From distress to anger to shame

Gender violence, empowerment, and emotional states in Ecuador

Datos Bibliográficos

ID18931493
AutoresKarin Friederic (0000-0003-0923-9547, Wake Forest University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2024
Volumen5
Número1
Páginas81-95
Fecha de publicación2024-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFeminist Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2643-7961 • E-ISSN: 2643-7961
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/fea2.12141
OpenAlexW4394928602
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas26

Changing discourses and laws related to women's rights and intimate partner violence (IPV) in rural Ecuador have profoundly reshaped how local women experience and respond to violence. Women once understood violence as one strand of social suffering embedded in everyday rural life, and they resisted and managed this violence through various collective idioms of distress. Over the last two decades, however, state and non‐governmental organization (NGO) campaigns have isolated gender violence as a discrete phenomenon, emphasizing the “wrongness” of IPV, the validity of righteous anger, and the importance of a legal response to secure the separation of “liberated” women. In this article, I draw on 20 years of fieldwork to discuss how emotional responses to gender violence have shifted in tandem with changing state and transnational discourses and policies in the coastal region of Las Colinas. A deep disjuncture between neoliberal discourses of feminist empowerment and the material reality of rural women's life options leaves many women experiencing new forms of shame when they are unable to turn anger into liberation and escape gender violence in their families and communities. Focusing on the emotional states that states create reveals how political‐economic and discursive shifts are mediated through emotions and collective idioms

Anger · Anxiety · Distress · Emotional distress · Empowerment · Political science · Psychiatry · Shame · Clinical Psychology · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gender Politics and Representation · Psychology · Sex work and related issues · Social Psychology