Engendering Violence

Heterosexual Interpersonal Violence from Childhood to Adulthood

Myra J. Hird

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138256613
• eBook ISBN: 9781351940184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together unique international research from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Europe, this book presents a detailed examination of the violence perpetrated by males and females within the context of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Based on illuminating empirical studies it accurately locates the societal implications of violence against males and females as well as the legal, social and public responses to violence. Combining feminism and a related analysis of power, the book provides an introduction to the study of violence in general, and violence against males and females who know each other in particular. It outlines the major evolutionary, psychological, and sociological theories proposed to explain this social problem and the traditional methods of studying this topic. The book also examines child violence - in the playground, the classroom and the home; adolescent dating violence and adult violence, both male and female, within cohabiting and marital relationships and violence occurring between strangers.

Chapter 1

Mapping the Discourses of Heterosexual Interpersonal Violence

Personal Safety and Public Discourses of Gender Difference

Messages about personal safety, from the protection of property to dating protocol, pervade our everyday lives. These messages usually offer advice about protecting ourselves from strangers. Women, in particular, are expected to prevent their own victimization by avoiding certain places, walking in the company of others, predicting when people’s tempers are getting out of hand and generally monitoring danger. Men’s lives, on the other hand, are not as restricted.¹ Indeed, men often accompany women home at night because it is assumed that men protect women from harm. Boys, also, do not typically learn the same number of personal safety strategies as girls and are also allowed to go out at night more often and to more places than girls. Yet the most likely victims of assaults by strangers are young men.²

From a sociological perspective, public discourses about personal safety are interesting because they contradict how males and females actually experience violence in their daily lives. An apparently gender-neutral discourse reflects, in fact, the experience of heterosexual masculinity and a particular understanding of danger, harm and violence. This is the reason that personal safety discourse remains largely silent about females’ most likely assailants: male acquaintances, male friends, male parents, male siblings, boyfriends and male spouses.³ The following narrative inquires into the subject of heterosexual interpersonal violence. This analysis takes as its starting point the contradiction between personal safety discourses and women’s and men’s experiences of interpersonal violence, which by far accounts for the majority of society’s everyday violence. In this analysis I will extend an existing critical discourse reassessing how, theoretically and empirically, gender and heterosexual interpersonal violence intersect.

In contemplating this map, I initially want to draw attention to three signposts on the interpersonal violence landscape: gender, space and relationship. First, contrary to movies such as Fatal Attraction and Disclosure, most violence (whether intimate or stranger-to-stranger) is committed by males. This does not mean that males as a group condone violence. It is to say that statistics consistently reveal that men commit the majority of physical and sexual assaults, and homicides. Men are also responsible for the majority of violence towards women. In the United States, the assault of women by their (ex)partners is the second highest form of serious injury after male to male assault. Interpersonal violence against women has reached such epidemic proportions in the United States that Surgeon General Everett Koop proclaimed domestic violence to be the number one health problem for American women (Schenck, 1992). The National Clearinghouse of the Defense of Battered Women estimates an incidence of domestic assault is reported every fifteen seconds in the United States (Spaid, 1993) and some researchers in the area of wife assault have coined the phrase ‘a marriage license is a hitting license’ (Gelles and Straus, 1988). More than a million women in the United States seek medical attention each year for injuries sustained from (ex)husbands, (ex)partners and (ex)lovers. Surgeon General Antonia Novella claims that domestic violence causes more injuries to women than the collective injuries sustained from rapes, muggings and car accidents (Spaid, 1993). Yet the Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that wife battering is the most underreported crime in America (Wenzel, 1993).

Second, contrary to everyday assumptions, males are more likely to be assaulted in public whilst females are more vulnerable to violence in their own homes. For example, statistics for England and Wales show that men are more likely to be victims of assault outdoors and women are most likely to be attacked in their own homes or the home of their attacker (Government Statistical Service, 1994). In Canada in 1994, approximately forty-nine percent of homicides, sixty-one percent of sexual assaults and forty-nine percent of physical assaults occurred in private residences (Statistics Canada, 1995). Most murders (fifty-seven percent) in Australia in 1995 also took place in private dwellings. Assault is the largest category of offenses against the person in Australia and they most frequently occurred in private dwellings. In 1995 New Zealand (1996) statistics recorded that approximately fifty-two percent of indecent assaults, seventy seven percent of coercive sexual relations and sixty percent of sexual violation occurred within the home.

Finally, the relationship between perpetrator and victim is also important. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all confirm that heterosexual interpersonal violence, whether homicide, sexual assault or physical assault, is largely committed by persons known to the victim. Moreover, most offenses are committed in circumstances of interpersonal conflict.

