GENDER &

Anderson, Umberson
SOCIETY / GENDERING
/ June 2001 VIOLENCE

GENDERING VIOLENCE
Masculinity and Power in
Men’s Accounts of Domestic Violence

KRISTIN L. ANDERSON
Western Washington University
DEBRA UMBERSON
University of Texas–Austin

This article examines the construction of gender within men’s accounts of domestic violence. Analyses
of in-depth interviews conducted with 33 domestically violent heterosexual men indicate that these
batterers used diverse strategies to present themselves as nonviolent, capable, and rational men.
Respondents performed gender by contrasting effectual male violence with ineffectual female violence,
by claiming that female partners were responsible for the violence in their relationships and by con-
structing men as victims of a biased criminal justice system. This study suggests that violence against
female partners is a means by which batterers reproduce a binary framework of gender.

In the 1970s, feminist activists and scholars brought wife abuse to the forefront of
public consciousness. Published in the academic and popular press, the words and
images of survivors made one aspect of patriarchy visible: Male dominance was
displayed on women’s bruised and battered bodies (Dobash and Dobash 1979;
Martin 1976). Early research contributed to feminist analyses of battery as part of a
larger pattern of male domination and control of women (Pence and Paymar 1993;
Yllo 1993). Research in the 1980s and 1990s has expanded theoretical understand-
ings of men’s violence against women through emphases on women’s agency and
resistance to male control (Bowker 1983; Kirkwood 1993); the intersection of
physical, structural, and emotional forces that sustain men’s control over female
partners (Kirkwood 1993; Pence and Paymar 1993); and the different constraints

AUTHORS’ NOTE: We would like to thank Sarah Dugan and Susan Sharp for their assistance with
interviewing, and Christine Bose, Jill Cermele, Beth Schneider, Paul Sterling, Carlos de la Torre, Chris-
tine Williams, and Gender & Society reviewers for their helpful suggestions on previous versions of this
article. This research was funded by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health in an award to Debra
Umberson. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Family Violence Diversion Network of Child
and Family Services, Travis County, Texas. A previous version of this article was presented at the annual
meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, 1998.
REPRINT REQUESTS: Kristin L. Anderson, Department of Sociology, Arntzen Hall 529, Western
Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225-9081; e-mail: [email protected].

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 15 No. 3, June 2001 358-380

© 2001 Sociologists for Women in Society

358
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 359

faced by women and men of diverse nations, racial ethnic identities, and sexualities
who experience violence at the hands of intimate partners (Eaton 1994; Island and
Letellier 1991; Jang, Lee, and Morello-Frosch 1998; Renzetti 1992). This work
demonstrates ways in which the gender order facilitates victimization of disenfran-
chised groups.
Comparatively less work has examined the ways in which gender influences
male perpetrators’ experiences of domestic violence (Yllo 1993). However, a grow-
ing body of qualitative research critically examines batterers’ descriptions of vio-
lence within their relationships. Dobash and Dobash (1998), Hearn (1998), and
Ptacek (1990) focus on the excuses, justifications, and rationalizations that
batterers use to account for their violence. These authors suggest that batterers’
accounts of violence are texts through which they attempt to deny responsibility for
violence and to present nonviolent self-identities.
Dobash and Dobash (1998) identify ways in which gender, as a system that
structures the authority and responsibilities assigned to women and men within
intimate relationships, supports battery. They find that men use violence to punish
female partners who fail to meet their unspoken physical, sexual, or emotional
needs. Lundgren (1998) examines batterers’ use of gendered religious ideologies to
justify their violence against female partners. Hearn (1998, 37) proposes that vio-
lence is a “resource for demonstrating and showing a person is a man.” These stud-
ies find that masculine identities are constructed through acts of violence and
through batterers’ ability to control partners as a result of their violence.
This article examines the construction of gender within men’s accounts of
domestic violence. Guided by theoretical work that characterizes gender as perfor-
mance (Butler 1990, 1993; West and Fenstermaker 1995), we contend that batterers
attempt to construct masculine identities through the practice of violence and the
discourse about violence that they provide. We examine these performances of gen-
der as “routine, methodical, and ongoing accomplishment[s]” that create and sus-
tain notions of natural differences between women and men (West and
Fenstermaker 1995, 9). Butler’s concept of performativity extends this idea by sug-
gesting that it is through performance that gendered subjectivities are constructed:
“Gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported
to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who
may be said to preexist the deed” (1990, 25). For Butler, gender performances dem-
onstrate the instability of masculine subjectivity; a “masculine identity” exists only
as the actions of individuals who stylize their bodies and their actions in accordance
with a normative binary framework of gender.
In addition, the performance of gender makes male power and privilege appear
natural and normal rather than socially produced and structured. Butler (1990)
argues that gender is part of a system of relations that sustains heterosexual male
privilege through the denigration or erasure of alternative (feminine/gay/lesbian/
bisexual) identities. West and Fenstermaker (1995) contend that cultural beliefs
about underlying and essential differences between women and men, and social
structures that constitute and are constituted by these beliefs, are reproduced by the
360 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2001

