Narrative Manhood Acts: Batterer Intervention Program Graduates' Tragic Relationships

Abstract

We analyze how twenty graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. We focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which we define as self-narratives that signify membership in the category "man" and the possession of a masculine self. We also show how graduates constructed self-narratives as a genre that was oppositional to organizational narratives: rather than adopting the program's domestic violence melodrama or preferred conversion narrative, graduates used the larger culture-especially "bitch" imagery and sometimes racialized discourse-to construct tragedies. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre-making can be a method to resist organizational narratives.

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