Description
"Surviving Troubles" is designed to ethnographically investigate and document the discursive construction of incest and sexual abuse as it is represented, experienced and embodied by sexual abuse survivors in one North American community. The immediate objective is to discover how individual female victim/survivors conceptualize their trauma and their recovery, and to determine the specific relationship between medical/psychoanalytic treatment discourses and the survivors' own reconstructed notions of self. Lastly, to trace the deployment of public cultural dialogue about sexual abuse and women's bodies as it is manifest through institutionalized policies and practices in one community. It utilizes a theoretical framework which links social constructivist notions of the body and sexuality, feminist approaches to gender and power, and medical anthropological notions of healing and embodiment.
