The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath

By Paige Sweet

For women who have experienced domestic violence, proving that you are a “good victim” is no longer enough. Victims must also show that they are recovering, as if domestic violence were a disease: they must transform from “victims” into “survivors.” Women’s access to life-saving resources may even hinge on “good” performances of survivorhood. Through archival and ethnographic research, Paige L. Sweet reveals how trauma discourses and coerced therapy play central roles in women’s lives as they navigate state programs for assistance. Sweet uses an intersectional lens to uncover how “resilience” and “survivorhood” can become coercive and exclusionary forces in women’s lives. With nuance and compassion, The Politics of Surviving wrestles with questions about the gendered nature of the welfare state, the unintended consequences of feminist mobilizations for anti-violence programs, and the women who are left behind by the limited forms of citizenship we offer them.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520976429

Paige Sweet

Paige L. Sweet is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. 

Book preview

The Politics of Surviving

The Politics of Surviving

HOW WOMEN NAVIGATE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND ITS AFTERMATH

Paige L. Sweet

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Paige Sweet

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: author. Sweet, Paige L., author

Title: The politics of surviving : how women navigate domestic violence and its aftermath / Paige L. Sweet.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021015702 (print) | LCCN 2021015703 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520377707 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780520377714 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520976429 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Victims of family violence—Services for—United States. | Abused women—United States—Social conditions. | Abused women—United States—Psychological aspects.

Classification: LCC HV6626.2 .S95 2021 (print) | LCC HV6626.2 (ebook) | DDC 362.82/920973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015702

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015703

Manufactured in the United States of America

25  24  23  22  21

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For all the women whose stories are told here

and for those who can’t or won’t tell stories

And for Susan, a.k.a. Sunshine (1983–2020)

Thank you for your light

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Acronyms

Introduction: Domestic Violence and the Politics of Trauma

PART I SURVIVORHOOD

1. Building a Therapeutic Movement

2. The Trauma Revolution

3. Administering Trauma

PART II SURVIVING

4. Becoming Legible

5. Gaslighting

6. Surviving Heterosexuality

Conclusion: Traumatic Citizenship

Methodological Appendix

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

I’ve relied on the generosity of so many to write this book. My deepest gratitude goes to the domestic violence survivors and anti-violence advocates who tolerated my intrusions into their homes and workplaces, who told me their stories with such candor and wit. Thank you.

I developed these ideas under the guidance of faculty and graduate students in the sociology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a program that nurtured my political commitments as deeply as my sociological ones. Claire Decoteau has been a true mentor and ally the whole way through. I’m sure I never would have made it without her, and I hope to be as committed and generous to students as she has been to me. To have a mentor I admire so much as a scholar and as a person is a real gift, and I’m so grateful.

Beth Richie has been a thoughtful advisor on this project and on my career—her scholarship, her warmth, and her passion never fail to amaze me. Many thanks also to Lorena Garcia, Sydney Halpern, and Annemarie Jutel, who served on my dissertation committee and provided invaluable feedback. At UIC, I also benefited from the mentorship of Barbara Risman, Nadine Naber, Laurie Schaffner, Andy Clarno, Maria Krysan, and Barbara Ransby. I’m incredibly grateful to all the graduate students at UIC who helped and inspired me along the way. To my good friends Jody Ahlm, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Tünde Cserpes, and Meghan Daniel, thank you, thank you, I wouldn’t be here without you. My work and spirits have been boosted at critical times by Kate McCabe, Erin Eife, Eric Knee, Emily Ruehs-Navarro, Anna Colaner, Lain Mathers, Sarah Steele, Sangi Ravichandran, and Piere Washington.

I’ve been lucky to be a part of several reading and writing groups that have made me love this job. Claire Decoteau’s reading group at UIC was an indispensable part of my education. To Kelly Underman and Danielle Giffort, I owe so much. Such good friends, such excellent sociologists—to get their feedback on my work and their support on whatever is a privilege. To Heather Welborn, thank you for making me smarter and happier in graduate school. To my dear friend Katelin Albert, thank you for your intelligence, for being there, for making me laugh. I’m so grateful to Maryam Alemzadeh, Anna Skarpelis, Hanisah Sani, Moira O’Shea, and Sneha Annavarapu for giving me a lovely virtual community while writing this book.

