Abstract
In the context of an ever-shrinking Victims of Crime Act Fund, the possible futures available to feminist antiviolence organizations in America grow increasingly tenuous. Using a queer intersectional feminist lens, sociologist Paige L. Sweet’s (2021) The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath offers a timely exploration of the long and contentious history of domestic violence organizations as both an ally and adversary to a gendered welfare state, in the process complicating feminist social movement organizations as the intermediary through which the state perpetrates structural interpersonal violence via therapeutic biopolitical governance. This unique kind of governance comes with its own set of expectations in terms of how women who have experienced domestic violence are expected and at times coerced into properly performing resilience by remaking themselves into a new type of “traumatic” citizen that is legible in the eyes of the state and therefore deserving of the label “survivor” rather than “victim.”
The Politics of Surviving features a “split” methodology by using qualitative data collected from a variety of different sources, including ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with domestic violence professionals, and life story interviews with survivors of domestic violence. Sweet also incorporates a rich historical analysis by cruising preexisting archival sites and compiling original collections, all of which were supplemented by interviews with veteran activists in acknowledgment of the intersectional erasures that so often characterize taxonomies of knowledge. Sweet’s dual status as an outside researcher and an inside domestic violence crisis advocate further contributes to her uniquely compelling perspective on contemporary feminist antiviolence organizing. Throughout this project, Sweet personally embodies the self-reflective tensions experienced by so many domestic violence professionals grappling with how to truly advocate for and offer support to those in need while also simultaneously operating under the constraints of inherently coercive and sometimes even violent sociolegal institutions.
Sweet’s The Politics of Surviving effectively debunks the myth that domestic violence is in any way an intimate or private occurrence, revealing the very public nature of interpersonal violence as reinforced by the state and inflicted upon women who have experienced domestic violence, especially when those women are already marginalized along other intersecting axes of oppression. As suggested in the title of the book, how women navigate the aftermath of this state violence is a political decision which in turn determines their access or lack thereof to critical state-controlled assistance programs. Sweet uncovers a pathway whereby women who have experienced domestic violence are coerced into seeking services from domestic violence organizations, where therapy programs instill the requisite trauma frameworks needed for women to properly perform the stereotypical conception of survivorhood, albeit at the expense of truly feminist models of violence intervention. Women who prove themselves as “good” survivors worthy of state support retain some degree of political inclusion via their newfound traumatic citizenship. Conceptualizing survivorship as a type of learned performance exposes the muddiness of the victim–survivor binary, allowing Sweet in turn to highlight the creative resistance women perform despite having to contend with very limited rights and options in the aftermath of domestic violence.
The first half of The Politics of Surviving, entitled “Survivorhood,” explores the historical contexts that have shaped grassroots feminist enterprises into the contemporary domestic violence agency, where discourses that medicalize trauma run rampant in crisis intervention work. In the latter half of the text, “Surviving” focuses on the experiences of women who must utilize these medicalized trauma frameworks in order to perform the requisite perception of survivorhood needed in order to access supportive care from the state, a performance that sometimes hinges upon reformulating a woman’s relationship with heterosexuality and the institution of marriage itself. Sweet’s arguments build upon previous analyses of feminist antiviolence efforts and social movement organizations while also contributing to emerging critiques of the broader nonprofit industrial complex.
In light of Sweet’s compelling criticisms of the complicit role that domestic violence organizations play in mediating structural interpersonal violence, it is clear that these groups are not always acting in the best interests of women. The question remains, then, how feminist social movement organizations can be reframed in the current neoliberal context so as to actually support the tangible needs of women beyond just perpetuating trauma paradigms. Some more radical abolitionist thinkers might even argue that the purportedly feminist domestic violence agency with its long history of carceral entanglements has no place in the antiviolence movement. Sweet does not offer a concrete answer as to what should be the future for domestic violence agencies as part of the larger antiviolence movement. Nonetheless, The Politics of Surviving is a critical and thought-provoking reminder of the egregious consequences of a still significantly limited American welfare state.
