Silence as a Response to Everyday Violence: Understanding Domination and Distress through the Lens of Fantasy

TY - JOUR

T1 - Silence as a Response to Everyday Violence

T2 - Understanding Domination and Distress through the Lens of Fantasy

AU - Gammeltoft, Tine

PY - 2016/12/1

Y1 - 2016/12/1

N2 - Across the world, existing research indicates that many women respond with silence to marital abuse. This article offers an ethnographic investigation of the social and psychic forces behind Vietnamese women’s silencing of violence and a theoretical exploration of how the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy—understood as unconscious or subconscious mental processes—may contribute to the analysis of everyday violence and psychic distress. Distinguishing between what I term deliberate and subconscious silence, I explore the role that fantasy plays when Vietnamese women silently endure intimate partner violence. Closer ethnographic attention to the fantasy-constructions that sustain day-to-day lives can, I argue, strengthen the capacity of anthropology to comprehend how systems of everyday violence are upheld and rendered socially invisible.

AB - Across the world, existing research indicates that many women respond with silence to marital abuse. This article offers an ethnographic investigation of the social and psychic forces behind Vietnamese women’s silencing of violence and a theoretical exploration of how the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy—understood as unconscious or subconscious mental processes—may contribute to the analysis of everyday violence and psychic distress. Distinguishing between what I term deliberate and subconscious silence, I explore the role that fantasy plays when Vietnamese women silently endure intimate partner violence. Closer ethnographic attention to the fantasy-constructions that sustain day-to-day lives can, I argue, strengthen the capacity of anthropology to comprehend how systems of everyday violence are upheld and rendered socially invisible.

U2 - 10.1111/etho.12140

DO - 10.1111/etho.12140

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0091-2131

VL - 44

SP - 427

EP - 447

JO - Ethos

JF - Ethos

IS - 4

ER -