Impetus
The late 1990s marked my entry into the world of womenâs health and sexual assault services. Freshly minted from a university degree, I could not believe my good luck when I got a position as a sexual assault worker with a local service in my hometown. I loved the feminist and gender studies subjects I had studied at university and looked on my new position as an extension of those studies, an opportunity to do feminist work âat the coalfaceâ so to speak. It was a workplace and an area of work in which I felt âat homeâ. As an interview participant commented when I returned to this field of work some years later, this time as a researcher, it was a place where it was âeasy to be a feministâ. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, one of my clearest early memories of this period was asking at one of the weekly team meetings if we could discuss what it actually was that made our service a feminist service. The question had been puzzling me for some time. It was not that I doubted it was a feminist service or that we were indeed feminist workers. I guess I meant it was not a criticism masquerading as a questionââI donât think this service really is feministââbut rather something about which I was genuinely curious. I could not quite put my finger on exactly what made how we worked and how our service was organised any different from, say, the child and family service next door.
The consensus reached after the usual animated discussion that characterised these meetings was that we worked from a feminist understanding of sexual violence. I was not entirely convinced. The child and family service next door, I countered, also seemed to have a feminist understanding of sexual violence but did not refer to themselves, nor did others refer to them, as a specifically âfeministâ service. The discussion turned to feminist âvaluesâ, which I possibly, a tad grumpily, found unsatisfactory, the latter being a concept that to this day makes my eyes glaze over; it always seems so vague. Someone suggested we take an unscheduled tea break to ponder the question further. I suspect that at this point I was probably trying peopleâs patience, even as the still slightly indulged ânew kid on the blockâ.
We never did return to the question. This will not surprise anyone who has ever worked in such an organisation. The pressures of the work are constant. There are always issues and tasks that really cannot be set aside to make way for leisurely cerebral conversation: ensuring that a 24-hour crisis roster is covered; working with highly distressed survivors whose needs are critical and immediate; responding to calls from police and hospitals; running workshops in schools and community organisations; meeting with statutory child protection authorities; rushing out the door to pick up a child for their counselling appointment. There is very little downtime. Indeed, something that struck me when I returned to university to undertake my doctoral research was the quietude and orderliness, relatively speaking, of the academic work environment. I relished the luxury of having the space and time just to think.1
In retrospect, I would say that part of my difficulty in identifying specifically what made our service a feminist service (beyond a statement of fact) was that the âtypicalâ markers of a feminist service were missing. Management committees had replaced the earlier non-hierarchical collective structure, all services had a designated coordinator or manager and the era of women working in services based on their lived experience of sexual violence had ended.2 I wanted to understand and to be able to âseeâ how feminist, or indeed other, ideas were evident in the mundane everyday practices and minutiae of regulatory decisions that collectively form a âserviceâ (for example, decisions about who can or cannot use a service).
In formulating these musings into the formal research questions that guided my empirical postdoctoral research, I found Michel Foucaultâs approach to knowledge and discourse provided the methodological tools I needed. Discourse, in the Foucauldian sense, is not solely about language but is evident in language, social practices and institutional regulations (Gavey, 2005, p. 346; Hall, 2004, p. 346). For example, we can find it in the discursive production of the desire to be âa good motherâ and the material and political effects that flow from that, including things like âchildcare books, hospital visits, routine check ups and the normalizing techniques that define satisfactory maternal health or development and so onâ (Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984, p. 219). Discourse governs the way a topic can be talked about and how ideas are put into practice, and it rules out or limits other ways of knowing. Discourses that have assumed dominance can be difficult to identify. They often appear natural or commonplace: the accepted way of thinking, doing and being.
During those first years in the field, I also began to question some of the comfortable dichotomies in which I had been so well schooled in the academyâat least within my particular location in the academy. The easy distinction between, for example, the ways medicine and psychiatry âlabelledâ women through their diagnostic categories (as hysterical, depressed, frigid, borderline personality disorder [BPD]) as opposed to the liberatory ânamingâ by feminism of womenâs previously unrecognised experiences of violence (as victims of sexual violence, domestic violence, or survivors of child sexual assault) did not always seem so clear cut. It seemed to me that we could also use these latter concepts and their attendant language to âlabelâ, to assign a set of identifying characteristics or indeed an identity. The concept of being a âsurvivorâ or a âvictimâ of sexual violence can function as a shorthand way of summing up a person and their experiences, of thinking we know who they are and the source of their worries and concerns or their strengths.
