Traumatic States: Gendered Violence, Suffering, and Care in Chile

3. "Exhaustion": Becoming a Victim and a Deserving Citizen

54 C h A P t e r 3 “Exhaustion” Becoming a Victim and a Deserving Citizen “He came back, no más, ’po [just like that],” Marisol told me matter-offactly in 2009 in the house she rented in a small town near the Chilean coast, about one and a half hours by bus from Santiago. It was situated on a dirt road just beyond where the paved road ended. She pointed my attention to the boarded-up hole in her living room window and to the security bars that cover it. Thieves had entered the window to steal her daughter Paloma’s computer that she used for her university studies and to connect to the Internet, a crucial interpersonal and informational link for Marisol as well. Although the area was crime-ridden, Marisol told me that she was not afraid. Marisol was now living here with Paloma because the complaints she filed in the judicial system and the sentences passed down since 1996 had provided her no protection from Gerardo’s return in 2006 to the home they owned in Santiago where she had been living for the eight previous years, while he resided in Argentina. Since they remained married and the six-month restraining order from 1998 had run out long ago, he felt entitled to take up residence there again. The house was legally in his name, after all. After his return, Marisol had lived first with her ailing mother, then with her sister and her family, and finally here with Paloma. This chapter addresses how, in order for women who suffer from gender-based intimate partner violence to seek and claim their rights, the state has made necessary an individualization of those problems. Women must fit themselves into the structures that exist. This individualization , which happens in part through a bureaucratization of the self, a process of allowing oneself to be turned into or actively turning oneself into an object of bureaucratic knowledge, can be particularly “Exhaustion” 55 detrimental in cases of domestic violence because of its nature as a social , not an individual, pathology. In this chapter I explore how Marisol’s iterative search for care and her struggle to claim her rights continued after Gerardo’s return in 2006, in a shifting legal landscape. She continued to construct a narrative of her experiences in different venues of the state, and she learned how to arm herself with the bureaucratic traces of her life and suffering that would support her case to claim her rights as a “victim” of domestic violence and therefore to claim her citizenship. By 2006 many changes had been made in the judicial landscape that Marisol now had to navigate. Women’s rights sectors continued to push reform of key legal structures. In 2005 they succeeded in shifting legal structures when the congress approved reforms to the new Family Violence Law (Gobierno de Chile 2005a), based on Representatives María Antonieta Saa and Adriana Muñoz’s proposal, drafted in 1999.1 One of their critiques of the enactment of the 1994 Family Violence Law was that “victims repeat their stories many times, have to recover archived documents, get confused, [face] differential application of criteria, etcetera, all of which results in inefficient interventions that are slow and as a consequence do not protect” (Gobierno de Chile 2005a:6–8). Some of Marisol’s most frustrating experiences reflected this critique almost identically. The 1999 report also highlighted the problematic nature of the 1994 Family Violence Law’s emphasis on reconciliation. Congressional representatives from the right and left of the political spectrum heralded the reforms enacted in the 2005 Family Violence Law as a key success for women’s rights.2 Representative Adriana Muñoz highlighted the 2005 Family Violence Law’s deep roots in the work of the women’s rights movement of the late 1980s and beyond, noting: A very important change has been made in how public policy and the laws are made. Issues such as the one we are discussing today used to be culturally considered part of private life, intimate . . . but with [the Family Violence Law of 1994], they began to form part of the public and policy agenda of Chile. It is necessary to highlight the women’s movement’s active participation in striving to publicize the suffering 56 Traumatic States of thousands of women who endure this scourge and installed the issue in...