Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug -Involved Women (original) (raw)
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This ethnographic interview study of poor, minority, drug-involved women seeks to fill a gap in the existing research on partner violence by examining the meaning women attach to their own use of violence in their intimate relationships. This paper uses theory and research on symbolic boundaries and resistance to examine what symbolic boundaries study participants draw around violence, and how their desire for respect and respectability influence the boundaries that they draw. This paper highlights the interpretive flexibility of violence as a social phenomenon—a flexibility that allows the women in this study to maintain respectability. Yet, these various interpretations, it is argued, are constrained by the matrix of domination (Collins 2000a) within which women live out their lives.
Women’s everyday resistance to intimate partner violence
Feminism & Psychology, 2020
Aotearoa/New Zealand’s rate of reported intimate partner violence (IPV) is among the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In this article, we step behind the statistical trends to document the ways in which violence manifests in women’s everyday lives and the subtle, imperfect ways in which they respond through the development of various resistive tactics. We explore how these women navigate their daily lives with violence, paying particular attention to moments of adaptation, agency and resistance. With the help of Te Whakakruruhau (Māori Women’s Refuge), we conducted semi-structured discussions with eight women (four staff members and four former clients) who revealed how deeply enmeshed IPV can become within the conduct of everyday life. This necessitates their development of tactics for surviving the danger associated with mundane practices, such as grocery shopping, sleeping and doing the dishes. In responding to everyday violence, the w...
We're Not Victims": Women's Use of Violence in Their Intimate Relationships
2019
This doctoral research examines women who engage in or initiate violence in their intimate relationships. Through qualitative in-depth interviews with twenty-five women who were mandated to undergo treatment for intimate partner violence and participant observation of the support groups, I examined the reasons and justifications used by women to explain why they resort to violence as a strategy in conflict with their intimate partners. An integral part of this study was also the manner in which women reflect on, and shape their gendered identities, specifically as female perpetrators of intimate partner violence. The subsequent comprehensive analysis of the participant’s narratives, depicts their experiences of IPV, illustrates how these women view their world and how violence mediates the manner in which they construct and shape their gendered identities. The narratives also highlight the limited discourse within which female perpetrators of intimate partner violence use to frame t...
How is the agency of women best conceptualised in highly coercive settings? We explore this in the context of international efforts to reduce intimate partner violence (IPV) against women in heterosexual relationships. Articles critique the tendency to think of women’s agency and programme endpoints in terms of individual actions, such as reporting violent men or leaving violent relationships, whilst neglecting the interlocking social, economic and cultural contexts that make such actions unlikely or impossible. Three themes cut across the articles. (1) Unhelpful understandings of gender and power implicit in commonly used ‘men-women’ and ‘victim-agent’ binaries obscure multi-faceted and hidden forms of women’s agency, and the complexity of agency-violence intersections. (2) This neglect of complexity results in a poor fit between policy and interventions to reduce IPV, and women’s lives. (3) Such neglect also obscures the multiplicities of women’s agency, including the competing challenges they juggle alongside IPV, differing levels of response, and the temporality of agency. We outline a notion of ‘distributed agency’ as a multi-level, incremental and non-linear process distributed across time, space and social networks, and across a continuum of action ranging from survival to resistance. This understanding of agency implies a different approach to those currently underpinning policies and interventions
Understanding Women's Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence: A Scoping Review
Scholars widely acknowledge that women oppose male violence and control in intimate relationships. Yet there is limited comprehensive knowledge of how resistance features in intimate partner violence (IPV) research across the social sciences. Our scoping review helps fill this gap, analyzing and synthesizing 74 research articles published in English-language scholarly journals between 1994 and 2017. Our review is guided by the following questions: (1) How is research on IPV and resistance designed and executed? (2) How do IPV researchers define the term resistance? (3) What specific types of resistance do IPV researchers discuss in their work? (4) What policy and practice implications are provided by current literature on women's resistance to IPV? We find that scholarship on resistance to IPV is varied, spanning 10 scholarly disciplines with research samples drawn from 19 countries. Studies overwhelmingly used qualitative data, gathered through a range of techniques. The 42 articles that explicitly or implicitly defined resistance either conceptualized the term in the context of power relations, defined it as a form of agency, or understood resistance as a mechanism of physical, economic, and existential survival. Articles also identify several subtypes of resistance strategies including avoidance, help-seeking, active opposition, violent action, and leaving a violent relationship. In terms of practice and policy, articles identify several ways in which institutions fail to meet women's needs, and recommend training so providers and legal personnel may better assist IPV victims.
