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Abstract
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This article questions why violence carried out by men toward their female romantic partners remains so prevalent today by examining how it has been understood and talked about over time. The aim here is twofold: the first is to historically map the changes in how male partner violence has been addressed in society-and to what effect. The second is to examine subtle dynamics within this historical map in order to suggest how language could be used to destabilize its fixture in society.
Male partner violence--defined in this article as violence that is carried out by men toward their female romantic partners--has long been a fixture in society, with historians noting its presence at least as far back as the Roman Era (Sewell, 1989). Even with this permanent fixture, society still does not have a well-established cogent language to fully address women's experiences of this gendered form of violence (Easteal et al., 2012; Marcus, 1994; Minow, 1990). This article interrogates why this form of violence is so ubiquitous by historically mapping discursive patterns of how it has been understood and talked about in society. This article will chart this complex terrain of language (Wetherell & Potter, 1992) with two key aims: the first is to make more sense of why male partner violence is still so prevalent today and the second is to examine subtle dynamics within this historical map in order to suggest how language could be used to destabilize its fixture in society. To do this work, a Bourdieusian approach will be used to interrogate the effects that language has on how society makes sense of male partner violence and in turn, how this has impacted the support women experiencing this form of violence have been able to access. This approach will also be used to look at how ambivalence signals ways in which male partner violence could be destabilized...
Language: en |