Through a close reading of the figures of America’s disenfranchised and most vulnerable—the homeless, sex workers, drug addicts, and veterans—Aimee Pozorski argues that the contemporary American literary tradition has long testified to the traumatic effects of gentrification in the 20th and 21st centuries. The classic slogan from the 1960s, “sex, drugs, & rock n roll” was itself a specifically chosen critique of society. Retroactively, however, our literature tells us that sex work, sexually transmitted disease, and drug addiction are not the “sex” and “drugs” we come to associate with freedom of Woodstock. Rather, they are signs of human lives overlooked and unaccounted for, and now connotate danger and death more than freedom itself. Pozorski argues that where political and journalistic discourse falls short in showing the distinctions, the literary language of American texts function to defamiliarize the problem and shock readers into action. Taking a new approach to trauma studies and cultural criticism, Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification seeks to give a face to the faceless in our everyday lives and demands that we reassess our treatment of—and attitudes toward—suffering in the American city.
