The Collective Parent Wound: Affective Violence of the Institutional Caregiver

The public narratives of queer and trans care are inevitably anchored to the mental health industrial complex. While the counseling field has its foundations on viewing care through the wellness model instead of the illness/deficit-based model used by the psychology and psychiatry fields, the counseling profession is still complicit in perpetuating structural harm, especially for marginalized communities (Mullan, 2023). Based on Eurocentric expectations of health and entrenched in individualist values, “the goal of therapy has been to help people adapt to oppression and cope with the ongoing trauma of colonial, capitalist, and white supremacist systems” (Mullan, 2023). Gill-Peterson reflects a similar perspective on the medical system, noting that “the signature e5ect of medicalization over the past century has been to restrict trans life to a singular definition while simultaneously placing an etiological question mark upon trans people, and children especially, forcing them to constantly prove and account for their embodied self- knowledge instead of taking their transness seriously.” (2018). 

Furthermore, accessibility to counseling is highly influenced by political and economic privilege, while attempts to make counseling services more accessible for marginalized communities often are embedded in the non-profit sector. As Stanley describes, “the rise of the nonprofit form, certain logics that support criminalization, militarism, and wealth disparity have penetrated and transformed spaces that were once locations of fomenting resistance to state violence.” (2015). The mental health system delivering services to youth will almost always involve intersecting systems of surveillance, including child welfare, juvenile carceral system, state-funded school systems, and the medical system. Under the name of caretaking, the mental health industrial complex perpetuates and “amplify contemporary understandings of who is “inside” and who is “outside” of the group whose protection and cultivation is being sought, which means they always include determinations of who deserves protection and who is a threat” (Spade, 2015). In the context of medicalized trans care, Gill-Peterson asserts that “children’s bodies, because of their unfinishedness and plastic potential to be changed as they grow, have been key sites of the modernizing violence of medicine. Trans children have been forced to pay one of the heaviest prices for the sex and gender binary, silenced as the raw material of its medical foundation” (2018). This collective parent wound, or the structural and affective violence targeted towards queer youth of color, is a chronic and at times fatal consequence of the systemic child abuse and neglect at the hands of the institutionalized Caregiver. This wound is a site of collective pain and vulnerability at the hands of a malingering caregiver, keeping the wound infected with the pathologization of queer lifeworlds, inflammed by neoliberal hegeomy, monitored by state surveillance, and being kept localized enough to be considered a bening condition of equality. 

Queer/trans providers of color also suffer under the chronic temporality of the collective parent wound, most of whom decide to engage within these systems of care to promote safety and healing for their communities precisely because of the impacts that systemic violence have impacted their wellbeing, while also holding on to the hope of healing through affective attunement and social justice efforts. The (forced) decision to work within these systems is also a consequence of the current neoliberal landscape that has purposefully co-opted resistance efforts under the guise of inclusion and protection. These providers, who are themselves marginalized, are tasked with navigating the tension of the contradictory forces of ethical resistance and pressures of assimilation to sites of surveillance and administrative violence.  Indeed, queer/trans providers of color working under these neoliberal systems “take part in producing and maintaining a racialized-gendered maldistribution of life chances while pursuing their 'good work.'” (Spade, 2015).  It is no surprise that queer and trans providers of color share affective commons, or “how negative affect, or bad feelings, produce psychic bonds and collective energies in practices of trans and queer worlding” (Malatino, 2022), that are steeped in the embodied impacts of this ethical tension - moral injury, burnout, and vicarious trauma - when tending to the impacts of how the mental health industrial complex systemically abandons queer youth of color while demanding compliance and productivity to fuel the unsustainable machine of neoliberalism.

So, I ask: How can queer providers of color create resistance of their racialized affective labor? How can we reclaim communal healing queer futurity on our own terms while strategically dismantling institutional caregiving? How can we alchemize resistance derived from ancestral wisdom and queer kinship as medicine to heal the collective parent wound?

References

Gill-Peterson, J. (2018). Histories of the transgender child. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9781517904678.001.0001

Mullan, J. (2023). Decolonizing therapy: Oppression, historical trauma, and politicizing your practice. W. W. Norton & Company.

Spade, D. (2015). Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law (Rev. ed.). Duke University Press.