Feminism(s), Politics, and Domestic Violence: Tensions and Challenges in Shifting the Discourse and Institutional Relationships

Abstract

This dissertation explores the creative responses of domestic violence advocates, activists, and other professionals working to address domestic violence in a South Atlantic U.S. state. Neoliberal political-economic policies have supported the development of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to address social ills that the state has increasingly relinquished responsibility for. While personal responsibility and the work of civil society is extolled as the best way to address social problems and offer social services to the public, state-level cuts of funding streams to NGOs have made it increasingly difficult for these entities to perform their missions. Moreover, reliance upon the state for funding leads to a slippery slope whereby missions shift and projects may be selected based on funding availability rather than what target communities could truly benefit from. Limited resources and time available to adequately conduct organizational missions within NGOs has helped promote new forms of community coalition building across agencies and systems. Based on ethnographic research within a quasi-state agency and multiple community coalitions, this dissertation examines the knowledge and practice of actors situated within these different sites and their relationships with the state. I address the following questions: 1) how are actors affected by and then in turn respond to the socioeconomic affects of neoliberalism; 2) how do socially defined categories of difference shape knowledge and practice; and 3) what is the relationship between dominant and alternative discourses of domestic violence and the differentially positioned actors who adopt them. My research sheds light on the process of community coalition building and activism in the context of a national financial crisis, which supports politically driven hostility towards domestic violence activist work. Through an in depth analysis of the early development of a community coalition to end domestic violence in the LGBTQQI community, I examine the ways actors heterogeneous social compositions and life experiences shape understandings of domestic violence, and receptiveness to alternative forms of knowledge and practice. Material constraints produced by neoliberal political-economic policies further hinder knowledge production and actors' capacity to contend with alternative frameworks for analyzing domestic violence.