marian devotion through a queer, feminist lens, and imagines Mary's ecstatic femme4femme desire. "Intoxication Spaces: Mental Maps of Substance Use" examines how our relationship to substance use can shape our relationship to the spaces we move through. "Failure to Comply: Madness and/as Testimony" uses psychiatric survivor testimony as a method to reveal and resist the coercive and carceral tactics of the psychiatric industrial complex. "Trauma Time: The Queer Temporalities of the Traumatized Mind" brings queer theory and disability theory into conversation with each other to consider how trauma can queer time. "Fucking Crazy: On Complex Trauma, Surviving Sexual Violence, and Living My Best Slut Life" uses storytelling to explore queer sexuality and bdsm in the context of trauma, disability, and unbearable pain. Together, these essays celebrate the magic of trauma survivors, and seek out the rich, generative questions trauma can push us to ask.