While social theorists have understood ‘power’ in multiple ways - from Weber (1978: 53) to Gidddens (1979: 91; 1984) and Lukes (1974) - I draw in this thesis upon a dual conceptualisation of power which is based upon both structural and post-structural approaches. These approaches to power were selected on the basis of their usefulness for making sense of the experiences of participants in this study. As I discuss in Chapters Five and Six, I was particularly struck when analysing the interviews collected for this study by the emergence of two broad clusters of themes. The first relates to structural inequalities experienced by participants such as access to community facilities and resources - this data lends itself to an analysis which relies upon a structural approach to power. The second centres on the ways in which participants made sense of their experiences of abuse, and came to decisions about the most appropriate ways to respond to it, in relation to their ideas about identity. I made the decision that the most useful way to make sense of this data was through post-structural approaches. Moreover, interview narratives in which participants spoke about structural inequalities and about their identities were, as a rule, talking about gendered structures of inequality, and about gendered identities. As a result, the ways in which gender has been theorised within structural and post-structural approaches is of particular interest to this study. Below, I therefore discuss both structural and post-structural approaches to power and to gender, and the relationships between them.
My engagement with a structural model of power, which I use to make sense of my data in Chapter Six, allows me to consider the ways in which social subjects are differently positioned and differently empowered in relation to one another. Structural analyses of society are interested in systems of social relationships, and draw attention to the inequalities rooted in the arrangement of society. These social structures are larger than and external to the subject76, and function to constrain that subject in particular ways. In Connell’s words, “structure” refers to “the experience of being up against something, of limits on freedom [...] The concept of social structure expresses the constraints that lie in a given form of social organisation” (1987: 92).
76 While scholars have treated structures as something external to the subject, they have also shown that these structures are brought into being and constantly reproduced by subjects themselves (e.g. Giddens, 1984; 1986, 4) - however, this discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter.
92 While theoretical engagements with structural power are diverse and multi-faceted, my discussions focus in particular on “structural violence,” a concept first developed by Johan Galtung. Structural inequalities and structural violence are closely related but not precisely the same: structural violence is a concept used to describe the embodied harms experienced by subjects who are disempowered through structural inequalities. For Galtung, structural violence exits when subjects are unable to reach their physical and mental potentials; it is “the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is”
(Galtung 1969: 168). For example, if a person dies because they are excluded from access to existent medical care, structural violence is present (ibid.: 168). Because of violent structures of inequality certain social groups - often including women and minority groups - find themselves
“as a community, subjected to violence, exposed to its possibility, if not its realisation” (Butler 2004: 20). For Uvin, structural violence therefore amounts to “unequal life chances, usually caused by great inequality, injustice, discrimination, and exclusion and needlessly limiting people’s physical, social, and psychological well-being’” (Uvin 1998: 105). Structural violence refers not to identifiable acts of violence perpetrated by identifiable actors but to “the social machinery of oppression” (Farmer 2004: 307). As Farmer argues, theories of structural violence allow scholars to understand the suffering that they witness as evidence of how “social forces […]
become embodied as individual experience” (1996: 261-262). This is where work on structural violence provides useful insights for the analysis presented in this thesis, as it allows me to begin with the harms experienced by individual victim-survivors and to trace this harm back to the specific structures of inequality which shape the British military community.
Systems of structural violence do not just happen naturally or accidentally. They are constructed over time by human practices; “the product of an incessant (and therefore historical) labour of reproduction, to which singular agents (including men, with weapons such as physical violence and symbolic violence) and institutions - families, the church, the educational system, the state - contribute” (Bourdieu 2001: 34, emphasis in orignal; see also Anglin 1998: 147). Despite this, structural violence is often not recognised as violence by those who are subjected to it, as the structures of inequality which underpin it are often normalised and taken for granted. In Bourdieu’s words, “The dominated apply categories constructed from the point of view of the dominant to the relations of domination, thus making them appear as natural” (Bourdieu 2001:
35; see also Klinenberg 2004; Price 2012: 6). This insight is useful for the analysis presented in this thesis because it enables me to approach the gendered structural inequalities which characterise the British military community - and the structural violences which emerge from them - not as
93 timeless inevitabilities, but as political structures which are produced over time and naturalised by human practices, and which could be otherwise.
