Chronic Victims, Risky Women: Domestic Violence Advocacy and the Medicalization of Abuse

Abstract

Critical literature on the antiviolence movement has largely overlooked the role of biomedical institutions in depoliticizing domestic violence advocacy. Additionally, studies of medicalization have largely failed to attend to domestic violence screening and diagnosis as key technologies through which gendered biomedical surveillance has expanded. Based on interviews with domestic violence medical advocates and health-care providers, I show how domestic violence is being transformed into a chronic disease category, thereby reconfiguring the historical relationship between feminist-based advocacy and medical expertise. What follows is a scientized and degendered transformation of causal explanations for domestic violence: rather than patriarchy, advocates now explain domestic violence using the language of risk. I argue that haunting this construction of women as at high risk for abuse is a reconstituted gender essentialism that casts women victims as passive recipients of their partners’ abusive actions.