First Do No Harm? Female Hysteria, Trauma, and the (Bio)Logic of Violence in Iraq

Abstract

In Iraq, women are frequently rushed to the hospital in severe anxiety, diagnosed by medical professionals in local hospitals as “hysterical.” The treatments proffered are often disturbingly violent in their own right, indicating the normalization of violence in the conflict zone and the rationalizing discourses of biomedicine to this end. Based on fieldwork in the northern Kurdish region, held to be a prosperous beacon of “postconflict” stability in an otherwise war-torn country, I consider the ways in which neoliberal interventionist agendas, medical technologies in the aftermath of war, and gendered narratives of the Kurdish nation coalesce to valorize particular forms of suffering while devaluing others as both inherently “feminine” and devoid of either agency or recuperative value. I argue that the violence of such biomedical beliefs forms a “natural” rationalized corollary of wider logics of violence in the war zone, and that both inscribe non-normative expressions of trauma in gendered terms.

Keywords:

• biomedicine
• embodiment
• gender
• Iraq
• trauma
• violence

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research on which this article is based was made possible by a research grant from the British Academy. I would like to thank Hannes Artens, whose comments on an earlier version of this paper were influential, as well as the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments helped immensely in providing me new insights and clarifying my final arguments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Keeler

SARAH KEELER has taught at universities and conducted research in Iraq. She is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent.