In this thesis I investigate intimate partner violence (IPV) against women in heterosexual relationships by analysing the accounts of women and men in the Anglophone Caribbean country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Since IPV occurs in the context of a range of abusive practices (Dobash and Dobash 2004) participants' talk on the use and experiences of violent acts, violent threats, as well as other controlling and coercive tactics are examined as part of this study. Analytically, I focus on the points at which discourses of gender converge with narratives of violence. In other words, the current work examines the ways in which participants construct, (re)produce, disturb and/or negotiate gender in their accounts of IPV, and the kinds of power dynamics that are implicated in these verbal performances. I apply a feminist poststructuralist framework to the study of IPV against women. Synthesising feminist theories of gender and power, and poststructuralist insights on language, subjectivity, social processes and institutions, feminist poststructuralism holds that hegemonic discourses of gender are used to subjugate women (Weedon 1997; Gavey 1990). The points at which individuals complicate dominant discursive practices will also be assessed as part of this approach. In-depth interviews conducted with 34 participants - 19 women and 15 men - between 2007 and 2008 are analysed by using a version of discourse analysis (DA) compatible with the feminist poststructuralist framework outlined in the thesis. My analysis begins by highlighting the ways in which narratives of gender inscribe asymmetrical relations of power. The focus then shifts to a comparison of women's and men's accounts on a range of abusive acts. Traditional scripts on gender are often used to police the boundaries of femininities and masculinities, tying these to female and male bodies respectively. This is the context in which control, coercion, violence and violent threats are discussed in these accounts. Understandings of manhood and womanhood also emerge in the analysis of the strategies used to explain violence. I conclude with a summary and discussion of the analysis, and I suggest possible areas for further research on IPV in the Anglophone Caribbean.

The focus of my research has been the reverberations of the 2001 Argentine economic crisis, as they affected and were responded to by women in social movements. This dissertation contributes to studies of globalization by highlighting the unintended consequences of neoliberalism in Argentina in the form of the collective empowerment of women in egalitarian social movements. The negative consequences of neoliberalism are well known, but I found that these policies produced more than misery. They also helped to stimulate a new kind of politics —a set of autonomous movements aimed at democratizing society as well as the state. In response to rapidly deteriorating living conditions, contemporary Argentine social movements organized their constituencies in what I have defined as the field of politics by other means. In the context of failed governmental programs and discourse designed to create docile, mobile subjects (governmentality), egalitarian social movements engaged in the creation of social movements whose democratic structures contrasted with the dispossessing nature of the neoliberal global power they confronted. In Argentina, this new political culture and methodology fostered, through street theater and pageants, 'other means' of making politics, including a concern for internal gender democracy in what has been called the “solidarity economy.” My research suggests that struggles against gender inequities have a synergistic relationship to democratic political structures. I found that receptivity to feminist discourses and opportunities for women’s participation were greater in antihierarchical opposition movements than in those with a more traditional leftist orientation. In these autonomous movements, women were able to challenge gender inequities, democratizing both the movements and their family relationships. Their struggle for democracy and freedom contrasts with the role of neoliberal policies and practices responsible for the weakening of democratic institutions in Argentina. In this way, my research not only broadens understanding of Argentina’s crisis and recovery, but it raises questions about the implications of the present worldwide economic and social crisis on struggles to transform gender relations.