Ya no quisiera ni ser yoLa experiencia de la violencia doméstica en un grupo de mujeres y varones provenientes de zonas rurales y urbanas en México

Abstract

Author: Clara Juarez-Ramirez Title: I wouldnt want even to be me anymore: Domestic violence experience within a group of women and men from rural and urban areas in Mexico. Key words: Domestic violence, gender, subjectivity, supporting nets, suffering. Doctorate Program in Anthropology of Medicine 1998 2001. Department of Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Work. The general purpose of this research was to understand, through the discourse of women and men who had lived or were living into a kind of conjugal violence experience, the subjectivity structured around the meanings of partners maltreatment, social support as well as physical and emotional indispositions related to this experience. This research inferred, as a central point, that family violence is a structural problem within human groups, for this reason it surpasses races, gender and socio-economical conditions, this is, it is exerted with a social imaginary based on a culture of masculine dominance that controls, regulates and rules a social practice in both sexes which material substrate goes back up to the social and sexual division of work. However, we state that the construction of gender is a socio-cultural process that lasts a life time, therefore people have the possibility during their lives to modify the violent practices they have learned socially so that both victims of violence and their male or females perpetrators can avoid it. For these reasons, we decided to study the phenomenon from an interpretative-hermeneutic perspective that states to consider social problems from a daily action and practice of involved people, since it is in this practice where - day after day - the dynamic of abuse gets meanings and provides a sense. In order to answer this statement, the central question that guided the empirical quest in this research was: how is it possible to build, to give a meaning and to show in an everyday life the experience of living in an environment of violence? The methodological design began from a qualitative approach, observing the problem as a phenomenological way and carried out an ethnographic approximation to different scenarios where the field work was done. Three stages were planned combining the observation in a rural area and an urban area. With this approximation we were able to document 42 cases of women and men originated in the scenarios mentioned above. The gotten information was subjected to an analysis of discourse for which the Ethnograph software was applied. To carry out this technique, six categories and twenty one subcategories were built, each one with a conceptual definition regarding different specific objectives stated in this research. One of the contributions is that even though the experience of conjugal violence can be referred to socio-cultural practices that support gender inequality and have been reproduced historically through social institutions, the results of the research and the interaction of couples who conjugal relationship was interfered by abuse, permit to defend the thesis that violence within the family is a reflex of multiple social structured indispositions that express the contradictions and paradoxes of the system.