This thesis presents a feminist genealogy of ideas concerned with male violence against
women from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The thesis has two
components: the first examines feminist, psychotherapeutic and socio-legal literature,
examining how knowledge about female victims of male violence has been constituted;
the second analyses memory work conducted with two groups of women exploring
personal meanings about victims and violence.
Each chapter describes pivotal moments in the history of women and violence showing
how seemingly disparate ideas emerged to become precursors of contemporary
knowledge which have given rise to a range of institutional responses to violence. Late
nineteenth-century feminists created new ways of speaking about violence against
women, however, their ideas were incongruent with prevailing discourses of the era.
The advent of Freudian thought also brought about a new language with which to talk
about violence placing the victim of violence firmly under the therapeutic gaze. During
the 1930s and 1940s the founders of victimology utilised Freud's work as evidence for
their proposition that female victims were often complicit in their own victimisation. In
the1970s feminists challenged victim blaming ideology and redefined violence as a
social and political issue. Twentieth century psychotherapeutic discourses tended to
position victims of violence within discourses of psychopathology. However, more
recently survivors have been defined in terms of traumatisation, constituting alternative
possibilities for subjectivity following victimisation.
The memory work used in this study enabled a consideration of the relationship
between discourse and women's understandings of violence. Although remnants of all
the discourses could be found in the women's narratives, some resonating with more
authority than others, no one discourse operated deterministically to totalise
subjectivity. Rather, it is evident that identities associated with survival are complex,
dynamic and fluid.
The legacy of the discourses described in this thesis continues to be apparent in
community attitudes, institutional responses to violence and survivors' concepts of self.
This thesis considers the potential implications of these discourses for women's
subjectivity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/218672 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Mikhailovich, Katja, Katja.Mikhailovich@canberra.edu.au |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Katja Mikhailovich |
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