Scared kitless: Scrapbooking spaces of Trauma

Scrapbooking is a heavily gendered, lucrative industry in which women manage and extract value from the past. As an accessible feminized form of self-expression and memory work, it builds community and represents without attempting to rationalize or comprehend. Drawing on fieldwork in real-world and online scrapbooking communities, and previous research with survivors of spousal abuse, this paper argues that scrapbooking spaces and practices could readily be appropriated and subverted as an object- and image-oriented method of representing and containing histories of everyday trauma.