Representing Domestic Violence: Ambivalence and Difference in What's Love Got to Do with It

Abstract

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.

Subjectification and Confession in Contemporary Memoirs of Abduction and Prolonged Captivity

“…These accusations work in tandem with the authors' desire to “set the record straight” to reflect dominant discursive patterns surrounding domestic violence. We must note that the cases I discuss differ drastically from other manifestations of spousal abuse, but the passages above suggest that we make sense of long‐term captivity using the same interpretive frames that we deploy to discuss domestic violence: when a woman acts in a counterintuitive way and returns to her partner (or does not leave in the first place), we attribute these actions to the victim's character flaws or personal weakness (Shoos , 62). We hypothesize that women consented, or even enjoyed, the abuse.…”

“…It is also important to note that these memoirs (or sexual confessions) are published for an audience that is accustomed to consuming them (Haug , 64), and memoirs have become popular within a broader social context that consistently demands why battered women remain in abusive relationships. This tactic “erects a mental wall around abuse, marking both batterers and victims as Other and reassuring us that we could never be them” (Shoos , 62). These authors and readers thus interpret memoirs about abduction and prolonged captivity within a framework that demands a confession, blames women for their suffering, or disavows this violence altogether.…”

“…Comparing these texts with Rivera's memoir also foregrounds the ways this diagnostic power operates along racial and class‐based lines. Diane Shoos reminds us, “popular and clinical discourses about abused women have also been structured, often in conflicting ways, by issues related to racial and class differences” (Shoos , 63). Rivera's case illustrates this reality: she does not discuss Stockholm Syndrome at all in her memoir, which implies from the outset that the diagnostic frameworks that Smart and Berry reject do not apply to her.…”

“…Representing domestic violence is not the same as understanding its root causes (Shoos , 58). As a result, feminist critics must attend to interpretive possibilities outside of the logic that these memoirs are empowering or disempowering, emancipatory or exploitative, as these readings do little to account for the root causes of this type of violence.…”

Making space for critical race theory within therapeutic settings :||Understanding the significance of race in serving racial and ethnic women minorities

“…These "unique" locations are constructed in comparison to the experiences of the privileged white racial group, which situates racial and ethnic minority women lived experiences of domestic violence as "unusual," or "counternormative." More importantly, locating racial and ethnic minority women's lived experiences is valuable to examine the politics and representation of domestic violence against racial and ethnic minority women (Shoos, 2003). An in-depth analysis addressing the social problem of domestic violence among racial and ethnic minority populations allows social work professionals to advance cultural, racial and ethnic knowledge, while examining gender dynamics, further strengthening social work practice, education and research.…”