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Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic contribution casts light on female survivors’ emotions related to the failure of their dreams and hopes. An intersectional approach shows the social consequences of the embodiment of unachieved aspirations by survivors considering cultural and socio-economic factors in Italy.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution aims to provide an anthropological perspective on how emotions related to unfulfilled hopes and ambitions are embodied by survivors of gender-based violence seeking help from the Italian NGO system. I aim to show how the embodiment of these emotions affects their everyday life and its social consequences. The multi-sited fieldwork took place within the Italian anti-violence network of NGOs based in Milan (Italy, 2018-2021). The ethnographic methodology adopted (long-term participant observation, semi-structured interviews, collection of women’s narrative biographies) allows me to understand how the ‘pawns’ of political, institutional, and structural forces emerge as women who shape their own aspirations. My analysis of survivors’ unfulfilled dreams and aspirations required an ethnography capable of grasping a sense of the unknowable and the unachievable in the flow of daily life, the 'quasi-event', the tension towards the future that resides in the present. My ethnographic focus on the voices of more than twenty women sheds light on their experience of a ‘new marginality’ as a social consequence of living in the shadow of unachieved life goals. Survivors experience a persistent marginality because of the failure of their dreams of prosperity in terms of job placement, personal improvement, and liberation from traditional gender positioning. The specific positioning of the survivor (determined by ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, gender) in the social arena shapes women’s life trajectories toward unrealised hopes. The woman's body becomes the site where hopes and failures are negotiated and materialized subjectively daily.