My thanks to the family of Susan Schechter for allowing me access to her archives, as well as to the archivists at Smith College, Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, and DePaul University. I’m so grateful to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence for allowing me to scour their storage units in search of historical materials. Key insights were also offered by the staff at the National Center for Domestic Violence, Trauma, and Mental Health, especially Heather Phillips and the incomparable Dr. Carole Warshaw. Thank you to the generous people at Mujeres Latinas en Acción and Sarah’s Inn for guidance on this research. I thank Valeria Velazquez, Jasmine Maldonado, and Hector Dominguez for their excellent assistantship during fieldwork. The National Science Foundation, ACLS/Mellon Foundation, the Rue Bucher Memorial Award at UIC, the Alice J. Dan Dissertation Award, and the Chancellor’s Award at UIC all provided valuable funding for this project.

I was lucky enough to find myself at the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University for two years while working on this book. To Claudine Gay, Larry Bobo, and Jennifer Shephard, thank you for not only leading a program that gave me time and space, but for offering real encouragement and guidance. Jocelyn Viterna has made me a better scholar and has taught me what it means to carry oneself with grace and care in this profession. I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today without Jocelyn’s encouragement and careful reading of my work. I owe thanks to Jocelyn’s graduate students, who welcomed me into their community and contributed important feedback to this project. My gratitude to Caroline Light for taking me under her wing, and to the sociology faculty at Harvard for creating a welcoming space in the department. Julia Weiner, a brilliant student and an anti-violence advocate herself, provided excellent research assistance on this project. A warm thank-you to the fellow postdocs who made my time in Cambridge so special, especially Anthony Johnson: I couldn’t have done it without your kindness and camaraderie. Anna Skarpelis provided ongoing encouragement and feedback, as did Michael Aguirre, Miao Qian, David Mickey-Pabello, Charlotte Lloyd, Talia Shiff, and Shai Dromi. To the Cambridge Women’s Center, where I spent afternoons answering hotline calls and talking with members while writing this book, thank you for reminding me that it is possible to provide care and community to those who need it, without demanding anything in return.

While at Harvard, I had the incredible experience of convening a book manuscript workshop with some of the scholars I admire most. Enormous thanks to Lynne Haney, Cecilia Menjívar, and Catherine Connell. This book is only what it is because they took the time to read and comment. The first time I read Lynne’s work, I knew I had found a place in sociology, and I thank her for supporting me. Cecilia’s scholarship is a constant guidepost for me, and she is—unsurprisingly—also a very generous advisor. Cati Connell’s support has meant so much, and I hope to be the kind of mentor and scholar she is. A huge thank-you, as well, to Naomi Schneider and Summer Farah at UC Press. Gratitude to Michelle Pais for emergency design advice and to Donna Ferrato for allowing me to use her remarkable photograph on the cover.

Since coming to the University of Michigan, I’ve had the warm support of Karin Martin, Elizabeth Wingrove, and especially Elizabeth Armstrong and Anna Kirkland, who both took the time to support me long before I landed at U-M. My department has been so welcoming, despite the strange and isolating period during which I started this job. My love to Robert Manduca, Roseanna Sommers, Luciana de Souza Leão, Neil Gong, Kate McCabe, and Apryl Williams—thank you for helping to make Ann Arbor home.

Who knows where I’d be without my chosen family. Such love and gratitude to Jody Ahlm and Meghan Daniel—truly, my support group—for keeping me laughing and always being on my side. To Anna Skarpelis, whom I can’t believe I didn’t meet until we got to Harvard, since we were meant to find our way to each other. To Ati Rahimpour and Michael Levin, for making Chicago home and for taking care of me. And of course, to Ayla Karamustafa, all my gratitude and admiration. Thank you for sharing your sharp sociological imagination and for believing in me. I’m unreasonably lucky to count you as a true constant in my life. My heartfelt thanks to the whole Karamustafa-Keshavarz clan for their love and guidance throughout this journey.

