Population Control: Theorizing Institutional Violence. Jen Rinaldi and Kate Rossiter, Editors McGill Queens University Press (preprint version) 34 Making Sense of Institutional Violence through Social Theory: An Autoethnography of Adolescent Trauma and Survival Claudia Malacrida I have always found it difficult to declare myself as a specific “type” of scholar: my work spans classical feminist topics such as childbirth, pregnancy loss, the medicalization of women’s bodies, and motherhood. It also sits squarely within disability scholarship through my oral histories on the institutionalization of people identified as intellectual or psychologically “inferior,” or my research on the challenges disabled people face in accessing housing, money, love, reproductive and sexual justice, parenthood, or respectful and inclusive dealings with helping professionals. In neither of these scholarly fields do I feel completely at home. My work as a feminist scholar sits on the edge because I have been firmly poststructuralist in my approach to understanding gendered inequalities, and because I have understood gender to, at times, be the least of some people’s problems. As a disability studies scholar, my interests in disabled and nondisabled mothers and the policing of normative motherhood (which often simultaneously excludes disabled women as mothers) have posed challenges to tidy alignments. Additionally, my own embodiment as temporarily abled stands against the frequently argued idea that a disabled identity or embodiment is foundational or necessary to good disability scholarship. I have often felt challenged in making sense of these competing understandings, subject positions, and approaches in my work. Thinking about institutional violence has given me an opportunity to reflect upon, and surprisingly, to reconcile these apparent fissures. In preparation for this book, the members of