Medicalizing violence: victimhood, trauma and corporeality in post-genocide Rwanda

Abstract

In this work, I argue that among the mental illnesses recognized in Rwanda, post-traumatic stress disorder (or trauma) is uniquely exempted from social stigma due to its inextricable link with the 1994 genocide. As it afflicts only genocide survivors, trauma symptoms validate the recognition of violence and victimhood. Individuals do not occupy a space of moral uncertainty, as they embody the memory of the genocide and the innocence of its victims, and so participate in the creation of a historical past shared by all Rwandans. I investigate the legitimacy of trauma as a lens for understanding the relationship between morality and power. With that purpose in mind, I analyse the context in which trauma becomes a performative aspect of victimhood, disambiguating identities and mapping social relationships. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that the moral legitimacy associated with this psychiatric disorder is deeply rooted in its corporeal nature, as the translation of signs into symptoms is linked to, but also prescinds from, any immediate experience of violence. Data suggest that diagnoses of trauma often take into account individuals' ethnic backgrounds, discerning between legitimate and illegitimate forms of memory, and appropriating the former within official historical discourses of the genocide. The production of moral entitlement through the body thus endorses a dichotomous logic that is crucial to the construction of an ideal status of nationhood which is built upon a very exclusivist recognition of suffering.