My family has always given me that deep kind of energy and support that is difficult to put into words. To Ross Sweet, Lizzie Nolan, and of course Ollie—thank you for always being there, for feeding me and listening to me and making me so happy. To Becca Kehm and Nick Brady, thank you for your unconditional support and for giving me so much to look forward to—I wouldn’t survive a day without you. To Dave and Diane Kehm for being the best bonus parents. Thank you also to David Brundage and Susan Stuart for being so supportive and for giving me a new place to call home. I thank my grandmother, Barbara Prior, who showed me what it means to be proud of your work and who always encouraged me to write and write. To Reed Prior, whom I love and admire. And of course, to my parents, Laurel Prior-Sweet and Dave Sweet, who have always been unwavering in their support, and who really are just the best. I’m so lucky to be your kid. Thank you for giving me everything I needed to be able to write a book.

And lastly, my love and gratitude to Jonah Stuart Brundage, my partner, friend, editor, champion, critic—my favorite. Thank you for everything. I hope this book makes you proud. What a dream to be on this road together.

Parts of chapter 4 are adapted from Paige L. Sweet, The Paradox of Legibility: Domestic Violence and Institutional Survivorhood, Social Problems 66, no. 3 (2019): 411–27. Parts of chapter 5 are adapted from Paige L. Sweet, The Sociology of Gaslighting, American Sociological Review 84, no. 5 (2019): 851–75.

Acronyms

Introduction

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND THE POLITICS OF TRAUMA

Things only seemed to get worse after she left him. That’s when he started going after her for custody of their child, using her mental health records against her to try to convince the courts she was an unfit mother. Nevaeh’s ex-partner abused her for years.¹ Though they are no longer together, like many abusers, he continues to harass her through the family court system.² He uses the kid now to try to regain his control. . . . His target is me. I clearly have a big, red bullseye on my back. . . . And the kid is like the bow and arrow. Any means necessary, he’s gonna hit that target. Like many women who have experienced domestic violence, Nevaeh was not allowed a reprieve upon leaving her abuser—no breath of fresh air, no sense of unshackling.³ Rather, leaving him has led to extended custody battles and public accusations that she is crazy, exaggerating about the abuse, and unable to parent on her own.

In response to these accusations, the judge in Nevaeh’s case recommended that she get counseling at a domestic violence organization. Nevaeh found an agency for victims nearby and went in for individual and group sessions, fearing what would happen to her child if she refused. At first, Nevaeh was resistant to attending counseling at the judge’s behest. But she came to like the therapists and the other women at the domestic violence agency where I met her. In group, she practiced deep breathing, processed out loud her battles in family court, and learned about the biology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Throughout our interview, Nevaeh used the language of trauma and psychological victimization with practiced confidence. She described herself as strong, as someone who has overcome: she felt she was a survivor.

But Nevaeh also questioned whether she had really overcome, since she regularly relives the abuse in court: It had to take . . . strength to come through it. You know that much. But allowing all these things to happen and having to go through all these things [again]? It’s like, at what moment did I get enough? Nevaeh also worries that attending counseling is risky because it might make her appear crazy. She does not believe she needs counseling and resents being pushed into it—pushed by the very systems that did nothing to help her recover financially from the abuse or to parent her child safely, away from her abuser. It isn’t as if the court actually forced her to go to counseling—she is a victim, after all. Nevertheless, the court’s recommendation that she get counseling felt like punishment to Nevaeh. And it felt mandatory: It was ‘suggested’ through court order that I seek [therapy] . . . even though I had already been through therapy. Nevaeh felt that her lawyer colluded with the courts to make it seem like she needed counseling: [My lawyer] said, ‘It’s just protocol.’ Even though she liked her counselors at the domestic violence agency, Nevaeh was upset about being pressured into attending therapeutic programs in order to show the courts that she is a credible victim, a responsible mother, a good survivor. "It wasn’t even my fault in the first place. I was being abused by him." Going to counseling came to feel like one more thing she had to do in order to actually survive.

Domestic violence agencies pitch their services as optional and premised on self-determination. However, I found through my fieldwork that women who experience domestic violence are regularly pressured or required to attend counseling by child welfare agencies, judges, and social workers. Most of the domestic violence victims I interviewed for this book were attending several kinds of therapy simultaneously when I met them. Most were pushed into counseling at domestic violence agencies because they needed something—from family courts, from child services, or from the immigration system—and attending therapeutic programs became an important way to demonstrate to state agencies that they were worthy of those resources. Trauma language pervades these programs, teaching women the medicalized terminology of victimization and recovery. It turns out that for women like Nevaeh, proving that you fit the definition of a good, legal victim is not enough. Women must also show that they are in recovery from domestic violence, as if it were a disease: they must show that they are transforming from victims into survivors.

