Gender Embodiment as Gender-Enacted Body: A Review of Intimate Partner Violence and Gender Embodiment Perspectives

Abstract

The author proposes the gender-enacted body as a better perspective of gender embodiment than the three current prevailing views: sex differences (the biomedical organism), socio-cultural imprint (the regulated body) and experienced gender (the lived body), which are not wrong, but misrepresentative of the active nature of gender embodiment. Gender embodiment is both an ongoing process of configuring subjectivity and the ensuing gendered agency. This implementation of the enacted body perspective is supported by two different arguments: first, a theoretical one to establish that the process of gender embodiment and the corporality that results from it are the settlement of human meaning and acting conditions; second, an empirical application of this perspective to resolve the shortcomings of current explanations of intimate partner violence in heterosexual couples by interpreting some well-known gender embodiment processes as enactment processes in which the body becomes an agent that generates practice. These gender-enacted bodies generate, in assemblage with the breakdown of the circuits of dependence within the couple, the agency of this kind of violence.