Turning Towards the Affective: Medical Semiotics of Child Maltreatment in Denmark.

Signs of child maltreatment may be physical and detectable by clinical examination but may also arise as a feeling of strangeness that sparks uncertainty. Based on fieldwork in Danish general practice, and thinking along recent discussions around semiotics and affect, the article explores how feelings of "strangeness" arise in child consultations. It focuses on how subjective, embodied, and interpersonal reactions arise, how signs, however tactile and arbitrary, are felt and experienced, and how engaging with affective aspects when doing diagnosis, could expand the medical semiotics of child maltreatment.