Today, the idea that people seeking social services have suffered trauma and should engage in psychological recovery is taken for granted. The language and therapeutic logics of trauma suffuse social service programs in the United States, from addiction services to child welfare to HIV care to homelessness, and, of course, rape and domestic violence programs. Domestic violence services—the topic of this book—are an important part of this infrastructure, with over seventy-seven thousand people using them in an average twenty-four-hour period in the United States.⁴ Domestic violence agencies have changed dramatically over the past forty years. Not only are they more professionalized than ever before, but they are also increasingly medicalized, staffed by clinicians rather than feminist advocates, clinicians who use trauma as the vocabulary of victimization.⁵ Domestic violence victims are also more likely than ever to be labeled with PTSD when they access services.⁶ When someone like Nevaeh enters a domestic violence agency, chances are she will be offered trauma-informed counseling and asked to write a recovery plan. Through participating in therapeutic programs, Nevaeh learns how to talk about her experiences in the language of trauma and recovery.⁷ She understands that she should become a survivor at a revelatory moment in the therapeutic process.

This book examines the complex, contradictory, and unequal process of creating survivors out of women who have experienced domestic violence. It exposes the pressures that domestic violence victims face to attend therapy as a condition of receiving aid and the labor-intensive processes by which women are expected to become survivors in order to be seen as responsible and worthy. As such, this book forces us to wrestle with questions about the gendered nature of the welfare state—and the unintended consequences of feminist mobilizations for these programs. What happens when state resources like visas and child custody are made contingent on participation in therapy? How and why are victims of gender-based violence expected to show that they are recovering? Is recovery imbued with social expectations around gender, sexuality, race, and class? Throughout this book, I show that women’s citizenship at the margins is increasingly medicalized through the language and technologies of trauma. Through this process, new norms of deservingness enter into the therapeutic state and shape women’s lives: you don’t have to be innocent or self-sufficient to be deserving of social services, but you do have to be resilient. You have to become a survivor.

The pervasive expectation of a victim-to-survivor transition emerged inductively from life story interviews I conducted with women who have experienced domestic violence, creating a connective thread across their stories. I noticed that domestic violence victims conceived of their relationship to nonprofit organizations, to their families, and to the social world itself through their success (or not) in becoming a survivor. This success was to be achieved through attending therapy; but the identity survivor was also perceived as a natural state of being, the right way to be a respectable woman who deserves care. Attending therapy and becoming a survivor operate as a shorthand for worthiness. Surviving violence requires that women make medicalized claims for personhood and state recognition based on experiences of psychological trauma, a process that I refer to—following anthropologists Vinh-Kim Nguyen and Erica Caple James—as traumatic citizenship.⁸

Trauma has emerged, in far-reaching ways, as the state’s answer to the question of why women need help to get by. Federal policy increasingly identifies trauma as the source of women’s and children’s dependency on state resources.⁹ This pervasive interpretation of victims as trauma survivors has implications for women’s symbolic and material relationship to the state.¹⁰ I trace those relationships throughout this book, exposing therapeutic transformations in governance and anti-violence politics, showing how state programs attempt to civilize marginalized women through therapy.¹¹ Indeed, governance—how external powers such as the state shape our behaviors, our relationships, our identities, our consciousness—is a central thread throughout this book. I am concerned with how therapeutic norms become intertwined with mandatory and quasi-mandatory programs for women on the margins, diminishing their autonomy while claiming to empower them.¹² As such, I’m interested in governance as a gendered process—as gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and ability—and in exploring how the lessons of coercive institutions become embodied.

