As I signaled previously however, while the type of feminism informing most
understandings of abuse answered many of the questions posed to me by this research, particularly its analysis of gendered social power relations, these were paralleled by emerging limitations. The most notable of these were the ways in which feminist analyses of violence against women spoke only to some participants stories and, even then, not all of the time. In other instances my attempts to overlay a feminist template, to hear the women’s stories through conventional feminist framings of abuse, resulted in
interpretations which, while thoroughly reasonable and sensible on those terms, sat decidedly uneasily alongside their interpretations of many of the experiences and understandings they recounted to me. For instance, it is a relatively simple task to
reinterpret Paula’s words describing her responsibility for her abuse as an example of the self-blame so often described in much feminist work as the entirely understandable result of living as a victim of abuse within a patriarchal society.
I think I empowered him by, I just empowered him by being weak. That’s how I see it. I was too weak to get out of it (Paula).
From a conventional feminist perspective, Paula could not be criticized for understanding and describing her experience in such terms. A virtually inevitable result of the abuse would have been to convince her that she was indeed weak, that she did indeed empower her partner and therefore enable the abuse. Stories of the ways in which abusers managed
(or at least attempted) to convince victims that they are responsible for their own
victimization are an almost a hallmark characteristic of abuse accounts. The implication of such an analysis for Paula though is that she was misguided in her belief that she was weak, that her description is somehow less credible or can be discounted or reinterpreted in the light of more accurate (feminist) knowledge. Entertaining such an analysis can possibly be useful in some circumstances, for instance, shifting beliefs such as these sits at the very heart of feminist consciousness raising strategies (Valverde, 2004). However, for Paula, what doing so also meant is that her account, her construction of herself and her actions when leaving her abuser, dissolve into an example of unexceptional, typical victim behaviour and belief, rather than the actions and beliefs of a determined woman pursuing a proactive strategy to protect herself and her children. For Paula, her analysis of her actions as ‘weak’ and empowering of her husband’s violence was an integral part of the process of leaving the marriage, allowing her to construct a process of positive personal change – finding strength and gaining control of her life – which enabled her to finally leave the marriage. From a conventional feminist perspective, her actions would be construed as largely the result of a victim driven to leave by fear and desperation. From Paula’s perspective though, her actions were anything but those of a victim, as illustrated by the triumphant tone of her account of leaving.
I planned it. I planned how I was going to leave. He was into [sport] and he was getting right up there in the hierarchy and I thought…. They used to go away on these training camps, three days, two days. That was all the time I needed. And I knew the next one was coming up, so I started planning how I was going to get out of there. He couldn’t take the car. And I decided weeks before hand what I was going to take that was worth selling that I would sell and get more money to get away with. And when he was gone I had this little garage sale (laughs). I just stuck a sign on the side of the road, the main road, and people started showing up. And I made hundreds of bucks. And it was my runaway money….I only left him the once, and I stayed left! (Paula).
Listening to her story through the type of filter outlined above effectively undermined my ability to grasp the fine detail of her understanding of her experience, but, perhaps
equally as importantly effectively categorized Paula, her actions, her responses, and her account. In short, overlaying this theoretical framing assigned her a specific identity as a ‘typical abused woman’, smoothing away any real need to come to grips with the
workings of her understandings and beliefs, either in their construction or effects, gathering these together into a handy bundle to be deposited tidily in the ‘usual victim experiences’ file. In a similar way, even when participants’ accounts did resonate with conventional feminist framings, these seemed to exert an almost prescriptive influence, again dissolving the subtlety, differences and contradictions in their stories in favor of a smoothly formulaic and inevitably constraining reading. In other words, application of these ideas in their rigid entirety did produce an analysis, but one which seemed almost politically sanitized in its smoothness and which imposed a solidly stable understanding of what constitutes abuse and how it should be redressed.
Even conventional feminist analyses (as outlined in earlier sections) of the way in which power operated within abusive relationships posed some problems. While descriptive of many instances, these failed to adequately represent the experiences recounted by participants. Again, the main effect was one of smoothing and leveling their stories, massaging their accounts into a shape where patriarchal power and dominance – power over - reigned, with women’s choices and actions framed as compliant, reactive or, at best, resistant. Nonetheless I was hesitant to entirely abandon such an understanding of power. In many instances it adequately described the ways in which these women’s lives played out. What it did not seem to do however was offer a way forward – opportunities for change within a society characterized by such a monolithic form of authority as patriarchy seemed inevitably limited. One particular form of feminism however, feminist poststructuralism, seemed to offer, at least potentially, a means of resolution to this dilemma.