Methodological disruptions: interviewing domestically violent men across a ‘gender divide’

Abstract

This article examines the negotiations of power in cross-gender interviews with men on the topic of their violence against women partners. The article locates itself within a body of feminist and pro-feminist work on men's accounts of their own violence toward women, making the argument that when this ‘accounting’ is to be accomplished in an interview, with a woman, the interview dynamics are worthy of close attention. I argue that closer attention to the dynamics of the interview involves seeing interviews as social and dialogical encounters in which the dialogue is shaped by the active involvement of researcher and participants. The analysis draws on unstructured interviews conducted with 15 men who had perpetrated violence against an intimate woman partner and shows how men assert masculine power in the interviews through pursuing their own agendas in order to present themselves as either non-violent or justifiably provoked to violence. I also reflect on how these performances of masculinity open up a discursive space for my own performance of femininity and the challenges this holds for me as a feminist researcher researching men's violence against women. The article ends by exploring some further implications for critical feminist work on men's violence against women.

Keywords:

• intimate partner violence (IPV)
• qualitative interviews
• researching men
• men's violence

Notes on contributor

Floretta Boonzaier is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Cape Town. Her primary research areas include the psychological aspects of gender-based violence, the intersections of raced, classed and gendered subjectivities, and a focus on the social construction of femininities and masculinities in post-apartheid South Africa. She has published on intimate partner violence against women, and is co-editor of The Gender of Psychology  (2006), published by UCT Press and co-author of South African Women Living with HIV: Global Lessons from Local Voices (2014), published by Indiana University Press.

Notes

1. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for requesting I elaborate on this idea.

2. Men who participated in the interviews had attended weekly, psycho-educational sessions as part of a men's program aimed at ending their abuse towards women partners. The programs were drawn were influenced by a mixture of feminist understandings (gender and power) of IPV and cognitive behavioral principles. The weekly sessions spanned between 16 to 22 weeks. Men recruited into this study were at different phases of participation in the programs.

3. All names used to identify participants are pseudonyms.

4. A protection order is a court order enabled through the Domestic Violence Act of 1998, ensuring women protection from violence from an intimate partner.