But at its core, this book is about how women who have experienced domestic violence come to feel like they belong in the social world. I go beyond a unidirectional approach that focuses only on how women are seen by the state. Instead, I offer a relational framework that highlights how women make themselves legible to systems, forging attachments to therapeutic programs and refashioning their identities in order to survive program requirements and make meaning about violence.¹³ After all, as Nevaeh’s story reveals, domestic violence is not a discrete event. Abuse is processual, full of bureaucratic entanglements and legal pressures—characterized by ongoing attacks on victims’ credibility, sanity, and respectability. In this harmful configuration, as Nevaeh explains, the survivor identity feels aspirational, associated with a better life. Trauma and survivorhood are the capacious discourses through which women interact with service providers, explain abuse to friends and family, and find camaraderie with other women. These are the terms through which women who have experienced domestic violence become legible to the state, to professionals, and to each other. Throughout this book, I explore the struggles and contradictions of this labor of legibility.

Nothing about these struggles and their history is inevitable. As Nancy Naples reminds us, survivor discourse is individualized and tethered to psychological expertise—but it did not start out that way.¹⁴ The medicalization and institutionalization of survivorhood raise questions about feminist politics and the state, about the privatization of suffering, questions about whose trauma we are really invested in addressing. Throughout this book, I ask questions about survivorhood as a therapeutic category, a discourse of state recognition, and a lived identity. Why must we make victims redeemable through the expectation of survivorhood?¹⁵ What do victims need to be redeemed from?¹⁶ The politics of redemption, I show, increasingly sets the terms for women’s social inclusion after violence. Survivorhood transforms anti-violence work into recovery work: an internalizing discourse of suffering obfuscates the diffuse, pounding structure of male violence. But we can do better. We can offer victims more than the labor of psychological redemption without the material supports of real recovery. We can offer healing without using psychological improvement as a criterion of deservingness. This book is not a polemic against trauma and survivor narratives, but an attempt to begin extracting survivorhood from an exclusionary politics of worthiness. Listening carefully to women’s stories—and placing those stories in the historical context of the anti-violence movement—is a good place to begin.

MANDATORY HEALING

Most contemporary domestic violence agencies emerged from feminist anti-violence organizing in the 1970s and 1980s. These are nonprofit organizations that rely on a combination of federal and state funding, donations, and private foundation dollars. They offer a range of direct services to victims, including case management, legal advocacy, and emergency housing. Some also offer psycho-educational groups for perpetrators. Despite this diversity of services, domestic violence organizations increasingly specialize in the kind of quasi-clinical therapy that Nevaeh attends. Today, spending time in a domestic violence agency means becoming conversant in the language of hypervigilance and flashbacks. Running a domestic violence agency means demonstrating quantitative program outcomes based on reduction in trauma symptoms. Women who attend support groups may be shown diagrams of their brains, learning the effects of posttraumatic stress on cognitive function. They are likely to encounter trauma-informed yoga or mindfulness classes as part of their curriculum.

Domestic violence agencies’ orientation toward clinical therapy mirrors other social services and reflects the increasing imbrication of punitive and therapeutic systems.¹⁷ Often, women come to domestic violence programs through a kind of therapeutic extortion. The Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) may require her to attend a support group in order to get her children back from state custody.¹⁸ A judge in a custody case may request that she take her children to therapy in order to demonstrate parental fitness. An immigration lawyer will likely tell her that she needs to attend domestic violence counseling before she can apply for a visa. Victims of domestic violence learn from other women in support groups that they should get proof of therapy attendance so that their custody cases will go better. Domestic violence counseling becomes a cure for violence and related problems in this institutional configuration. The message is: get yourself healed or you won’t get what you need.

Still, attending counseling is not usually mandatory in the strict sense of the word. Domestic violence programs seem softer and nicer than other kinds of services like addiction treatment, which is typically a penal system requirement. Nevertheless, as I conducted interviews with survivors, I came to feel that scholars and policy makers have focused too much on distinguishing mandatory from nonmandatory programs. Women themselves make very few distinctions between services that are required and those that are suggested. They usually do not know the difference. Domestic violence victims often approach feminist-based therapeutic programs the same way they approach compulsory parenting classes or psychiatric evaluations. Starting with survivors’ own narratives tells us a new story about this web of programs: therapy feels and often is compulsory, a condition of accessing critical resources—even in feminist-founded organizations that pride themselves on offering optional services premised on self-determination.

