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.

Keywords::

• discourse analysis
• social languages
• gender
• violence
• masculinities
• femininities

Acknowledgements

I am truly grateful to Professors Rebecca Dobash and Russell Dobash who were my Ph.D. supervisors at the time that I was undertaking this research. I benefitted tremendously from their advice on an earlier version of this paper. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission for providing the funding for my doctoral work.

Notes

^1. For the purposes of this article, the word Caribbean refers to countries in the Caribbean Community, most of which are former British colonies and share similar socio-political, historical and cultural practices. Countries of the English-speaking or Commonwealth Caribbean share a similar political system (Westminster-based), a legacy of plantation slavery and class structures comprising old commercial oligarchies, petit-bourgeois subgroups of politicians, bankers and professionals and black and brown working majorities (Marshall 2002). Like its political system, the Commonwealth Caribbean's legal system is derived from the British. Many of the vestiges of the English Common Law still find resonance within these societies. These include male proprietariness and notions of women and children as having a propensity to ‘lie’. The latter still exists in the form of directives/reminders read to juries in the Eastern Caribbean in cases of rape.

^2. In this paper, IPV is understood as a form of VAW in intimate relationships.

^3. In his 1995 study, Johnson makes a distinction between patriarchal terrorism and common couple violence. He argues that the former is usually present in clinical samples and involves more extreme and frequent acts of VAW. Common couple violence is described as less frequent and is more likely to be found in population samples. This difference is presented as the source of the schism in the findings of equal and unequal perpetration of violence in heterosexual relationships. Johnson builds on these ideas in later publications.

^4. Family Courts were established as a socio-legal response to family disputes (excluding divorce) in the Caribbean in the late 1990s. These Courts exist in Jamaica, Belize, Grenada, SVG, Trinidad and Tobago and St Lucia. There are trained personnel, for example counsellors, at these specialised courts. In addition to a specialised court that hears family issues there are also probation, counselling and mediation services at the Family Courts (Lazarus-Black 2007).

^5. The Family Services addresses the social welfare needs of Vincentians. Family Case Workers are attached to this division of government to investigate the cases brought before them by citizens. They function in much the same way as social workers and make recommendations for the allocation of resources on a case-by-case basis.

^6. Senior schools are usually attached to primary schools and are similar to what are known as middle schools. Persons who were unsuccessful at the Common Entrance Examination (examinations to transition from primary to secondary schools) went on a senior school. The system is more or less being phased out with the introduction of compulsory secondary education.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Halimah A.F. DeShong

Dr Halimah A.F. DeShong is a Commonwealth Scholar who received her Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Manchester with a thesis entitled Gendered Negotiations: Interrogating Discourses of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). At present, she is a lecturer at the Institute of Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.