Emergent Themes

Gender and Difference

This book coincides with a major theoretical shift in gender and interpersonal violence theories. Coming to terms with the complexities of patriarchy, gender relations, sexuality, subjectivity, colonialism and globalization has prompted a challenge to traditional conceptualizations of the relationship between gender and interpersonal violence. This past decade in particular has produced a proliferation of theories on subjectivity and gender relations, work taken up by a number of feminist scholars (see Flax, 1987; Butler, 1990; Haraway 1990; Hooks, 1990; Nicholson, 1990; Yeatman, 1990; Fraser and Nicholson, 1994). More recently, under the rubric of ‘new sociology of gender theories’ (Dobash, Dobash and Noaks, 1995), a combination of feminist, poststructural and postmodern theory is attempting to deconstruct these concepts by calling attention to their essentialist girding.⁴ Poststructural and postmodern theories of gender radically call into question the notion of a pre-social (sexed) body, arguing instead that bodies are configured through social, political and cultural discourses. These theories posit an historical and changeable body, on which all possible configurations of power and signification are inscribed.

Because postmodern theories posit a post-socially sexed body (that sexual difference is created rather than emerges from some innate origin), these theorists are concerned to theorize how we understand gender and the mechanisms through which gender is reproduced (cf. French, 1985; Sydie, 1987; Spelman, 1988; Butler, 1990; Rhode, 1990; Lorber, 1994). They suggest that the ‘essence’ of meaning is no more than the very establishment and maintenance of binary opposites. Thus, we can only know what ‘man’ is through its opposition, ‘woman’. The female is everything that is absent from the male and vice versa. Gender difference is sustained through a play of absence and presence ‘revealing that what appears to be outside a given system is always already fully inside it; that which seems to be natural is historical’ (Namaste, 1996: 196). Postmodern works call attention to sociological discussions of ‘women’ and ‘men’ predicated on this essentialist binary opposition. Emerging theories of gender argue that gender identity is assembled, fragmentary and shifting and that individuals ‘practice’ gender through a variety of mechanisms (Rose, 1996).

An increasing body of scholarship has begun to challenge this bi-polar construction of gender and the a priori association between violence and masculinity. These works argue that many studies reify rather than challenge the association between masculinity and violence. Bi-polar configurations of gender and the a priori association of violence with masculinity fail to acknowledge the wide variation in female and male behavior. By framing males as violent and females as passive, the complexity of human behavior is vastly over-simplified. Specifically, the variety of violent behavior within each gender is ignored whilst differences between genders are exaggerated (Hyde, 1990). The link between masculinity and violence is tautological: violence occurs in society because males are violent and males are violent because they are males. Moreover, an exclusive focus on male violence denies females’ reality such that violent women are silenced. Violent women are defined as deviant, undermining women’s status as fully responsible human beings (White and Kowalski, 1994). This effectively maintains male power as ‘men prefer not to dwell on women’s aggression because it (is) an ugly sign of potential resistance’ (Campbell, 1993: 143). It is the problematic association between gender and violence that poststructural and postmodern theorists seek to challenge by exploring the social conditions under which we have come to associate violence with masculinity, and the ways in which our current understanding of violence reinforces gender divisions.

The attribution of particular characteristics to women and men remains one of the most common practices in society. Zygmut Bauman (1997) explores how ‘strangers’ are created by society as a means of bringing order to an unstable, shifting environment. Bauman attempts to understand human atrocities such as the holocaust as an outcome of the creation of strangers and the implied threat that strangers make to the established order. To discriminate against large numbers of people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and social class requires a discourse which positions a ‘them’ as representative of everything to which ‘we’ stand opposed. Discrimination becomes possible and manageable when those being discriminated against are so different from us as to be not really fully human. This creation of strangers may also be applied to gender, as society’s insistence on the creation and maintenance of differences between women and men serves to impose order onto social relations. Indeed, gender difference is one of the most enduring binaries in our language: we position ourselves against the ‘opposite’ sex. This positioning, as this book will argue, provides a key element in understanding the persistence of heterosexual interpersonal violence in society.

Power and Investment

Public discourses identify apparently stable gender identities at the local, social, and group levels (Connell, 1995). These gender identities are arranged within a power-knowledge nexus in which gender identities are hierarchically ordered. It is on these masculinities and femininities which recent analyses of heterosexual interpersonal violence focus. Gendered performances (‘Baywatch babe’, ‘computer geek’, ‘dyke’) identify certain combinations of actions and objects through which gender is practiced.⁵ Certain masculinities, and a minority of femininities, are assembled around the practice of violence. The macho homophobic male ‘gay basher’, for instance, is only able to identify himself as ‘straight’ by articulating his difference from gay men.

If we understand individuals to take up or perform particular subject positions, Hollway’s (1984) notion of ‘investment’ provides a useful conceptual tool for connecting the agency involved in this performance and violence as action.⁶ Investment refers to a combination of emotional commitment and vested interest in terms of perceived rewards. It is here that the link between subject positions and power is made explicit because subject positions are positioned in relation to others and take on meaning only in that relation (Moore, 1994). The choice of subject positions is both limited and bounded by historical-structural institutions and each individual’s agency is expressed in the choice from this limited set of subject positions. This is not to say that all subject positions are equal and that individuals are ‘free’ to pick and choose between them. Quite the contrary: some subject positions clearly carry greater social rewards than others, particularly with respect to race, sexuality, ethnicity, age and so on.

