Abstract
This article presents an in-depth study of eight women's experiences and conceptions of men's intrusions in the UK. ‘Men's intrusions’ is posited here as a useful concept for exploring a lived continuum of men's practices in and across digital, online and offline space. Typically, research on men's intrusions has focused on specific and bounded space, neglecting the interrelation and collapse of sites and spaces into each other. This paper addresses this omission and finds that participants experienced a wide range of complex, multi-faceted intrusions, all unique, but sharing the common characteristics of being simultaneously unexpected and continuous, and of imposing gendered-self-awareness with lasting negative effect. In the process of making sense of their experiences, participants adopted different frames for conceptualising men's intrusions, three of which were identified: an individual frame, a grey frame and feminist frame/s. This sense-making process was largely facilitated by the activity of scrapbooking; the research used analogue and digital scrapbooking methodologically to represent diverse intrusions occurring across diverse mediums. The findings have implications for both developing and complicating understandings of the continuum of men's violence against women and also for diversifying feminist research approaches to gender, space and violence.
Highlights
Following a history of specific naming praxis, ‘men's intrusions’ is posited here as a useful concept for exploring a broad continuum of men's practices in and across digital, online and offline space
Found that women's experiences of violence, far from constituting discreet and hierarchical categories of offence, shade into and out of one another, taking on particular meanings and harms in particular contexts. She argued that the continuum shares both a common character and a common function, namely, to naturalise and maintain women's subordination
Given that women's experiences and interpretations of intrusion are situated in unique material contexts – reflecting broader intersections between, for example, race, class and place – a methodological design for capturing their situated-interconnectedness is crucial. Scrapbooks with their implied – and, in the case of this research, explicit – attention to multiple materials and episodes are inclusive of the diverse ways in which people think and communicate and permit expressive styles linked to particular spaces
Summary
Following a history of specific naming praxis, ‘men's intrusions’ is posited here as a useful concept for exploring a broad continuum of men's practices in and across digital, online and offline space. Given that women's experiences and interpretations of intrusion are situated in unique material contexts – reflecting broader intersections between, for example, race, class and place – a methodological design for capturing their situated-interconnectedness is crucial Scrapbooks with their implied – and, in the case of this research, explicit – attention to multiple materials and episodes are inclusive of the diverse ways in which people think and communicate and permit. Even the homes shared by two pairs of women are intruded upon by television content or abusive comments received online, while one participant's scrapbook presents the intrusive phone messages received from a male housemate, despite the literal locked door between them (see Fig. 1) Such trans-locational experiences seem to be enabled by participants' increasingly techno-social lives. Whether you can “separat[e] the ‘inseparable’” is a question for intersectional feminist theory more generally (Gunnarsson, 2015)
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