Domestic violence agencies manage this tension in a variety of ways. For example, the types of counseling offered in domestic violence organizations are different from what you might find in a traditional mental health agency. Yoga and other somatic therapies are popular because counselors see them as soft interventions, less pathologizing than other types of therapy. On an unseasonably warm February weekend in Chicago, I attended a trauma-informed yoga workshop recommended to me by several therapists in the anti-violence field. A mix of counselors, yoga instructors, social work students—and one researcher and novice yogi—sat in a semicircle on yoga mats as the instructor welcomed us with a series of self-care and breathing exercises, reminding us that we should lie down, twist, stand up, and stretch throughout the day. The instructor articulated precisely the kind of ambivalence about neuroscientific trauma theories that I found in domestic violence agencies, telling us, There’s a lot to say about the brain, but I’m not a neuroscientist. I came into this through my own experience. Now I’m developing the vocabulary to describe what I went through. Like domestic violence counselors, the instructor combined neuroscientific language with lay theories of trauma and personal testimony.

As the workshop progressed, we learned that trauma is held or stored in the body. The instructor explained the role of the limbic system, discussed theories of the reptilian brain, the way the hippocampus goes offline during trauma. She described trauma victims as lost animals in the wild. We heard about how our bodies are designed to help us run away from tigers, and victims’ trauma reactions mirror this vulnerable prey response. Speakers insisted that trauma is about the loss of relationship to one’s body. For this reason, somatic approaches like yoga are ideal, reteaching the body how to regulate. Throughout the workshop, we were asked to practice mindfulness by acknowledging how our bodies felt in space. All day long, the language of neuroscience blurred into the language of evolutionary biology which blurred into empowerment language, landing finally on mystical discourses of yoga and mindfulness. At first, trained as I am to identify boundaries, I found the discussion dizzying, moving in too many directions at once. However, I soon became accustomed to these vertiginous moments: this kind of hybridity—a blend of neuroscience, feminism, pop psychology, and Eastern philosophies—characterizes the trauma paradigms used in domestic violence agencies.

Often, domestic violence counselors attend trainings like this in order to learn stretching and breathing techniques to implement in support groups. The idea that trauma is stored in the body—and therefore that the body should be a site of therapeutic work—is widely accepted. Almost every domestic violence counselor I interviewed endorsed somatic theories of trauma and used body techniques in counseling. The uptake of trauma in domestic violence agencies encourages a focus on victims’ bodies as a site of disequilibrium. Trauma thereby institutionalizes a new regime of embodiment and a new type of therapeutic labor into domestic violence agencies, one premised on unconscious suffering and body-based recovery.

Trauma is contradictory in that it brings together soft interventions like yoga with the hard requirements of attending therapy in order to get critical resources from the state. It is through these kinds of hybrid interventions that women are thrown into an intimate relationship with a distant therapeutic state.¹⁹ When women engage in these kinds of therapies, they may not feel like they are interacting with the state at all.²⁰ That’s because the welfare state is privatized and operates through nonprofit organizations like domestic violence agencies. The US welfare state governs indirectly, through a cascade of political and administrative relationships.²¹ This allows for governing at a distance, such that nonprofit agencies use state funds to operate seemingly outside of the state, and programs are submerged in private networks.²² There is an illusion of distance, then, between state institutions, experts, and citizens themselves.²³ Even when state policy requires arduous and intimate transformations in people’s lives, it seems far away and irrelevant.²⁴

Further, the state enacts its policies through domestic violence organizations that have complex commitments embedded in second-wave feminism and in their local communities. Just like the yoga workshop, domestic violence agencies are hybrid. Workers fulfill state funding requirements while pursuing their own aims, which are often explicitly feminist. Domestic violence workers interpret their situations and respond to problems in diverse ways.²⁵ Part of understanding the contemporary welfare state, then, is explaining how its goals—in this case, reforming problem subjects through therapy—get filtered through agencies with their own histories, practiced by professionals with different aims, and thereby reconfigured.²⁶

After all, the ascendance of trauma therapy in domestic violence agencies is peculiar. When feminists founded domestic violence hotlines, shelters, and political coalitions in the 1970s, medicine and psychiatry were serious enemies of the movement. Male psychotherapists were likened to battering husbands. Doctors and their diagnoses were cast as misogynistic and coercive. Feminists argued that battered women needed political, not clinical, interventions. In chapters 1 and 2, I explain how feminists’ opposition to traditional therapy motivated them to develop their own models of therapeutic expertise. Today, domestic violence agencies operate on the borderlands of medicalized treatment goals and feminist philosophies of care—through an articulation of these disparate logics, which I explore in chapter 3.²⁷ The transformation of domestic violence work into trauma work is not a wholesale reinvention but is constituted by interlocking structures and strategies that are themselves composed of old and new elements.²⁸ Trauma work is a site of struggle between feminist politics and medicalized social service logics, a struggle that domestic violence workers themselves embody.

