South Africa has one of the most advanced constitutions in the world. Several progressive laws that promise the protection of women, including the Domestic Violence Act, and a range of state-funded bodies have been established to promote women’s rights. Despite these signs of transition to democracy in the post-apartheid era, violence against women remains problematically high. The dominant perspective in both South African and international literature on the high rate of violence against women has been that of women’s ‘powerlessness’. This article goes beyond approaches that emphasise women’s victimhood. It explores women’s agency from the perspective of the narratives of 16 women in two shelters in Cape Town. Drawing from Scott’s (1990) concept of power and resistance, and using a feminist poststructuralist analytic lens, the article provides insight into the complexity of women’s subjectivities ‘post-abuse’. It highlights women’s shifting sense of power in relation to their abusers, and how this imbued women with a sense of agency as seen through their retrospective accounts of their motivations to leave the abusive relationships.
This article shows how a narrative methodological approach is particularly suited to examining the dynamics of intimate partner violence, especially among poor women of color in South Africa. We show how a narrative approach allowed women to represent their experiences of violence according to their own frames of meaning, examining the complexities of abuse as it is informed by sociocultural factors of gender, poverty, and deprivation. In particular, we show how a narrative approach departs from other qualitative work by enabling women to construct particular forms of identity, thereby giving them agency in authoring their own stories of violence.
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