Traumatic States: Gendered Violence, Suffering, and Care in Chile by Nia Parson (review)

In Traumatic States, Nia Parson offers an insightful and ethnographically rich exploration of the experiences of women who have suffered gender-based violence in Chile. More pointedly, the book illuminates in detail the different paths to care, healing, and recovery enabled or blocked by shifting institutional and state approaches to violence against women. The book relates women’s individual biographies to broad social and political processes—from a military dictatorship that ruled Chile for nearly two decades since 1973, to the country’s transition to democracy beginning in 1990, to political and economic developments in the new millennium. The study situates women’s personal experiences of violence and care-seeking in relation to the state, neoliberalism, and feminism.

From a human rights perspective, the book squarely locates violence against women, including domestic violence, in the realm of human rights violations. Drawing on the theoretical and political contributions of feminist scholars and activists, the notion that “women’s rights are human rights” and that violence against women violates such rights is illustrated in the book. Parson analyzes the role of the state as discursively and practically enabling violence against women, showing how individual perpetrators’ power is bolstered through state-sponsored ideologies, dysfunctional bureaucracies, and governmental unwillingness to prioritize women’s needs and aspirations. Traumatic States examines how the interaction between individual and institutional layers of power results in women’s preventable suffering, ill health, and stunted potentialities. At the same time, one of the book’s strengths is its emphasis on women’s agency—individual and collective—while still not losing sight of the contextual factors that constrain choice and action.

Traumatic States is based on research that combines life histories of women who experienced gender-based violence, ethnographic observations of two organizations assisting such women (Safe Space and Family Care), group interviews with women who looked for support in one of these agencies, as well as conversations and interviews with other relevant social actors such as staff members of the organizations. Parson also pays attention to changes in legislation, institutional responses in the juridical and medical fields, and campaigns to raise awareness of and prevent violence against women. While the study is focused on Chile, Parson notes important connections to broader contexts, including how traveling global feminist discourses on violence against women are translated, adapted, and circulated at the local level through the work of key social players (e.g. policy makers, state officials, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), women survivors, and activists).

While Parson gathers life histories from eighteen women, for the purpose of this book, she analyzes in depth the narratives and experiences of three individuals: Luz, Marisol, and Josefina. She examines these women’s

subjective, affective experiences as they interact in dialogic relationship over time with the novel state structures—juridical, medical, nongovermental, and discursive—recently built up around domestic violence; and with women’s rights organizations and feminist frameworks. Their intimate narratives tell more than the stories of their individual lives. They show how these women’s health, their overall well-being, is affected by various forms of violence that constitute, sustain, and perpetuate what we call domestic violence. And through this analysis it becomes clear that their health is at stake.¹

Even though the interviews and ethnographic fieldwork took place during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the book situates the study participants’ stories in a longer historical framework, and in doing so, it illuminates the connections between state-perpetrated human rights abuses and gendered forms of interpersonal violence. Indeed, one contribution that specifically relates to the history of Chile, but that resonates with other Latin American experiences, is the examination of “private” violence in light of the legacies of state atrocities, such as torture, disappearance, and extrajudicial executions committed during the military regime led by General Augusto Pinochet. Traumatic States delves into how the norms promoted by the dictatorship, which asserted the unity of the (heteronormative) family...