Family matters: Counseling South Asian immigrant domestic violence survivors in a moral border zone

“Family Matters: Counseling South Asian Immigrant Domestic Violence Survivors in a Moral Border Zone” is set in the clinical department at Safe Passage, a large domestic violence agency located in New York City. Tracing the conflicting discourses around suffering, and more broadly subjectivity, counselors and South Asian clients bring to the therapeutic encounter, I demonstrate how these differences produce sites of misunderstanding, configuring Safe Passage as a clinical borderland. Counselors espouse a predominantly psychological construction of subjectivity and expertise in which an essential notion of self corresponds with a progressive liberal politics. In other words, a “successful” client is one who learns to own her feelings, a process linked to secular humanist notions of self-care, agency, and empowerment. As such, domestic violence counseling comes to play a crucial role in transforming the political and affective subjectivities of South Asian immigrant DV survivors.;However, such endeavors fall short because South Asian clients primarily configure suffering and identity formation within a moral framework–“the good and honorable wife.” Will she once again re-inhabit those normative structures through which she defines moral and ethical subjectivity, but that are no longer accessible to her? This becomes her primary concern. In the midst of profound uncertainty, I contend that moral suffering and agency is reconfigured within ongoing, everyday action. Additionally, such embodied practice involves profound emotion-work. In highlighting emotion's fundamental role in shaping practical and moral experience, I problematize Safe Passage counselors' psychological discursive framework by expanding upon the social construction of subjectivity and affective formations.