Policing femininity, affirming masculinity: relationship violence, control and spatial limitation

Abstract

In this article, a feminist poststructuralist approach to discourse analysis is applied to examine the accounts of 35 Vincentian women and men on men's enactment of a range of violent, controlling and coercive acts in heterosexual relationships. The social languages participants employ in their explanations of men's abusive practices, and how these implicate particular gendered subject positions are discussed. Nested within this discussion is an exploration of how women's personal autonomy is regulated and contested in the context of violent intimate unions. Acts of violence by men, coupled with the threat of violence and other forms of control, serve to limit women's ability to navigate between the so-called private/domestic and other social spaces. Similar limits do not exist for men in these unions. This double standard is often presented as an effect of traditional and/or transcendental arrangements of gender in men's narratives, while women range between subverting and affirming dominant scripts of womanhood and manhood in speech.