Gender violence and legally engendered selves

In recent years, growing efforts to control violence against women through batter‐ers’ training programs and the criminalization of spouse abuse reflect a more activist stance by the legal system toward domestic violence. The collaboration of feminist activists and the law provides new possibilities for protecting women from male violence. It offers new gender identities to both women and men. Battered women are offered legally endowed selves while men encounter the criminalization of violent behavior viewed as “natural” to men. By endowing women with autonomous selves who can choose to stay or leave a violent man, but by failing to provide the economic means to leave such men, the discourse of the courts reconstructs women who fail to leave as undeserving of help. The study focuses on a violence control program in a small town in Hawai'i during a period of rapid social and economic change which has opened a space for new legal initiatives against domestic violence.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Violence
• Law
• Hegemony
• Resistance