accomplishment of gender. In examining the accounts offered by domestically vio-

lent men, we focus on identifying ways in which the practice of domestic violence
helps men to accomplish gender. We also focus on the contradictions within these
accounts to explore the instability of masculine subjectivities and challenges to the
performance of gender.

DATA AND METHOD

In-depth interviews conducted in 1995-96 with 33 men recruited through the

Family Violence Diversion Network (FVDN), a nonprofit agency located in a
midsize southwestern city, serve as data for our analysis. FVDN provides educa-
tional domestic violence programs and serves approximately 500 to 700 men per
year in this capacity. Eighty-five percent to 90 percent of the program participants
are court mandated to participate in a battering program. The remaining partici-
pants are self-referred or referred by other sources such as their attorneys or thera-
pists. FVDN’s program for batterers entails 21 weekly meetings run by male group
leaders. The first three weeks of the program consist of orientation sessions. We
recruited respondents primarily through these orientation sessions to reduce the
possibility that responses would be influenced by the information provided dur-
ing group sessions. Potential participants were informed that the study was not
connected to FVDN and that their participation was voluntary. The number of
participants recruited from 10 FVDN orientation meetings ranged from 5 percent
to 40 percent of the men present. Participants were paid 30 to 40 dollars for their
participation.
We collected information about the characteristics of the FVDN participant pop-
ulation that allows us to compare our sample to the population. Table 1 presents
descriptive data for the study sample and the population of all men who participated
in the FVDN program from July through December 1994. A middle-class group of
the population served by FVDN volunteered to participate in the present study. On
average, the men who volunteered to participate were of higher socioeconomic sta-
tus and were more likely to be at FVDN at their own initiative than men in the
FVDN population. Our sample contained more European American men and fewer
Latino men compared with the FVDN population. Six of the respondents reported
an African American ethnic identity, 7 men identified as Latino, 19 men reported a
European American ancestry, and 1 respondent reported a Native American ances-
try. Five men had earned college degrees, 18 had attended college or vocational/
technical schools, 6 had completed high school, and 4 had not completed high
school. Their annual household incomes ranged from $5,000 to $80,000, with a
mean of $30,463.
Interviews were conducted by three white female graduate students in FVDN
agency offices and lasted between one and two hours (the average length was 95
minutes). We asked open-ended questions about positive and negative aspects of
their relationships with female partners and their children (see Appendix A for a list
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 361

a
TABLE 1: Comparison of Sample to FVDN Population

FVDN Population Sample of

7-94 to 12-94 FVDN Participants
Variable M SD M SD

Sociodemographic
Household Income 14,123 15,936 30,463 16,642
Education (years) 11 3.10 13 1.8
Age 31.51 9.00 32.07 7.88
Race/ethnicity (%)
African American 16.0 18.2
European American 32.4 57.5
Hispanic/Latino 39.7 21.2
Other 12.1 3.0
Marital status (%)
Married 40.2 42.4
Cohabiting 23.8 27.3
Divorced/separated 3.7 30.3
Never married 11.4 0
FVDN participation (%)
Court mandated 90.3 81.5
Voluntary 9.7 18.5
n 219 33

a. FVDN = Family Violence Diversion Network.

