Vulnerable realities : an ethnography among female survivors of gender-based violence in Italy

Abstract

This thesis sheds light on the intersection between gender-based violence, socio-economic precariousness, and vulnerability through a detailed ethnographic exploration of the intimate experiences of female survivors seeking help from the humanitarian system based in northern Italy. Drawing on extensive fieldwork (August 2021 to August 2022) within anti-violence centres, my ethnographic account provides insights into how survivors navigate their everyday lives while envisioning their futures in marginal and disempowering conditions. Through diverse accounts from a heterogeneous group of women, this research reveals how survivors manoeuvre their subjectivity and agency within socio-political landscapes, encompassing multiple identities.

I demonstrate that women’s experiences are subjective and embodied, yet deeply influenced by migration governance, neoliberal policies that reduce support for vulnerable women, gendered inequalities, and patriarchal structures. By focusing on women’s agency and self-making processes, I highlight the intricate complexities surrounding victimhood and survivorship in the gendered experiences of violence across various domains. It emerges that the relationship between agency and vulnerability is temporally informed, subjective, and intersubjective.

My participants’ lived experiences are imbued with trauma, anxiety, and uncertainty. Through an in-depth analysis of survivors’ embodied symptoms of mental distress, I show how trauma, memory, and women's temporal experiences are interconnected. Engaging with scholarship on violence, trauma, vulnerability, medical anthropology, anthropology of gender, and migration studies, this research delves into survivors and NGO professionals’ daily practices within a humanitarian system shaped by national and international policies. It also contributes to the anthropology of time by showing how the future is negotiated in times of suffering, crisis, and deep personal ruptures.

This thesis pluralises the concept of vulnerability by highlighting its various configurations anchored in women's intimate encounters with gender-based violence, precarious legal statuses, migration, socio-economic instability, and mental health problems. It portrays vulnerability as a multifaceted experience embedded in unique, concrete, and situated realities.