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The relationship between feminism and biomedicine is complex and uneven. Medical sociologists and feminist scholars often theorize this relationship as one of co-optation. Biomedicine may appropriate feminist empowerment language for marketing and profit. Or, feminists may agitate for biomedical inclusion, only to have 'their' problem redefined. And yet, co-optation frameworks suggest that the relationship between biomedicine and feminism is - in the end - reducible to biomedicine, that biomedical power is the mover and the outcome in that relationship. Starting the analysis with feminist-based institutions rather than biomedical ones, this paper uses the case of domestic violence to complicate such 'takeover' explanations. Specifically, this paper tracks the rise of trauma discourse in the domestic violence field, asking why feminist actors - who have long rejected psychiatric knowledge and therapeutic practice in domestic violence work - now turn to 'trauma' as a vanguard paradigm of the field. Based on interviews and archival data, findings suggest that 'trauma' sutures together feminist and mental health frameworks, centering victims' psychology and bodily 'dysregulation' in domestic violence services, yet rejecting the diagnostic work of the mental health field. Pushing past notions of biomedical takeover, co-optation, or de-politicization, this paper draws from the concept of 'articulation' to demonstrate how the tensions between biomedicine and feminism are kept in play - rather than subsumed into each other - in order to produce the new reality of domestic violence trauma. Domestic violence is being biomedicalized, but feminist histories animate that process, transforming the implementation of biomedical logics and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) broke rank with the American Psychiatric Association (APA) over the release of the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), announcing that it would use its own biological categorization system in its place. Using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, we analyze the debates sparked by the release of the DSM-5 and suggest that psychiatry is propelled forward by a fundamental mismatch between its imaginary identification as an objective, biologically-based science and its fragmented actuality as a symbolic system. Leaders in psychiatry continuously bump into the field's failure to elucidate the biological causes of mental disorders, compelling them to reiterate psychiatry's fantasy identifications anew: by pinning the profession's future on the "mysterious" brain; by reinventing the structure of the unconscious through brain imagery; and by absorbing "the social" into neural function. We suggest that biologizing mental illness serves to ontologize rather than destigmatize social differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic violence literature has attended to the ways in which overreliance on the criminal justice system distorts the feminist goals of the anti-violence movement. In this paper, I extend this literature by asking how the movement's reliance on the institution of biomedicine could also be part of this de-politicizing trend. Drawing on interviews with domestic violence medical advocates and doctors, I examine the use of "chronic" diagnostic labels for domestic violence victims and their effect on the boundaries between biomedical and feminist work. I find that medical advocates construct themselves as domestic violence "specialists" in order to "manage" this part of victims' care in the clinical setting. This construction transforms advocacy into a stage of the diagnostic process and feminist knowledge becomes scientized in line with the demands of biomedical inclusion. This process then naturalizes the category of "women-asvictims," obscuring the social conditions that create domestic violence and the potential of feminist advocacy to disrupt existing gender relations. Gender becomes an "absent presence" in that the social category of gender is made invisible while women as a medical category are constructed as a "high-risk population" for victimization. I show how this medicalized framework might restrict the transformative potential of the anti-violence movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]