The Politics of Surviving

How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath

Paige Sweet

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520976429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

For women who have experienced domestic violence, proving that you are a "good victim" is no longer enough. Victims must also show that they are recovering, as if domestic violence were a disease: they must transform from "victims" into "survivors." Women's access to life-saving resources may even hinge on "good" performances of survivorhood. Through archival and ethnographic research, Paige L. Sweet reveals how trauma discourses and coerced therapy play central roles in women's lives as they navigate state programs for assistance. Sweet uses an intersectional lens to uncover how "resilience" and "survivorhood" can become coercive and exclusionary forces in women's lives. With nuance and compassion, The Politics of Surviving wrestles with questions about the gendered nature of the welfare state, the unintended consequences of feminist mobilizations for anti-violence programs, and the women who are left behind by the limited forms of citizenship we offer them.

PART I Survivorhood

1 Building a Therapeutic Movement

During the 1970s, feminists established an extensive network of domestic violence shelters, hotlines, and drop-in centers. Their aims were radical: to dismantle the patriarchal structures that allowed domestic violence to occur and blamed women for the abuse inflicted upon them. They marched, they demanded funds, they published the names of suspected rapists in underground newspapers, they hid battered women in their homes and churches.¹ Shelters were meant to act as “physical and symbolic” boundaries separating women from male violence.² Early documents from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) reveal that many of the first domestic violence shelters served queer and trans women and that the shelter movement was “born in [the] gay bars” of cities across the country.³ One of the first shelters in the country (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was started by two queer mothers on welfare who opened their apartments to women fleeing their homes.⁴ Activists met in donated rooms and stayed in sleeping bags on the floor while they hustled for money to develop training materials.⁵ Feminists faced harassment from authorities—the Portland police even tracked them for suspected “terrorist acts” thought to be coordinated through a mysterious “underground” shelter network. By the mid-1970s, there were already between three hundred and five hundred grassroots shelters operating across the United States.⁶

Through community projects, protests, and public testimonies, feminists called on the state to assume its responsibility for protecting women from patriarchal violence. Feminists argued that “private” violence was in fact a public issue of women’s citizenship. Their claims therefore necessarily involved the state. However, activists relationship to the state was ambivalent. It was common for activists to hold genuine commitments to both resisting and using the state.⁷ No stark line existed between state-averse feminists who knew government cooperation would be their death knell and more “practical” feminists who sought to influence policy and change institutions.⁸ While scholars are often nostalgic for a pure, grassroots feminist past, the truth is fuzzier. And in fact, such a distinction between pro-state and anti-state activists is anachronistic, a reflection of contemporary rather than historical realities. The shelter movement could be described as revolutionary in its approach to redefining and expanding the welfare state—or perhaps as anti-state in its infancy, following the goals of movements that operated outside the state such as the Women’s Health Movement and the Black Panthers.⁹ Nevertheless, activists quickly saw the benefits of applying for federal funds.

When they built the first wave of shelters, hotlines, and drop-in centers, feminists won resources from Johnson-era programs like the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), Law Enforcement Administration Assistance (LEAA), and Title XX grants for economically underserved women.¹⁰ By 1976, 65 percent of shelters relied on CETA funds.¹¹ NCADV organizers spent much of their time teaching local organizations how to apply for federal grants.¹² Activists were optimistic about using these distributive federal policies for their own aims, and that optimism formed the basis of their approach to the state.¹³ Activists coordinated White House meetings and sought to establish domestic violence as a “top priority social problem” for state policy.¹⁴ Even feminists who were trepidatious about state involvement saw it as a necessary site of agitation because they addressed what they thought was an expanding welfare state—and sought to expand it further.

However, another revolution was afoot. This movement, which would come to be known as neoliberalism, sought to undo the Johnson-era projects that had (unintentionally) galvanized feminism and other liberation projects.¹⁵ Neoliberals—intent on installing market logic in all arenas of social life, including the state—stripped the welfare state that had provided the seeds of the shelter movement, dissolving entire funding sources (such as CETA) and moving money into block grants to be administered by states.¹⁶ Neoliberalism, as it aligned with neoconservatism, sought to replace the idea that “women” deserved unique state protections with the ideology that “families” and “victims of crime” should be the locus of state support, albeit limited.¹⁷ With Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, funding for domestic violence programs was immediately under threat—both by a restrictive anti-welfare ideology and by “family values” advocacy groups. Reagan quickly abolished the fledgling Office on Domestic Violence after his election.¹⁸ Under this new regime—in which neoconservatives and neoliberals were allied—feminists were forced to make their claims to a new state.¹⁹

The neoliberal revolution would come to dramatically reshape, though not forestall, the work of the anti-violence movement. It might seem strange that domestic violence services actually gained ground in the 1980s, the height of neoliberal retrenchment. This was in part because “victims of crime” became a new category of state investment during these years, as activists and federal policy makers found common cause by zeroing in on the figure of the innocent victim. In a landmark federal report in the 1980s, Assistant Attorney General Lois Herrington wrote that victims are “forgotten citizens” who have been “blamed and ignored” rather than assisted by courts.²⁰ This policy report would come to have significant influence over victim policy in the coming years, helping to pass the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) in 1984, which provides millions of dollars annually for domestic violence services. The Task Force was led by Herrington, who had a long-standing interest in domestic violence, but also included key figures of the rising conservative right, such as Pat Robertson. Notorious segregationist Strom Thurmond helped usher the bill through the Senate. Progressive policy makers, anti-violence activists, and neoliberals and conservatives forged a joint effort around the innocent victim: a powerful figure who was used to justify a stronger, “protective” penal state and to create a new “victim services” branch of the welfare state.²¹

