For Grande, responding to despair with hope is nothing less than a moral imperative. As she moves through the murky aftermath of the bomber’s violence, her duty, she’s said, is “being a light.” True to her word, and despite an onslaught of personal hardship, Grande has flown through her annus horribilis with every pore open, doing her best to vanquish darkness and give back, in her own words, everything it stole. She’s weathered the death of a beloved former partner, the indignity of being blamed for his passing and the very public disintegration of a new love. Too often, though, her striving at being a light has meant eliding even the most benign expressions of grief. Crying is a normal, healthy response to trauma, not a cause for concern. So why does Grande feel the need to apologize for her tears?
In her 2014 essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” the author Leslie Jamison coined the phrase “post-wounded” to describe a modern shift, among female authors, away from melodramatic affect and toward suppression of sadness. “These women are aware that ‘woundedness’ is overdone and overrated,” writes Jamison, and wary that “postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood.” They’d rather not make their pain known; they’d rather die than play victim. “There’s a Wild West stoicism to these women,” wrote the critic Emily Nussbaum in a 2010 piece about how television heroines respond to trauma, “like cowboys who shrug off a beating.”
At root, though, the post-wounded stance is sculpted by shame and outside judgment. Implicit in the cultural shift from the language of victimhood to that of survival is the notion that women must respond to pain by resisting it. Anything less is tantamount to moral failure. And ultimately, this post-wounded mandate on resilience may be more restrictive than plain old woundedness. “This motif of a tough woman who tries to power through her trauma,” writes Nussbaum, is “a notion by now as fetishized as any notion of fragility.”
