This article investigates the problems of visibility, ambivalence, and difference as they relate to our ways of "seeing" domestic abuse. The focal point of this investigation is the 1993 Brian Gibson film, What's Love Got to Do with It, based on Tina Turner's autobiography. In this essay I "re-view" What's Love in order to consider how the complexities of gender, race, and class construct popular cinematic representations of abusive relationships and how these representations can offer us comfortable positions from which to "see" what we already assume about men as abusers, women as victims, and the racial and class politics of violence.

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This essay discusses the place of popular culture, especially visual representation, in theories of female subjectivity and examines two recent works on women and popular culture as representative of two primary critical and methodological approaches to the fd subject. The essay considers the limitations and implications of both qualitative communication research and text-based feminist criticism and the need to construct a dialogue between them.