Paige L. Sweet

Centered on the concept of trauma, this project examines how processes of medicalization affect domestic violence politics, service provision, and the ways in which women understand and tell stories about their abuse. Through the site of trauma this project links macro-level political shifts in anti-violence feminism and medicine with micro-level transformations in women’s narratives of abuse and their interactions with service providers. Using in-depth interviews and archival research, this project tracks how feminist politics become entangled with biomedicine through the concept of domestic violence trauma, how that concept is made into a reality via professional practices, and how women negotiate this new reality in their stories of survival and transformation.