While it is difficult to see the dispersed, privatized, and trauma-informed state, then, what does connect services to each other is the expectation that victims attend therapy and work on becoming survivors. Though the state is retrenched and fragmented, [it] also provides powerful cultural representations.²⁹ As women who have experienced domestic violence are funneled through systems, they learn to speak the language of therapeutic progress, to demonstrate psychological improvement through racialized and classed norms of feminine embodiment, sexuality, and motherhood.³⁰ Becoming a survivor in these institutions sometimes allows women to access resources that they lost as a result of abuse, or to gain new resources altogether—but not always. The rub is that achieving survivorhood feels like individual, psychological work, when it is actually embedded in complex state and institutional requirements.

THE VICTIM-SURVIVOR BINARY

The labor of navigating bureaucratic systems after abuse is intensified by the fact that women enter into a symbolic economy of victim and survivor when they name their experiences in the public sphere. These terms determine much of what it means to endure rape or domestic violence, both in popular culture and in social programs. Victim and survivor are powerful public narratives that have institutionalized a bifurcated understanding of what it means to endure gender-based violence.³¹ But those categories are also made and remade through women’s stories and actions. As Rose Corrigan and Corey Shdaimah show, a woman’s ability to become an ideal victim does not just depend on characteristics like race and class, but on how she mobilizes those characteristics in interactions with legal authorities.³² A relational approach is therefore necessary for understanding victim and survivor categories: these are intimate categories of practice.

Importantly, the victim/survivor binary is also hierarchical. Survivorhood is better than victimhood.³³ Linda Martín Alcoff and Laura Gray have written about the historical transition in anti-rape work from passive victim to active survivor.³⁴ Popular feminism has been particularly obsessed with the binary of passive, innocent victimhood pitted against active, responsible agency.³⁵ Rather than a victim saturated in feminine dependency, we now prefer a therapeutically engaged survivor figure. The survivor figure, according to sociologist Poulami Roychowdhury, is someone who can become a savior of herself: she is better than women who are stuck in a victim mentality.³⁶ Chanel Miller, who was sexually assaulted by Stanford student Brock Turner, wrote in her memoir that Stanford University pressured her to commemorate her experience on a plaque with uplifting words, rather than words that spoke to her rage and devastation.³⁷ The pernicious dichotomy of victim/survivor pressures victims into becoming heroines, giving us gendered archetypes in place of the complicated realities of human suffering, anger, and social action.³⁸ Further, the temporal sequence presumed by the progression from victim to survivor belies the reality of domestic violence, which is processual—characterized by ongoing struggles with abusers and coercive systems that may extend years after leaving.

Nevertheless, the term survivor, evocative of a courageous struggle, has largely replaced the term victim in professional anti-violence work.³⁹ Understandably, organizations prefer to represent women as capable agents rather than as victims in need of saving.⁴⁰ In her historical analysis, Nancy Whittier shows that feminists created the survivor label to ally with conservative policy makers and other skeptics in the 1980s and ’90s, creating a positive language for public-facing work.⁴¹ Survivor discourse is legitimating for the field. Further, psychological experiments reveal that people ascribe more positive attributes to women perceived as survivors than to those perceived as victims.⁴² Survivors are seen as optimistic, brave, confident, and active—and as people who attend therapy. Victimhood can be overcome, it is thought, through testimony of trauma in professional settings.⁴³ In this way, survivor discourse facilitates psychotherapeutic evaluation, making survivor both a moral and a medicalized category.⁴⁴

On the one hand, then, the victim is a failed figure who must be expelled from the boundaries of successful survivorhood. In Rebecca Stringer’s words,