On the heels of state interest in “victims of crime” came an even more targeted interest in “family violence.” Anti-violence activists had been laboring in shelters and drop-in centers for over a decade before federal policy makers passed legislation specific to their efforts. Over the course of the next fifteen years, the federal government would pass two key pieces of legislation addressing violence against women—the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA) in 1984 and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994—funneling millions of dollars into feminist organizations.²² It’s nothing short of stunning that this happened in the 1980s and 1990s during the roll-out of the neoliberal and neoconservative revolution. The discourse of innocent victimhood helped pass these bills, but it wasn’t enough. Feminists also had to convince policy makers that they were the experts, that their agencies could provide effective services. Just as importantly, they could do so in private organizations far from the state, providing in-kind services rather than direct cash assistance to victims.²³

I’ll make the case in this chapter that feminists became legitimate state experts by investing in the figure of the psychological victim (the trauma sufferer) and inventing the “survivor” (the figure of therapeutic recovery). The expertise they developed in order to satisfy policy makers was therapeutic expertise. Therapy promised to heal the family’s “dependency” on state programs, a concern of neoconservatives and neoliberals alike.²⁴ For this reason, the human services infrastructure premised on therapeutic rehabilitation in private organizations remained intact even during Reagan’s dramatic 1980s funding cuts.²⁵ Further, neoconservative fears about the “crisis of the family” were bound up in public health discourses about social “illnesses” and violence as “disease,” popularizing treatment and recovery models for violence.

Feminists were prepared to offer therapeutic services because their organizations were already quasi-therapeutic, premised on “lay therapy” models including feminist peer counseling and consciousness-raising.²⁶ Feminists were good at convincing policy makers that their organizations should be the locus of new federal funds because they had already developed successful counseling models for abused women and children. The emphasis on therapeutic recovery was evident from the beginning of feminist collaborations with the state, even in the name of the first proposed FVPSA bill in 1977, presciently called the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act. The models of therapeutic governance that would come to pervade the welfare state throughout the 1980s and 1990s, then, drew from feminist therapeutic expertise and from discourses of women’s psychological “dependencies.”

So, how did feminists manage to implement a large-scale federal response to violence against women during the 1980s and 1990s, years characterized by neoliberal retrenchment and the rise of “family values”? They convinced policy makers that they could respond to the “crisis of the family” and they made themselves into the experts who could “treat” victims—who could, in fact, make victims into trauma survivors. As scholars have pointed out, the victim is an ideal figure for state intervention.²⁷ She sets the foundation for a stronger punitive response—to save her—as well as a clinical infrastructure geared toward her recovery.²⁸ In this way, activists became, as political scientist Kristin Bumiller has argued, part of the carceral state and the therapeutic welfare state at the same time.²⁹

Existing research on the anti-violence movement focuses overwhelmingly on its participation in expanding the carceral state.³⁰ However, I find that the medicalization of domestic violence has been equally consequential—and in fact, a necessary condition for criminalization.³¹ Feminists combined their philosophies of care with penal and therapeutic discourses in order to secure funds and execute complex direct service work. In order to become indispensable to the state, feminists developed unique counseling models; they constructed women as psychological sufferers and bearers of “family” health; and they created stable, therapeutic organizations that became integral to a burgeoning “trauma industry” in the 1990s.³² In this way, feminists did not simply adapt to neoliberalism—they helped enact it.³³ As I show through original archival research, feminists helped generate the “shadow state,” or the “parastate apparatus” of voluntary organizations that would come to deliver welfare services under neoliberalism.³⁴ As Melinda Cooper argues, neoliberalism did not dismantle the welfare state but reconfigured it in order to regulate “needy” families through social obligations and therapeutic interventions.³⁵

By satisfying the demands of both neoliberals (who wanted to send social problems “down” to families and to the states) and neoconservatives (who were obsessed with the “crisis” of the family), feminists used federal funds to build their own brand of therapeutic expertise. They promised that they could treat “victims of crime” and heal families—and they promised to do that in organizations far from the state that seemed not to be part of it at all. Feminists forced the state to redistribute federal dollars to services for women fleeing their homes—but they did so by submerging their more radical politics into theories of traumatic victimization and by investing in the figure of the survivor, someone who can recover from violence, rebuild a “healthy” family and “break the cycle of violence.” This chapter tells the story of the anti-violence movement’s contested investments in the therapeutic state, a terrain of struggle that feminists have shaped and been shaped by.³⁶

FEMINISTS POSE THE PROBLEM

States and their component parts undoubtedly embody several sets of interests, only some of which intentionally or unintentionally serve women well. However, the precise sets of interests that dominate at a particular moment are not given a priori, but rather are formed out of struggle and negotiation within a political field.

Ray (2000, 14)

The feminist anti-violence movement is arguably one of the most “successful” social movements in US history. Domestic violence and rape services—though still chronically underfunded—are firmly incorporated into the state and into public expectations of aid. There are nearly two thousand domestic violence programs operating in the United States today.³⁷ Almost all of them rely to a significant degree on federal funds. Three big pieces of federal legislation fund domestic violence services. The federal Office on Violence Against Women administered a budget of close to half a billion dollars in 2018. Domestic violence is defined as a crime in all fifty states and in federal law. There are over two hundred specialized domestic violence court...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction: Domestic Violence and the Politics of Trauma
• Part I   Survivorhood
• Part II   Surviving
• Conclusion: Traumatic Citizenship
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index