Structural approaches provide one of the ways in which gender is conceptualised in this thesis.
Structural accounts theorise gender as “an overarching framework that organises social institutions and social relationships” (Anderson 2007: 175-76). From a structural perspective, gender is a system of inequality and stratification which positions men and women in unequal categories, roles and material circumstances. Feminists have labelled social structures of male power over women as “patriarchy” - defined as by Walby as “a system of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women” (Walby 1989: 214; see also Fraser 1987; Oakley 2014: xii; Pateman 1988; 1989a; 2006; Rubin 1975). While some understandings of patriarchy have been critiqued as ahistorical and universalising (see Walby 1989), scholars continue to draw attention to social structures which place women in a disempowered position in relation to men. For Scott et al., the gendered division of responsibility in relation to unpaid domestic labour and the related prevalence of British women in part-time employment constitute economic structures which disadvantage women (2010:1). Similarly, Farmer shows how the intersecting structures of poverty and of gender can drive individuals to make unsafe choices, with possibly devastating consequences (1996: 271). In various ways in various locations, then, structures of gendered inequality continue to limit the social power, choices, and life-chances of gendered subjects in various ways. This understanding of gender is important to the analysis in my thesis because, as I illustrate in Chapter Six, it is the gendered structures of inequality, and the structural violences they produce, which are of most interest in making sense of making sense of victim-survivors’ experiences of domestic abuse in the British military.
The post-structural theoretical approach on which this thesis draws allows me to pay attention to the ways in which individuals construct and live their identities on a daily basis. This theory of power most clearly informs my discussions in Chapter Five. For Foucault, disciplinary power is a form of power which produces rather than represses. That is, in contrast to the structural forms of power discussed above, disciplinary power is not something which acts upon and limits the life chances of pre-formed subjects; rather, it is the social force through which such subjects are produced:
We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it
‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact,
94 power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.
(Foucault 1991: 194)
Disciplinary power circulates throughout the social body, and functions in large part through the surveillance, or at least the visibility, of those subjected to it. For Foucault, disciplinary power produces subjects who, conscious of their own permanent visibility, shape themselves to conform to the norms of their societies - as such, the subject becomes “the principle of his [sic] own subjugation” (Foucault 1991: 202-203). The “docile bodies” (ibid.: 138) of subjects thus formed are constructed through the detailed control and surveillance of everyday activity, which “moulds the mind and soul” (Pemberton 2013: 154).
While Foucault himself did not provide in-depth theorisations of gender, others have drawn on his insights to explore the ways in which “docile bodies” are fundamentally gendered, as the bodies of men and of women are shaped in divergent (although far from simplistic or uncontested) ways (Bartky 1988). The post-structural approach to gender used in this thesis is markedly different from that contained within the structural approach outlined above. In structural approaches, gendered subjects are limited and repressed based on their position in gender hierarchy; in post-structural approaches, those very subjects are formulated, are produced, through gendered discourse. That is, following the Foucauldian notion that subjects are produced through the workings of power and that there is, therefore, no essential subject which can pre-exist power, gender is not an essentialised internal truth, something that a subject is, but rather, gender amounts to “configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action”
(Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 836), a “routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment”;
something one does (West and Zimmerman 1987: 126). As Sasson-Levy puts it, masculinities and femininities “do not ‘exist’ in reality but dwell in people’s consciousness, as is constantly expressed through everyday embodied practices, symbols, and metaphors” (2003: 325). For Butler, the notion of an essential, inner substance of gender identity is a fallacy. No fixed subject can be said to pre-exist the doing of gender, rather, the intelligible subject is an effect of gender, which comes into being through the performance of gender in the form of a “stylized repetition of acts” (1999: 191 emphasis in original). That is, gender identity is “constituted by the very
‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 1999: 34). This approach is useful for my thesis
95 as it enables me to pay attention to the ways in which responses to abuse can form part of the performance of gendered identity in particular ways within the British military context.
