WHOSE BODY, WHAT SCORE? ANALYZING EMBODIED GEOGRAPHIES OF TRAUMA, POLITICIZED HEALING, AND HEALTH JUSTICE IN THE US

This dissertation presents a feminist geographic analysis of the emergent, yet historically grounded phenomenon of politicized healing in the contemporary US. In particular, I pay attention the ways that trauma is taken up in politicized healing frameworks to describe the impact of social violence and oppression at multiple scales, from the singular body to communities. I consider how and why it is that contemporary politicized healing brings together understandings of trauma rooted in the analysis of social movements with findings in psychotraumatology that locate trauma in the body or the nervous system. This convergence, I argue, opens new possibilities for understanding embodied health justice. I conducted qualitative interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis from 2018-2023 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Durham, NC, and with practitioners all over North America over Zoom. The dissertation consists of an introduction; three empirical chapters, each exploring an interdependent facet of politicized healing; and a conclusion. Throughout the work, I analyze the implications of politicized healing approaches to understanding trauma for a politics of bodies and bodily autonomy, arguing that relational and political bodies can only ever be contingently and partially autonomous. I put forth the notion of an “epistemological remix” as a way to describe how practitioners draw in and mix together different epistemologies of the body in conceptualizing trauma as both bodily and political. And I consider what taking psychotraumatology frameworks of trauma seriously as a heuristic might offer feminist geographic engagements around the questions of safety and the body. Theoretically, this dissertation is grounded in feminist geographic approaches to understanding the body and embodiment, critical health and disabilities studies and work in new materialisms. I aim to fill a gap around explicit engagements with (in)justice in medical and health geographies through an engagement with the complex theorization of embodiment emerging in politicized healing.