The Dance of Dependency: A Genealogy of Domestic Violence
Domestic violence discourse challenges cultural acceptance of male violence against women, yet it is often constituted by gendered, racialized, and class-based hierarchies. Transformative efforts have not escaped traces of these hierarchies. Emancipatory ideals guiding 1970s feminist activism have collided with conservative impulses to maintain and strengthen family relationships. Crime control discourse undermines critiques of dominance through its focus on individual men. Domestic violence discourse exemplifies both resistance to and replication of hierarchies of power. In the 1990s, "domestic violence" represents a convoluted, contradictory discourse that incorporates the contested terrains of sex, love, violence, law, and truth. This discourse is a feminist victory, on one side, as it has urged social recognition of women's oppression and developed material resources and institutions specifically addressed to the problem. It is simultaneously a feminist nightmare, as it has absorbed grassroots struggles into the machinery of social engineering and mass mediation, reinscribing patterns of race, class, and gender domination. It is a political and discursive space in which emancipatory ideals collide with repressive mechanisms of social control; the legal, familial, and social scientific establishments. In the United States, at the end of the millennium, "domestic violence" is a code for physical and emotional brutality within intimate relationships, usually heterosexual. As a code, it glosses the intricate, layered connections of power relationships built on race, class, and gender hierarchies, each tied in unique fashion to requirements of female dependency. These power hierarchies recede as the discursive focus abstracts acts of violence as a pathology to be remedied, separate from a critique of the relationships of dominance