As these discussions make clear, my two approaches to power and to gender contain within them some fundamental differences which are difficult to allay. The first approach sees power in social structures which constrain the life chances of individuals; the second sees those very same individuals as produced rather than as repressed by a form of power which is diffused throughout social life. The first approach understands gender as a point of difference through which male and female subjects are unequally positioned within social structures; the second focuses on how those male and female subjects come into being through gendered discourses. However, despite the tensions and difficulties which it entails, this multiple approach to power and to gender is particularly helpful in understanding the multifaceted issue of domestic abuse; indeed, the complex narratives which emerged from the interviews I conducted for this thesis cannot be sufficiently understood through recourse to a singular approach.
While Risman (2004: 430) cites a number of studies which have argued (erroneously, she suggests) that structural and post-structural approaches are incompatible (Epstein 1988; Ferree 1990; Risman 1987; Risman and Schwartz 1989), there are a number of key scholars who, explicitly or otherwise, have noted the coexistence of multiple forms of power, and, similarly, of multiple ways in which gender functions in society. Foucault, for example, while generally describing disciplinary power as a modality which replaced sovereign power at a particular moment in history, does recognise in his later works that the two forms of power can co-exist, citing examples of disciplinary power in existence “like islands” in “the midst of sovereignty”
(2006: 63). Similarly, Butler refers to the “ghostly and forceful resurgence of sovereignty in the midst of governmentality” in the contemporary context of Guantanamo Bay (2004: 59).
Of more direct interest to this thesis is scholarship which theorises gender from both structural and post-structural approaches. Connell’s work on gender and power offers a particularly clear example of the ways in which power as structure and power as productive of individual subjectivities can be understood as mutually existent, or even as co-dependent, in relation to gender. Connell describes a gendered structure of inequality centred on the “global dominance of men over women,” (1987: 183). Her theory notes multiple, fluid forms of masculinities and femininities which are constructed in relation to one another as well as in relation to the
‘opposite’ sex, and which exist in hierarchical power relationships with one another. Connell
96 introduced the concept of a “hegemonic” model of masculinity, which is not imagined as normal in the sense that a majority of men embody it, but is understood to be normative in that it denotes the most respected contemporary way of being a man and legitimates the structures of male dominance over women (Connell 1987: 183-88; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005).
Connell’s work understands gender as relational, arguing that masculinities and femininities cannot exist without one another (Connell 1995: 72), but also that, because of the dominance of men over women, “[t]here is no femininity that is hegemonic in the sense that the dominant form of masculinity is hegemonic among men” (ibid., 187). Instead, she points to “emphasised femininity,” the form of femininity which is most clearly “defined around compliance with this subordination and is orientated to accommodating the interests and desires of men,” as the closest equivalent (ibid., 183, 187-188). The dominance of hegemonic forms of masculinity is achieved not through force (although it is not incompatible with the use of force) but through a Gramscian concept of hegemony; social ascendency achieved through the forces which organise social and cultural life such as religious doctrine and practice, mass media, wage structures, welfare and tax policies (ibid., 184). Importantly for my present purposes, while Connell’s work is centred chiefly around social structures of inequality, it also allows space for recognising the importance of individual performances of gender. The reliance of this theory on hegemony as opposed to force as the means by which unequal gendered structures are maintained points to a self-regulating subject; one who constructs their gendered identity through integration of (or resistance to) culturally defined notions of appropriate gender practice. Indeed, Connell and Messerschmidt argue that the theory points to a multi-dimensional understanding of gender, and emphasise the role of patterns of practice, embodiment, and the ways in which subjects discursively construct their identities (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 832, 37, 41-42). This has been highlighted by scholars who have followed Connell’s theory: Wetherell and Edley (1999), for example, used the notion of hegemonic norms to discuss the discursive strategies on which men draw to position themselves in society through practice (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 841).
While there remain inherent tensions and contradictions between structural and post-structural approaches, then, following the insights provided by Connell’s work I conceptualise gender in this thesis through a multiple approach which draws upon both structural and post-structural understandings of power. This dual approach allows me to take account of multiple experiences of gender and therefore to present a more nuanced picture of participants’ experiences of domestic abuse.
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