Things seemed to fall apart when he was in the room: Survivors' representations of violence, agency, power, and resistance in their online posts
Date
2019-04-18
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Abstract
In this research, I examined the ways in which survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) negotiated, in their online narratives, multiple IPV and gendered discourses to represent the context of men’s violence and to construct their subjectivities. I analyzed 26 online forum posts using Coates, Todd, and Wade’s (2003) interactional and discursive view of violence and resistance and Baxter’s (2003, 2008) feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis. The integrated findings demonstrated that the survivors drew from multiple competing discourses in their constructions of men’s violence and in constituting themselves as women, partners, mothers, and survivors. The results of analysis also identified how dominant IPV and gendered discourses worked intertextually to position survivors in shifting relations of power, to constrain their agency, and to delimit their strategies of resistance. However, the survivors also resisted IPV in meaningful ways. The limitations and the implications of these findings for research and counselling are discussed.
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Keywords
intimate partner violence, discourse, online forum, power, agency, resistance, feminist poststructuralism, interactional and discursive view of violence and resistance
Citation
Loewen, S. G. (2019). Things seemed to fall apart when he was in the room: Survivors' representations of violence, agency, power, and resistance in their online posts (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.