Biopolitics, Complicity, and Community in Domestic Abuse Support Settings Implications for Interpreter Guidance

This chapter discusses the underlying theoretical and empirical issues concerned in drafting guidance for interpreters working in charitable organisations that provide support services primarily for adult female victim-survivors of domestic abuse and violence. The chapter re-casts victim support services and interpreting provisions as biopolitical enterprises, drawing on Inghilleri’s (2008) translation ethics grounded in situated practice as a means to achieve Butlerian (2004) “political community” in interpreter mediation in these settings. The analysis brings together several data sets including new experimental data to identify ways in which political community can and does emerge in these settings. It argues that the particularised context of victim support services requires setting-specific guidance, but that there are limits to the assimilability of guidance presented in the written form without accompanying in-person training.