The “diseased” activist's body as the site of trauma: Anti‐racist struggles and the postrace academy

Abstract

This paper is an autoethnographic account of the "racialized activist body" in the White academy and in tandem the bio-politics and bio-ethics of its right to be an affective body or to possess its senses against the trauma of anti-racist struggles in higher education institutions. The paper argues that in the postrace university, the "activist body" birthed through trauma becomes a conduit for the pain of others enacting it as a site for the deposition and transmutation of trauma in the quest for racial and social justice. It employs Bracha Ettinger's notion of "matrixial borderspace" to examine the interplay of social relations between of the activist body and other traumatized subjects in the provision of care as an activist. Two narratives unfold in the paper fusing the articulations of the main text with the paratext to unleash the tumultuous psyche of the activist and her journey of voicing resistance in her anti-racist struggles. In the process, the activist body emerges as a "diseased site, " overloaded with the trauma of others, yet numbed in its inability to reconnect with its own corporeality and professional identity in its interface with White governmentality. The paper asserts that anti-racist struggles reassemble the activist body, tightly welding it with exhaustion which manifests in the pervasiveness of racial battle fatigue in the ivory tower.