Every Bone in My Body: Domestic Violence and the Diagnostic Body

• In Event: 237 - Section on Body and Embodiment Paper Session. Power, Pleasure, and Sexuality in Embodied Relations

Abstract

Biomedical constructions of domestic violence have shifted over time, from a rendering of abuse as a disorder of psychological passivity and acute injury to a rendering of abuse as a chronic and somatically invasive condition. This paper links these changing diagnoses to constructions of the abused body and to larger victim-blaming narratives. Based on interviews with domestic violence medical advocates and an analysis of medical journal articles, this article identifies two logics that undergird domestic violence diagnoses, the body, and victim-blaming: 1) the logic of injury (1970s-1980s); and 2) the logic of health (late 1980s-present). The logic of injury is associated with overt victim-blaming, a temporally bounded and physically injured body, and psychological passivity. Once the feminist anti-violence movement gained mainstream credibility, however, the logic of injury fell out of favor as a biomedical explanation for domestic violence, primarily due to its overt victim-blaming messages. What came about next was the logic of health, which is associated with chronic diagnoses and what the author calls a temporally extended body, which is flexible and layered, linking up past, present, and future states of “bad” embodiment. The author suggests that the abused body under the logic of health compels new forms of blame and self-responsibility to seep in, challenging the discourses of hope laid out by this somatic flexibility and futurity.

Author

• Paige Lenore Sweet, University of Illinois-Chicago