Trauma Pouring: The Uses, Costs, and Risks of Retelling Trauma

Black student activists have recently turned to notions of trauma to denote the embodied toll of antiblackness. Some even publicize their trauma, purposefully disclosing their suffering. In this article, I introduce and conceptualize “trauma pouring” as recounting experiences of trauma for the sake of redress, and I detail the uses, costs, and risks of this storytelling for Black students at a progressive and elite public university. My analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork, internal documents, and interviews with Black students and staff surrounding three listening sessions about antiblackness in 2020 and 2021, during which Black Participants voiced grievances and calls for change to administrators. Bridging scholarship in Black studies and the sociology of emotional labor, I demonstrate how Black Participants portrayed trauma pouring as useful for indicting, sensitizing, and mobilizing administrators to take black suffering seriously. I also reveal how trauma pouring involves an exhausting, and sometimes retraumatizing, performance of emotional labor and bears no guarantee that responses will be caring rather than voyeuristic. Consequently, I elaborate on emotions as resources for social action; push the conceptual boundaries of emotional labor beyond the workplace; and illuminate how activists sometimes suffer while trying to end the suffering of others.