ABOUT THIS BOOK

The end of the Pinochet regime in Chile saw the emergence of an organized feminist movement that influenced legal and social responses to gender-based violence, and with it new laws and avenues for reporting violence that never before existed. What emerged were grassroots women's rights organizations, challenging and engaging the government and NGOs to confront long-ignored problems in responding to marginalized victims.

In Traumatic States, anthropologist Nia Parson explores the development of methods of care and recovery from domestic violence. She interviews and contextualizes the lives of numerous individuals who have confronted these acts, as victims, authorities, and activists. Ultimately, Traumatic States argues that facing the challenges of healing both body and mind, and addressing the fundamental inequalities that make those challenges even more formidable, are part of the same battle.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Nia Parson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University.

REVIEWS

"Parson's book is a compelling narrative of how women make sense of gendered forms of violence they encounter in the home at the hands of their husbands and in their communities at the hand of the state."
--Madelaine Adelman, Arizona State University— -

"Parson writes in an accessible yet urgent style, making clear to a scholarly as well as public audience why the failure to address domestic violence and violence against women, even in a remote context, does harm to us all."
--Hillary Haldane, coeditor of Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence— -

"Parson's book is a compelling narrative of how women make sense of gendered forms of violence they encounter in the home at the hands of their husbands and in their communities at the hand of the state."
--Madelaine Adelman, Arizona State University— -

"Parson writes in an accessible yet urgent style, making clear to a scholarly as well as public audience why the failure to address domestic violence and violence against women, even in a remote context, does harm to us all."
--Hillary Haldane, coeditor of Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1. Unfinished Care

2. Feeling the State's Gaze on Intimate Violence

3. "Exhaustion": Becoming a Victim and a Deserving Citizen

4. Entanglements of Violence and Individualized "Cures"

5. Sanacion: Excavating the "Ordinary" to Move beyond Violence and Misery

6. Contingencies of Care

7. The Ills of Medicalizing Violence and the Work of Ethnography in Processes of Care

Appendix 1: Life History Interviews

Appendix 2

Notes

Works Cited

Index