Recent analyses further consider interpersonal violence to be an active expression of power relations between individuals. When individuals act violently, they often explain (read ‘justify’) their actions in terms of a reaction to an unfulfilled need as in ‘my wife didn’t have my dinner ready on time so I hit her’. This man’s violence is based on a particular conceptualization of individuals, relationships and social interaction. First, the statement made above would only be possible when social interaction is viewed in terms of the exchange of commodities (Kappeler, 1995). This idea is by no means novel in the context of most relationships in society: my relationship with my bank teller, grocery store cashier and so on are all based on the exchange of commodities (exchanging money for goods). However, we do not typically make these terms of exchange explicit. A key element in the ‘trade in relationships’ is power. The man does not want his wife to make his dinner on time because he is forcing her to; she is to make his dinner willingly. In getting his dinner served on time, what this man really achieves is the capturing of his wife’s will. Of course this annihilates the intended meaning of social interaction which is the free giving of things (feelings, care and so on) as gifts. In our social relationships, we do not want the goods and services from our family, partner and friends. We want their subjectivities embodied in those goods and services. Thus social interaction involving violence silences subjectivity. The Gramscian (1971) notion of power proves useful as it is formulated less on physical force and more on a sustained relation of ‘voluntary’ submission. Moreover, whilst the will (intent) of the individual is crucial to the definition of violence, the response of the person being demanded also needs addressing. When the man demands that his wife provide dinner on time, her doing this (which we tend to interpret as failing to resist violence) does not erase the violence of his demand. Nor does her resisting (throwing the dinner in this face, walking out the door) define his demand as violent. In other words, it is not the response to violence that defines violence, it is the will and the action of the person seeking need fulfilment that defines what constitutes violence (Frye, 1983). The conceptualization of heterosexual interpersonal relationships as a site of commodity exchange and the concomitant public discourse in which personal relationships are anything but an exchange, helps us to understand the structural context in which interpersonal violence takes place.

Aims of the Book

This book aims to explore these emerging themes in the heterosexual interpersonal violence literature. First, it seeks to explore those discourses which create and maintain gender differences. Socio-biology, psychology and sociology largely inform everyday understandings of gender. It will then proceed to examine how children learn to identify gender as a major symbolic marker used to differentiate individuals and order the social environment. Children must learn to perform the particular gender to which they have been assigned and to see themselves as opposite to the ‘other’ gender. I will argue that learning to organize our social worlds using bipolar symbols configured as oppositional creates strangers. Once we begin to think of certain groups of individuals as our opposite, as strangers, we lay the foundational girding necessary for the justification of violence.

The book’s major theme concerns the link between gender and violence, and in particular the performance of masculinity. To further explore this link necessitates the examination of a crucial aspect of hegemonic masculinity: heteronormativity. Through an exploration of adolescent dating relations, I will argue that, at a societal level, social relations are structured around expectations of heteronormativity, which structure sexual relations between women and men as coercive. By linking discourses of gender differences and expectations regarding gender performance and heterosexual interpersonal relations, I want to be able to understand how and why interpersonal violence persists as one of the most common forms of violence in society.

The book will further explore the argument that heterosexual interpersonal violence may be understood as an outcome of the investment in performances predicated on the production of gender difference. The chapters which focus on adult heterosexual interpersonal violence will draw on the theories of interpersonal relations as commodity exchange briefly outlined here. To continue the example, the man who hits his wife ‘because’ she did not provide dinner on time conceptualizes the relationship with his wife in terms of the rightful fulfilment of his needs. Within this conceptualization, the husband must attempt to control her subjectivity in order that she give ‘freely’ those goods and services that he wants. Her subjectivity is directly bound up with his subjectivity. In reality, of course, this man has set himself an impossible task: no individual’s subjectivity may be completely controlled. The best he can do is to get his wife to take up a subject position (caring, giving, suffering wife) that will not threaten his subject position (heterosexual, head-of-household, boss). He acts violently when he interprets that his subject position has been threatened. Thus violence, and the threat of violence, is not the sole domain of the heterosexual marital relationship: the threat to subject positions occurs in all personal relationships.

The potential of new theories of gender and interpersonal violence must also be advanced with a healthy dose of skepticism. Feminist theory involved in contemporary debates about gender deconstruction does so in the context of a backlash against feminism (Faludi, 1992). Moreover, there is a strong feeling amongst many ‘front-line’ feminists that we are in danger of losing gender altogether in our efforts to deconstruct ‘woman’ and replace it with ‘multiple genders’. Feminism began with the explicit political project of liberating girls and women fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Mapping the Discourses of Heterosexual Interpersonal Violence
• 2 Theoretical Challenges to the Study of Heterosexual Interpersonal Violence
• 3 Learning the Difference that Gender Makes
• 4 Heteronormativity and Sexual Coercion: Adolescents Practicing Gender
• 5 Investing in Masculinity: Men Who Use Interpersonal Violence
• 6 Investing in Difference: Violent Women and Masculinity in Disguise?
• 7 Engendering Violence?
• Bibliography
• Index