'Out of control…and vulnerable' : contextualising women's responsibility for their perpetration of intimate partner violence

Abstract

The central focus of this thesis is to explore how women, whether they are victims or offenders, are not served well by the multiple systems and institutions that currently deal with violence. In order to explore this proposition, this thesis will examine women's experiences of violence, as victims and perpetrators, as filtered through their structural and situational contexts. The ways in which women's positions in broader structurally inequitable contexts intersect with situational inequalities, are not well understood, nor captured by the systems and institutions to which women are subjected. In the institutional narratives examined in this thesis, women are not adequately understood as agents within the complicated power dynamics of their relationships. However, they are at the same time, overly responsibilised in these same institutional narratives, as well as in their own stories of their violence. This tension will be unpacked through Saba Mahmood and Carisa Showden's theories on women's agency and through critiques of gendered responsibilisation discourses while unpacking the intersectional structural constraints that can lead to women's violence. Overall, the thesis aims to understand women's recourse to violence through a critical examination of the concept of slow-burn provocation, in combination with Hannah Arendt's argument of violence as the preserve of the disempowered.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English