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

7. The Ills of Medicalizing Violence and the Work of Ethnography in Processes of Care

159 C h A P t e r 7 The Ills of Medicalizing Violence and the Work of Ethnography in Processes of Care Care . . . is work as well as an emotion or motive or intention. —Virginia Held (2006:51) The Ills of Medicalizing Violence A violent and catastrophic “event” does not have to happen all at once. The violent event can be a sum total of everyday forms of violence that congeal over time. For Luz, Marisol, and Josefina various forms of everyday violence coalesced to become the event that produced the poisonous knowledge that they continuously worked through. Conceptualizing the everydayness of violence as the event for Luz, Marisol, and Josefina points to the importance of developing and practicing an ethic of care that prioritizes curing, addressing, and fixing the various forms of seemingly mundane, banal violence that are entangled and interconstructed with gender-based intimate partner violence against women. Concomitantly, caring for women who have already experienced traumatic violence emerges as crucial. By illuminating and analyzing the experiences of Luz, Marisol, and Josefina, Traumatic States constitutes an act of witnessing poisonous violence and an argument for more effective forms of care for women—care that is both prior to and following the event of domestic violence. The stories of Josefina, Marisol, and Luz continue into the present. Their suffering has been extraordinary in severity and in terms of what it has done to their lives and experiences of being in the world, and this suffering folds into the ordinary in ways that are both perceptible and imperceptible, even as historical contingencies at local, state, and global scales shift in favor of women’s rights. 160 Traumatic States Instead of interventions such as meaningful job training or new living arrangements, Josefina, Luz, and Marisol were prescribed psychoactive medications by state and local government agencies in order to address depressive symptoms related to the abuses they suffered throughout their lives. Each woman dealt with her difficulties in her own ways and had different resources from which to draw; their “recoveries” depended largely on their individual activities in helpseeking and their histories in relationship to the state and ideas about their rights. Luz eventually fared well in the sense that she had the opportunity to work in a meaningful job, which paid well and provided health care for her. She seemed to draw from her “rebellious streak” in seeking out spiritual pathways that helped her to recuperate her sense of self. But, also, her abusive husband had killed himself right after he tried to murder her, and so he was gone, never to return. Marisol also had a strong educational background and sense of her rights as a person, which she continually mobilized in order to seek what she needed. Her financial situation was tenuous, and by 2009 she could not work for remuneration due to her myriad health problems. Her work consisted instead of seeking reparations from her abusive husband and from the state. Josefina still lived with her abusive husband and struggled with chronic depression due to the lifetime of genderbased violence she suffered. She felt she lacked viable options for making her own way in the world and saw no possibilities for the future other than her continued dependence on a variety of psychoactive medications and continual search for support from the government. Luz, Marisol, and Josefina are not self-contained, completely selfregulated , and self-determined individuals, composed of “mind” on the one hand and “body” on the other. However, systems of care often treat them as such and work to medicalize their suffering by treating symptoms and failing to address the etiology of that suffering within social, political, and economic bodies. Care for individuals is crucial, but that is only one facet of treatment based in an ethic of care. In one illustrative instance, Josefina described how she suffered rape by her husband as a deep violation of both her bodily and psychological integrity—a wound that would never be healed. In those violent episodes her husband asserted that he, in that moment and whenever Medicalizing Violence and the Work of Ethnography 161 he wanted, in a sense owned her body and her mind. Novel state policies , nongovernmental organizations, and grassroots women’s rights groups have the potential to disrupt this ideology of men’s ownership of women’s bodies. Instead, these groups assert, women are entitled to ownership over their own bodies, minds, and...