School of Social and Political Science

Description

Intimate partner violence is one of those “dead zones of the imagination” (Graeber 2012), that elude a critical analysis, not so much because of a lack of relevance, but rather because it represent somehow an excess of relevance, and deals with fields of common experience that do not lend themselves to a rich and meaningful narrative, an authentic disruption of expectations. Telling the truth, denouncing violence, pressing charges, and giving a clear account of the violent facts make the women persuasive in different ways according to different institutional requests. Victims of domestic violence often appear too difficult or largely uncooperative. Using Italy as an illustrative case, the paradox of women’s experience and its avowal, constitutive of intimate partner abuse, emerges as a perspective for investigating the politics of truth-telling, to understand not only the women who testify their truth, but also, those who do not wish to talk at all before the law. At the same time, issues of evidence, persuasion, and testimony, have implications for ethnographic theory: my wish is to connect feminist issues, especially the long-debated disavowal of women’s words, with questions that anthropology is good at answering—and possibly to pose new ones.