Reassembling violence against women in intimate relationships
Reassembling violence against women in intimate relationships: An ethnographic analysis of domestic violence policy assemblages in practice., 2022
The prevalence of ‘intimate violence’ against women in the Netherlands is unabated, despite years of political action and policy. Recent surveys show that the rate of women victimised by their male partner has not significantly decreased since the first nationwide survey was held more than 30 years ago (Römkens 1989, Römkens, de Jong, and Harthoorn 2014). In this context, this Ph.D. thesis sets out to understand what domestic violence policies are 'doing' in professional practices, thus building on and aiming to deepen anthropological analyses of the state, policy, and domestic violence. Inspired by actor-network theory, I analyse domestic violence policies as 'assemblages', drawing attention to the fact that policies are not concrete and unified things that are inherently rational and coherent (cf. Shore, Wright, and Però 2011, Lea 2020). On the contrary, policies connect multiple ideas, power relations, politics, logic, knowledge, institutions, people, practices, instruments, infrastructures, and so on into an actor-network. They assemble non-coherent heterogeneities (Mol 2002) by the on-going work of forging stable connections between the disparate elements that constitute a policy and reveal its effects in practice. Nevertheless, when staged as 'black-letter products' (Lea 2020), policies are framed as rational, coherent, and neutral. In this dissertation, I attempt to dislodge this view by analysing the working of policy in practice – encountering how policy is enacted 'in the wild' (cf. Lea 2020). This study is based on ethnographic field research in one family violence agency office (Veilig Thuis/Safe at Home) and some 75 interviews with, among others, victims/survivors, practitioners, and policymakers. I also collected and analysed numerous documents and reconstructed several cases. The first question this study seeks to answer is how domestic violence policy assemblages are enacted in local practices? This question allows for a broad inquiry of what policy is 'doing' in the professional practices of protection agencies such as Safe at Home and social workers in different service providers’ contexts. Besides sketching the effects of policy on various 'policy landing points' (Lea 2020), it will also highlight how 'doing policy' affects the people for whom the policies are intended. The second question examines if and how the enactment of domestic violence policy contributes to diminishing ‘intimate violence’ against women in the Netherlands. This question shifts the focus from the micro-level of everyday practices to the macro-level of the state and its political economy. The research questions that are at the focus of concern in this thesis are not intended to evaluate isolated policy measures, identify their particular strengths and weaknesses, and kickstart the improvement of specific policy programs. After all, such an endeavour runs the risk of reifying the rational frame of policy again. Instead, I view the research questions as reflexive, allowing for a critical, anthropological scrutiny of policy to provoke and stimulate alternative thinking without presuming to provide definite answers. Reflecting on the question of how domestic violence, especially ‘intimate violence’ against women, is problematised and how it plays out in women’s lives and professional practices, I deconstruct or disassemble the domestic violence policy assemblage and show that efforts to stop domestic violence are the work of a heterogeneous multitude of humans and non-humans. More specifically, the chapters in this thesis show ethnographically what happens when people are confronted with policies, both women who experience (ex)partner violence and professionals. Subsequently, I attempt to re-assemble the current domestic violence policy in the Netherlands and describe the different 'scripts' that connect and transform all the heterogeneous actors in policy processes into a historically situated policy assemblage, which is never perfect and always in the making. This analysis also demonstrates that policy assemblages are 'a form of exercise of power' (Clarke et al. 2015, 36) that seek to discipline women who experience ‘intimate violence’ as well as welfare practitioners but do not seem to contribute to a significant reduction of that violence. References Clarke, John, Dave Bainton, Noémi Lendvai, and Paul Stubbs, eds. 2015. Making policy move. Towards a politics of translation and assemblage. Bristol: Policy Press. Lea, Tess. 2020. Wild Policy. Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Römkens, Renée, Tim de Jong, and Hanna Harthoorn. 2014. Geweld tegen vrouwen: Europese onderzoeksgegevens in Nederlandse context: Atria, kennisinstituut voor emancipatie en vrouwengeschiedenis. Römkens, Renée G. 1989. Onder ons gezegd en gezwegen: geweld tegen vrouwen in man-vrouw relaties: Ministerie van Welzijn, Volksgezondheid en Cultuur. Shore, Cris, Susan Wright, and Davide Però, eds. 2011. Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) and sex work have been primarily constructed as mutually exclusive phenomena within scholarly literature, though both can be situated under the umbrella of gender-based violence and traced to male sexual proprietariness. Specialized research has resulted in deeper understanding of nuanced categorizations of sub-phenomena within both IPV and sex work, with parallel constructions along a spectrum of increasing danger. However, the scholarly construction of these continua as parallel—and thus unrelated—disguises the systemic nature of each form of violence and potentially pits victims against each other in the struggle for legitimacy. We propose a more systemic approach to understanding and researching IPV and sex work and provide examples of research already moving in this direction. Intimate partner violence (IPV) and sex work have been primarily constructed as mutually exclusive phenomena and disparate research interests within scholarly literature. Yet, both have been described as a consequence of male sexual propri-etariness—the perception that women are sexual and/or reproductive property to be
Conclusion: Telling Different Stories About Intimate Partner Violence and Abuse
2020
Chapter 6 concludes this book by synthesising our key findings and recapping on how they trouble the existing ways in which intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA) has been researched and theorised. We highlight the key contributions that we have made, including the importance of recognising identity abuse and experiential power as distinct aspects of LGB and/or T+ people’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse (DVA), and conceptualising how victim/survivors’ use of physically and non-physically violent resistance as space for reaction can inhibit them from seeing themselves as having been victimised. We argue how the findings from the Coral Project should be translated into a holistic relationship services approach which offers prevention, early intervention and crisis responses. We also identify priorities for the continued research agenda, with a deepening of the understanding of the intersectionality of LGB and/or T+ people’s experiences being a key priority. We end by r...