These sorts of musings remained largely private. They were not questions that I could have brought up at a team meeting. We were resolutely, almost stridently, anti-medical model. Concerns were regularly expressed, often in passing, about the increasing âmedicalisationâ of sexual assault. To be honest, had I been questioned too closely, I am not sure I could have explained in any detail what the medicalisation of sexual assault actually was. Part of the problem of this inarticulacy was that certain terms had become embedded in polarised disciplinary, institutional and professional domains. Sometimes hurled almost as terms of abuse, they had come to signify little more than whose side you were on in whatever âwarâ was being waged. The reductive language used to describe the perceived adversarial relationship between feminism and medicine troubled me.3 It stymies the capacity for uncertainty or to query oneâs own position. I wanted more space for uncertainty and curiosity and to engage in dialogue. These initial thoughts about how feminist and medical knowledges function in practice are not always so clear cut enabled me to formulate what became a key research question in my empirical study. I became interested in investigating how trauma, a form of knowledge based in medicine and psychiatry, has been taken up in feminist work against sexual violence. Adopting a Foucauldian approach to discourse and knowledge production, I sought to understand how what appeared to be, and are often promoted as, two seemingly disparate forms of knowledge work together. I was interested in exploring their compatibility more than their incompatibility.
Overview, Context and Key Arguments
This book represents my attempt to respond to those questions and apparent contradictions that I had begun to formulate in those early experiences of practice and which I pursued through my doctoral research in the New South Wales (NSW) sexual assault services sector. It charts the development and application of feminist theories of sexual violence and trauma in the sexual assault services sector in Australia. The key research question that frames the book is, what kind of feminist knowledge is built into the sexual assault services sector and how is it put to work? The book mounts two key arguments. First, I engage with a dominant contention within current feminist theory that state-sponsored institutional responses to sexual violence are restricted in what they can do to achieve feminist goals and have therefore left feminism behind. In the face of such elegiac narratives, I argue for recognition of the legitimacy of institutionalised feminism as an important component of feminist efforts to challenge and respond to sexual violence. In effect, I argue that although they are important in mobilising support for social change, grassroots movements on their own are not enough to tackle the complex problem of sexual violence embedded in the various patriarchal social institutions that support and sustain it. This book thus attempts to reconsider the value of institution-led responses against claims that subversive political action outside the apparatuses of the state is the only way to develop feminist knowledge, practices and interventions that can achieve social change.
Second, the book responds to a key criticism that sexual assault services, and feminist practitioners more broadly, rely on and reproduce a theory of trauma that places victims in an unhelpful position of helplessness and dependency. While I concur with existing scholarship that there are some problematic effects of the contemporary constructions of sexual victimhood as trauma, I suggest that this is the consequence of limitations or gaps in feminist theoretical work on sexual violence, rather than a problem endemic or specific to the process of institutionalisation of sexual assault services. Indeed despite these concerns there has been little empirical research by feminist scholars that has investigated the extent to which these concerns have come to fruition in the work of sexual assault services or feminist practitioners.
I argue that trauma theory is useful for the intimate and important emotional work that sexual assault counsellors do with their clients, whom they see when they are at their most vulnerable. This must be counterbalanced with the criticism that an emphasis on counselling and a reliance on knowledge based in psychiatry and clinical psychology merely reduces the social problem of sexual violence to a problem of individual healing. I argue in this book for a more complex understanding of the relationship between bodies, emotions and institutions as these connections are lived out in peopleâs lives. In addressing this question of trauma, feminism and gendered violence, I suggest that the way in which the field works with the neurobiology of trauma may well be instructive for feminist scholarship on sexual violence. This book thus attends to the productive ways that feminist knowledge works through institutional settings where sexual assault workers come up against the effects of gendered violence on a daily basis.
The empirical work on which this book draws is as I have stated based on research conducted on Australian sexual assault services. Australia has been something of an âearly adopterâ of institutionalised form of sexual assault and rape crisis service. ...