ABSTRACT
This chapter takes an intersectional perspective in exploring the power of art in addressing violence and trauma. When art practice links trauma, the body, feelings, memory, affect, and subjective formation to the social construction of race, class, gender, sexuality, or disability, it encourages an analysis of power relationships to question the status quo with the aim of transforming relationships. Intersectionality is currently being incorporated into various health and law practices—social work, criminal justice, disability justice, counseling, psychology, art therapy—as a way to articulate the relationship between knowledge production and how we practice. Intersectionality begins with a focus on identity. To define trauma, body, and memory as cultural, we have to question the relationship between these three concepts. Disidentification, thus, becomes a means to problematize identity and to rethink the encoded messages attached to minoritarian bodies. It is about exposing universalized accounts that sanction discriminatory practices as a way to empower minoritarian identities and identification.
