Methodological disruptions: interviewing domestically violent men across a ‘gender divide’

Abstract

This article examines the negotiations of power in cross-gender interviews with men on the topic of their violence against women partners. The article locates itself within a body of feminist and pro-feminist work on men's accounts of their own violence toward women, making the argument that when this ‘accounting’ is to be accomplished in an interview, with a woman, the interview dynamics are worthy of close attention. I argue that closer attention to the dynamics of the interview involves seeing interviews as social and dialogical encounters in which the dialogue is shaped by the active involvement of researcher and participants. The analysis draws on unstructured interviews conducted with 15 men who had perpetrated violence against an intimate woman partner and shows how men assert masculine power in the interviews through pursuing their own agendas in order to present themselves as either non-violent or justifiably provoked to violence. I also reflect on how these performances of masculinity open up a discursive space for my own performance of femininity and the challenges this holds for me as a feminist researcher researching men's violence against women. The article ends by exploring some further implications for critical feminist work on men's violence against women.