Narrating Domestic Violence
Producing the “Truth' of Violence in 19th- and 20th-Century Hawaiian Courts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12175805 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sally Engle Merry (0000-0001-5872-9898, Wellesley College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1994 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 04 |
| Pages | 967-993 |
| Publication date | 1994-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Law & Social Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0897-6546 • E-ISSN: 1747-4469 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1747-4469.1994.tb00945.x |
| OpenAlex | W2043513316 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Stories told by and about men who batter women in the courts of Hawai in the mid-19th century and in the late 20th century are strikingly similar. Courts, then as now, accept some justifications for battering and reject others, in the process constructing the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Throughout this period, the legal system claimed to focus only on the violent act itself, not the emotional or personal violation. The law interprets the violence as brute fact, knowable without regard to the social relationship or system of cultural meanings within which it occurs. There are persistent contradictions between the law's construction of domestic violence as an unambiguous physical act and litigants' and judges' views that these violent acts are moments within the social dynamics of gendered power relations. At the same time, there are recurrent tensions between the efforts of the legal system to portray violent acts against women in terms of rational categories of action and, in contrast, the experience of violence and the meanings within which it occurs that are often opaque to such sense-making, defiant of a simple means-ends calculus
Action (physics · Criminology · Domestic violence · Poison control · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · Suicide prevention · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Law · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2001 - 2023 (23) |
| Highly cited | No |