The domestic in the violence : understanding the experience of violence beyond trauma in contemporary France

Moussion, Adeline Sarah Marie (2024) The domestic in the violence : understanding the experience of violence beyond trauma in contemporary France. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

Trauma has become a legitimate discourse in feminist theory and public intervention on ‘violence against women’. This thesis ethnographically challenges and theoretically questions the usefulness of trauma to analyse the experience of violence that occurs within one’s homes. Drawing on ethnographic research with seven women who accessed dedicated support services in the suburbs of Paris, I argue that trauma does not account for the material implications of violence committed by men with whom they shared housing, familial and parenting bonds, and life resources. I contend that the domestic setting, as a site of habitual action, anticipation, everyday life, spatial knowledge, and violence embedded in state-structural dynamics, contributes to women’s experiences of, and responses to, violence. In the vein of feminist anthropology, I question expert knowledge and professional practices on neurological trauma and violence that circulate in the French context to women’s narrativisation of violence. This thesis contributes to trauma studies, anthropological and feminist research on sexual violence and domestic violence. This thesis shows that women’s experiences, and narrations, of violence were attached to structural hardships and that the harms they described cannot be reduced to the cause/effect logic of trauma. I reconceptualise the harms of violence in relation to the social organisation of parenting, the government response to ‘conjugal violence’ and ‘sexual violence’, to the spatiality of the domestic, reproductive work, administrative paperwork, and conceded efforts, which all mediate women’s experiences. Non-traumatic idioms of the inscription of violence are offered to account for this alternative analysis, which extends beyond the scale of acts and individual abusers and conjures state-structural more than traumatic harms.

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