Sunday, March 16, 2014
Presidential Board Room (Omni Shoreham)
Under socialism domestic violence remained a taboo topic in East Germany. Thought to arise out of the inequalities brought about by capitalism, family abuse officially did not exist in the East, where the conditions for emancipation had been realised. However, this position conflicted both with women’s often daily experience of violence, and with the work of those institutions, such as state-run marriage counselling centres and divorce courts, whose function was to examine and manage the inner workings of socialist marriages and family life. In this paper I will explore the ways in which East German divorce courts dealt with the issue of domestic violence and how in doing so how they sought to create ideal socialist citizens. Drawing from Foucault’s work on governmentality and the scholarship on morality in state-making (Biess, van Rahden, Heineman), I will argue that through using a language of morality these divorce courts assessed the socialist credentials of the individuals appearing before them, rewarding those who met state expectations and disadvantaging those who did not. Within this matrix, domestic violence fit uneasily, at once evidence of a failed socialist consciousness on the part of the abuser, but also of the woman experiencing the violence. Studying these cases then not only draws our attention to the role of moral frameworks in state making processes, but also to the position that everyday forms of violence played under socialism.
