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Accepted Paper:
Survival politics: domestic violence, ‘help seeking’ and gendered complaint
Philippa Williams
(Queen Mary University Of London)
This paper engages scholarship on 'survival work', anticipatory politics and 'complaint' to read and reframe practices of 'help seeking' by survivors of domestic violence in rural-urban India
Paper long abstract:
This paper engages scholarship on 'survival work', anticipatory politics and 'complaint' to read and reframe the 'help seeking' experiences of survivors of domestic violence in rural-urban India. In this context, survivors' complaints question and call out practices of violence and injustice, articulated through informal as well as formal relationships. Drawing on testimonies from 180 interviews with survivors in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra the paper examines the embodied and embedded work of making a complaint as 'survival work'. Work that is fraught with politics and power relations. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's concept of Complaint! helps to reframe practices of 'help seeking' as forms of complaint and how these inherently political acts are anticipated, articulated and responded to (or not) and the relentless challenges of being heard within discriminatory family, state and and legal institutions.