Abstract
With masterful ethnographic skill, Sweet delivers a richly rewarding account of the medicalization of domestic violence in the contemporary U.S. She accounts for the historical roots of this process using archival data to explain how, in their efforts to resist mainstream psychiatry, feminist activists positioned themselves as therapeutic experts. As Sweet explains, the turn to trauma reflects both the achievements of the feminist antiviolence movement and its unintended consequences. Through the movement's efforts to legitimize domestic violence as a public problem, secure state resources, and consolidate authority as experts, activists were enfolded into the growing carceral and welfare state apparatuses. This shift is not limited to domestic violence but is part of a wider cultural and political turn toward trauma. Troublingly, the legibility of trauma varies, reflecting the ways in which race, sexuality, gender, class, and nationality are co-articulated in the construction of traumatic citizenship.
A unique strength of the book is Sweet's use of both archival and ethnographic data. As the U.S. feminist antiviolence movement has been active for over 50 years, it is a rich case for exploring how social movements evolve. Sweet's use of archival data makes visible the connections between social institutions and how they’ve changed over time in contested negotiations with each other's logic. Using richly detailed interview data, Sweet also shows the labor of legibility that women who experience domestic violence are compelled to perform in their relational engagements with the state and other institutions. Sweet argues convincingly that, to achieve survivorhood, women are required to make medicalized claims to access their subjecthood as citizens and receive the attendant resources.
The book unfolds across two parts. Part 1 focuses on “Survivorhood,” describing in three chapters the evolution of the feminist antiviolence movement. In this gradual transformation, strategic interactions began as efforts to access resources but resulted in the movement unintentionally contributing to the growth of the neoliberal state. Although activists sought to expand women's citizenship, understanding that unequal political status was itself a root cause of violence, they were required to do so in the language of neoconservative discourses of “victims of crime” and “families in crisis” (p. 45). Domestic violence became a disease to be “treated” and “prevented”, with antiviolence activists recast as professional direct service providers.
As important as the analysis is in Part I, the most significant contributions of this book come in Part II. In this section, Sweet details “Surviving” in three chapters that focus on the experiences of survivors as they navigate domestic violence agencies and therapeutic systems. It is in Chapters 5 and 6 that Sweet's power as a social theorist is most deftly wielded. Here, she analyzes the temporal and spatial complexities of domestic violence and explains how domestic violence re-shapes women's relationships with the institution of heterosexuality.
In Chapter 5, Sweet analyzes gaslighting as an “invisible violence” that dismantles women's credibility first in the context of the abusive relationship and second in their interactions with institutions. Sweet argues that gaslighting should be considered the core of domestic violence because “it is structured by objective systems of inequality, by cultural stereotypes about irrational femininity, and by patterns of institutional discrimination” (p. 191). Both scholars and practitioners need to attend to the ways gaslighting as violence crosses interpersonal and institutional arenas. We can do this by developing new vocabularies for non-physical violence and questioning forced compliance to diagnoses that may be caused by or misdiagnosed as a result of domestic violence. In Chapter 6, Sweet uses a queer analytic approach to challenge the frequently asexual depictions of survivors. She demonstrates how heterosexuality can be a site of difference, inversion, and subversion in the aftermath of surviving violence.
Finally, one of the most important contributions of this book is Sweet's definition of domestic violence as a processual, relational phenomenon. While not the key theme of the text, it is central to her analysis, enabling her to unpack survivorhood as “therapeutic category”, “discourse of state recognition”, and also “lived identity” (p. 5). She defines domestic violence as “characterized by a form of power that is processual, built into the shadows of authoritative institutions, as a type of power that tilts women's realities while denying them institutional means of apprehending those realities” (p. 192). In contrast to frameworks that focus solely on point-in-time events of violence or only on the intimate relationship, Sweet's definition brings into focus how the experience of domestic violence unfolds across the full spectrum of individual's lives. Throughout the text, Sweet communicates the complexity of the temporal experience of domestic violence. This effectively makes space for the voices of individual women and the meaning they themselves make of their experiences, even while they’re compelled to use vocabularies and practices to make themselves legible to social systems.
The Politics of Surviving is a brilliant contribution to sociology and the multidisciplinary field of feminist scholarship. It is a necessary text for scholars of violence, social movements, and gender and sexuality. It is also an important text for practitioners and policy-makers, particularly in how it historicizes our present definitions of domestic violence and our array of prevention and treatment practices. For all Affilia readers, it is a cogent call to see: to see how the therapeutic welfare state reproduces social structures of inequality, to see how survivors craft resistance to erasure (p. 235), and see how recognition is the paradox at the core of the politics of surviving domestic violence.
