First Do No Harm? Female Hysteria, Trauma, and the (Bio)Logic of Violence in Iraq

Abstract

In Iraq, women are frequently rushed to the hospital in severe anxiety, diagnosed by medical professionals in local hospitals as “hysterical.” The treatments proffered are often disturbingly violent in their own right, indicating the normalization of violence in the conflict zone and the rationalizing discourses of biomedicine to this end. Based on fieldwork in the northern Kurdish region, held to be a prosperous beacon of “postconflict” stability in an otherwise war-torn country, I consider the ways in which neoliberal interventionist agendas, medical technologies in the aftermath of war, and gendered narratives of the Kurdish nation coalesce to valorize particular forms of suffering while devaluing others as both inherently “feminine” and devoid of either agency or recuperative value. I argue that the violence of such biomedical beliefs forms a “natural” rationalized corollary of wider logics of violence in the war zone, and that both inscribe non-normative expressions of trauma in gendered terms.