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CHAPTER 3

Corporeal Dimensions

of Gender Violence

Woman's Self and Body

Es que yo pienso que para ser felíz, uno tiene que sufrir

primero, y yo no sé como Usted va a interpretar esto, pero

yo estoy bien consciente de que así es. La gente me ha

criticado porque salí embarazada y él está casado con otra;

la gente ha hablado mucho. Pero a lo mejor todavía no he

sufrido lo suficiente como para poder entender la vida.

[I think that in order to be happy, first one has to suffer,

and I don't know how you'll interpret this, but I'm very

conscious that this is how it is. People have criticized me

because I became pregnant and he [the father of the child]

is married to another woman; people have talked a lot. But

maybe I still haven't suffered enough to understand life.]

—Teresa, twenty-one years old

Yo no le puedo decir con exactitud, vaya, por ejemplo, con

números y estadísticas, pero con excepción de quizás uno o

dos casos, yo diría que todas las mujeres en este pueblo son

maltratadas de una u otra forma.

[I really can't tell you exactly, with for example, numbers

and statistics, but with the exception of maybe one or two

cases I would say that every woman in this town is

mistreated in one way or another.]

—Emilia, health care worker

Both gendered and symbolic violence are central to an examination of the embodiment of suffering, not only in the personal, individual dimensions of the physical body, but in its social dimensions as well. In social science theory there have been multiple approaches to the examination of bodily themes and questions surrounding the body, from postmodernist to poststructuralist (see Williams 1999). Green (1998) calls for attention to concrete manifestations of suffering in theorizing about how suffering is embodied, as violence inscribes the body with message and significance.

Heeding Green's call, I focus here on concrete corporeal manifestations of different forms of violence among ladinas in eastern Guatemala, using a sociologically (and anthropologically) informed approach that is substantively grounded. This approach situates corporeal questions within unequal social structures and thus contributes to debates about the relationship between body and society. However, in contrast to examining issues of representation or sexuality, I follow Farmer (2003, 2004) and others (e.g., Martín-Baró 1991a, 1991b, 1991c; Torres-Rivas 1998) to focus on concrete expressions of social suffering, on how multiple forms of violence and macro forces coalesce on the body. Similar to Barbara Sutton's (2010: 2) focus on the body as a way to capture multiple social and material crises in Argentina, my angle here also illuminates how forces beyond individuals’ control “reach…lives and bodies in deeply personal ways.” This examination therefore highlights how “power, history, and gender operate through embodied subjectivity and concrete bodily activity” (Green 1998: 4); how the body connects women to extralocal, even global, realms (Sutton 2004, 2010), and how suffering is normalized in small, routine moments. In Martín-Baró's (1994: 13) conceptualization, this examination exposes the “normal abnormality” that the vulnerable endure.

I first examine the physical expressions of violence as they are manifested in the women's bodies, such as common health ailments that result from emotional distress or from the structural violence that shapes their lives. I underscore the normalization of deeply entrenched gender inequality and domination on the more immediate, physical sphere of body ailments and then discuss how the embodiment of violence is expressed in the control of the body in the social milieu, such as women's socializing and visiting. This approach sheds light on visible and invisible, yet still pervasive, forms of violence manifested in the lives of women. Although direct physical harm is usually accompanied by mental and emotional pain, the latter is sometimes inflicted alone, leaving no physical marks and no possibility for tracking in tables or statistics. As Emilia noted in the quotation above, these forms of violence are equally damaging, as women are just as maltratadas in both cases.

I want to repeat here that even though violence is often concretized in individual acts, my project is to call attention to the structures, cognitive frameworks, internalized dispositions, and ideologies that make these individual acts possible, tolerated, and accepted. Men are of course affected by the same structures that make the women's pain possible. And I do not wish to negate the heterogeneity and complexity of men's identities and understandings of themselves that Matthew C. Gutmann (1996, 2007) documents so well.Thus, while violence can come from acts by those close to the women, my analysis refocuses attention away from purely individual acts to the structures that shape the context in which women's and men's views and actions are shaped.

HEALTH AND THE SOMATIZATION OF SOCIAL SUFFERING