The Paradox of Legibility: Domestic Violence and Institutional Survivorhood

Abstract

Existing literature has demonstrated that victims of domestic violence and rape undergo processes of discipline when they interact with legal structures, transforming themselves into “worthy victims.” Intervening in this literature, I show how the medicalization of institutions surrounding domestic violence creates conditions under which women must prove their survivorhood, performing psychological recovery to achieve institutional legibility. Legal and therapeutic institutions create a matrix of demands on women’s lives, shaping their practices of survival and performances of self. Through interviews with domestic violence survivors, I show that women engage three strategies of transformation to make themselves credible survivors: (1) extracting domestic violence from their life stories; (2) explaining abuse through “self-esteem;” (3) performing survivorhood through “respectable” motherhood and sexuality. Through these processes, women craft a domestic violence narrative and an institutional performance of survivorhood, both of which allow them to navigate institutional pressures. These therapeutic narratives and performances, however, also rewrite the structural elements of violence into (feminized) accounts of psychological failure and overcoming. Thus, women navigate a paradox when they become survivors: they must tell stories of psychological recovery, even as those stories obfuscate the very infrastructure of violence. It is this disjuncture between individualized narratives of harm and the structural work of survival that I examine in this work. I develop the concept of the “paradox of legibility” to generalize this disjuncture, and to highlight women’s labor of making themselves credible amidst structural and institutional constraints.

Optics of the State: The Politics of Making Poverty Visible in Brazil and Mexico

“…The vast literature inspired by his work has also shown how the implementation of official categories can reorganize societies in unintended ways, by stimulating the emergence of new types of social movements (Paschel 2016, Loveman 2014 or politicizing notions of collective identity and claim-making long after the initial legibility projects are over (Wyrtzen 2015). Relatedly, scholars have demonstrated how states' knowledge-making efforts can impose disciplinary control on its subjects, who need to respond to the way the state sees them in order to become legible as, for example, domestic violence survivors (Sweet 2019), "deserving" immigrants (Menjívar and Lakhani 2016), or "good families" (Reich 2005). In other words, scholars have focused on the consequences of legibility for the local populations in which these projects of seeing are implemented and less for the states that implement them.…”

“…To date, the sociological study of state legibility has looked at knowledge-making efforts mostly from the perspective of disciplinary control and surveillance (Foucault 1980, Murray Li 2007, Lara-Míllan 2017. While this focus has provided fertile ground to explore the often invisible, fuzzy and internalized ways that the state classifies and creates groups of people (Hacking 2002, Menjívar and Lakhani 2016, Sweet 2019, it has, nonetheless, overlooked how states might vary in their drive to discipline, and how these variations shape legibility projects. In contrast, in this paper, I respond to Tanya Murray Li's call to study legibility as a "continuum that ranges from the more to the less coercive, and that encompasses a range of tactics and techniques" (2005,387) to show that not all states prioritize creating a synoptic view of society, aimed at imposing control and order.…”

Narrating the harm of rape: how rape victims invoke different models of psychological trauma

“…The focus is on the victim who is rewarded for compliance with treatment programs that aim to transform the victim into a successful survivor. A successful survivor is a victim who is able to demonstrate psychological recovery via expert means (Sweet, 2018). A critical component of survivorhood, according to Sweet (2018), is creating a narrative of psychological transformation, which can be used to access aid.…”

“…A successful survivor is a victim who is able to demonstrate psychological recovery via expert means (Sweet, 2018). A critical component of survivorhood, according to Sweet (2018), is creating a narrative of psychological transformation, which can be used to access aid. This medical narrative is valuable as currency to gain sympathy and recognition, as well as legal outcomes.…”

Beyond ‘Safeguarding’ and ‘Empowerment’ in Hong Kong: Towards a Relational Model for Supporting Women Who Have Left their Abusive Partners

“…When the rise of survivorhood marginalises victimhood, it can also become stigmatizing however (Sweet 2019). While victimhood might restrain women from articulating their experiences and personhood differently from being blamelessly weak and powerless, it can enable women to explicate their needs and garner sympathy and assistance (Leisenring 2006).…”