Love, Stigma, and Resistance: “Therapeutic Microaggressions” in a Prisoners' Wives' Support Group

Abstract

This article derives from ethnographies of therapeutic interventions in a support group for prisoners' wives in Israel. The study's main inductive findings reveal that love and the emotion work of prisoners' wives are constructed as the primary site for achieving the clinical objective: modifying the prisoners' wives' spoiled self and encouraging their adoption of a psychological self. The findings reveal a dramatic clash between the therapeutic emotion work of love that the group facilitators proposed and the collectivist emotion work to which the prisoners' wives subscribed. These forms of emotion work are associated with ethnic hierarchies and experiences of stigmatization by the prisoners' wives during the therapeutic sessions. In this context, the article suggests the concept of "therapeutic microaggressions" to describe how interactions in clinical sessions can reinforce inequality.Avihu Shoshana is a Senior Lecturer at Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel. His areas of research include social psychology of self-concept and emotions; cultural sociology; ethnicity, race and social class; ethnographies of education; and everyday inequalities.