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Abstract
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Feminist domestic violence advocacy has been an important venue for theorizing about how to apply concepts like individual autonomy and how to intervene strategically and effectively into the dominant, patriarchal legal system. Consistently, feminists have insisted that a woman's actual, lived experiences must form the basis both for her understanding of the world and for solutions to problems that she faces in the world. More particularly for feminist domestic violence advocacy, scholars and advocates insisted that a woman subjected to abuse1 should have the fullest sense of agency possible as she considers how to move forward in her life in light of the domestic violence she has, or continues to, experience.
As part of privileging individual autonomy, feminist domestic violence advocates have been exceedingly reluctant, if not adamant, that others working with a woman subjected to abuse should resist interceding in autonomous choices. Feminist domestic violence advocates also have thoughtfully and thoroughly critiqued the strategic choices that earlier feminists made about how to reform the legal system as choices that lead to a system that purports to be woman-centric, but, in fact, is rigid and disrespectful to true autonomous choice.
In crafting their discourse against the current domestic violence legal response system, scholars and advocates eliminated important moments of nuance. This Article seeks to reintroduce such nuance by focusing on one feature of domestic violence--the role of anger for a woman subjected to abuse. I hope to re-problematize anger by arguing that one can be respectful of the experiences of a woman subjected to abuse, including her experience of anger, while at the same time insisting that acting out of anger is ineffective. My approach to anger is intentionally pragmatic and instrumental. I embrace feminism's insistence that real experiences matter. However, I illuminate how the rush from emotion to action is deeply problematic, and particularly so in the case of anger. While feminist discourse about anger has not been nuanced, I suggest that feminist domestic violence practice already contains within it the seeds of a productive solution, and that the productive solution is to craft space so that the arising of the experience or emotion of anger is disrupted and separated from action driven by that experience. I conclude by offering two possible discursive frames that can be used to take advantage of the disruptive moment between the arising of an experience or emotion and action upon those feelings....
Language: en |