Abstract
Recent theoretical analyses of domestic violence have posited the complicity of medical communities in erasing and obfuscating the cause of injuries. Although medical cultures have engaged in progressive initiatives to address and treat domestic violence, these medical and clinical models can render domestic violence invisible by framing the battered woman as evidentiary object. By analyzing this invisibility of domestic violence through the concept of public secrecy, in this article I consider Kiki Smith's 1982 installation piece Life Wants to Live. Using medical technologies, Smith's installation offers the viewer a vision of domestic violence that recognizes its inherently problematic invisibility and emphasizes the importance of lived, bodily experience.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Felman, S. (1997). Forms of judicial blindness, or the evidence of what cannot be seen: Traumatic narratives and legal repetitions in the O.J. Simpson case and in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata. Critical Inquiry, 23(4), 738–788.
Heffeman, J. A. W. (1999). The Simpson trial and the forgotten trauma of lynching: a response to Shoshana Felman. Critical Inquiry, 25(4), 801–806.
Princenthal, N. (1984). Life wants to live/ The Kitchen. ARTnews, 83(4), 180.
Posner, H. (1998). Kiki Smith. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Taussing, M. (1999). Defacement: Public secrecy and the labour of the negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Turner, B. (1992). Regulating bodies: Essays in medical sociology. London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Coulthard, L. Visible Violence in Kiki Smith's Life Wants to Live . Journal of Medical Humanities 25, 21–32 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOMH.0000007448.57402.46
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOMH.0000007448.57402.46