Populations, Health and Trauma: The Mass Psychological Effects Stemming from 9/11

Abstract

This chapter addresses the wider social effects on the population that have resulted from the War on Terror. It seeks to bring to the literature on the psychological effects of terrorism and appropriate recovery techniques a reading that is sensitive to the wider social implications, particularly those of gender. The previous chapter located a number of spatial modes of regulation within domestic spaces, engendered places occupied by foreign policy. In this chapter, populations are regulated by the domestic operation of foreign policy. The previous chapter located a number of spatial modes of regulation within domestic spaces, engendered places occupied by foreign policy. This chapter examines how people, conceived as populations, are regulated by the domestic operation of foreign policy. It will demonstrate that in the aftermath of 9/11, the process of collective national recovery became a matter of security. Re-establishing a psychological normalcy among the domestic population is a way of expunging the effects of the attack on American soil by foreigners. The lingering psychological effects of 9/11 are a weakness and a sign that ‘the terrorists are winning’; the foreign is encroaching on the domestic. The binary of normalcy versus effects of trauma are once again, as in Chapter 5, overlaid with the geopolitical constellation of foreign threats. The goals of foreign policy inform social stereotypes of what it is to be normal. When this new ‘normal’ becomes a means by which to measure and regulate the population, it becomes akin to a biological fact because it starts to apply to a large number of people.