of the guiding questions). Following the methods used by Dobash and Dobash
(1984) in their study of women’s accounts of domestic violence, we asked partici-
pants to recount the worst and most recent incidents of violence in their relation-
ships. Interviews were semistructured; interviewers were instructed to cover the
topics suggested by the guiding questions and to pursue topics raised by the partici-
pants. Interviews were transcribed and thematically coded for analysis. After iden-
tifying the prevalent themes in the interviews, we reread the transcripts separately
for each theme to identify the presence or absence of the theme within the individ-
ual transcripts.
The diversity in our sample enables us to examine some ways in which social
class and racial ethnic locations influence accounts of violence. Moreover, we are
attentive to ways in which gender and racial ethnic differences may have influenced
our rapport with respondents and the content of the interviews. Appendix B pres-
ents specific demographic information about the individual participants and pseud-
onyms through which they are referenced.

FINDINGS

How do batterers talk about the violence in their relationships? They excuse,
rationalize, justify, and minimize their violence against female partners. Like the
362 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2001

batterers studied by previous researchers, the men in this study constructed their
violence as a rational response to extreme provocation, a loss of control, or a minor
incident that was blown out of proportion. Through such accounts, batterers deny
responsibility for their violence and save face when recounting behavior that has
elicited social sanctions (Dobash and Dobash 1998; Ptacek 1990).
However, these accounts are also about the performance of gender. That is,
through their speech acts, respondents presented themselves as rational, compe-
tent, masculine actors. We examine several ways in which domestic violence is
gendered in these accounts. First, according to respondents’ reports, violence is
gendered in its practice. Although it was in their interests to minimize and deny
their violence, participants reported engaging in more serious, frequent, and injuri-
ous violence than that committed by their female partners. Second, respondents
gendered violence through their depictions and interpretations of violence. They
talked about women’s violence in a qualitatively different fashion than they talked
about their own violence, and their language reflected hegemonic notions of femi-
ninity and masculinity. Third, the research participants constructed gender by inter-
preting the violent conflicts in ways that suggested that their female partners were
responsible for the participants’ behavior. Finally, respondents gendered violence
by claiming that they are victimized by a criminal justice system that constructs all
men as villains and all women as victims.

Gendered Practice

Men perpetrate the majority of violence against women and against other men in
the United States (Bachman and Saltzman 1995). Although some scholars argue
that women perpetrate domestic violence at rates similar to men (Straus 1993),
feminist scholars have pointed out that research findings of “sexual symmetry” in
domestic violence are based on survey questions that fail to account for sex differ-
ences in physical strength and size and in motivations for violence (Dobash et al.
1992; Straton 1994). Moreover, recent evidence from a large national survey sug-
gests that women experience higher rates of victimization at the hands of partners
than men and that African American and Latina women experience higher rates of
victimization than European American women (Bachman and Saltzman 1995).
Although the majority of respondents described scenarios in which both they
and their partners perpetrated violent acts, they reported that their violence was
more frequent and severe than the violence perpetrated by their female partners.
Eleven respondents (33 percent) described attacking a partner who did not physi-
cally resist, and only two respondents (6 percent) reported that they were victim-
ized by their partners but did not themselves perpetrate violence. The twenty cases
(61 percent) in which the participants reported “mutual” violence support feminist
critiques of “sexual symmetry”:

We started pushing each other. And the thing is that I threw her on the floor. I told her
that I’m going to leave. She took my car keys, and I wanted my car keys so I went and
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 363

grabbed her arm, pulled it, and took the car keys away from her. She—she comes back
and tries to kick me in the back. So I just pushed her back and threw her on the floor
again. (Juan)

Moreover, the respondents did not describe scenarios in which they perceived
themselves to be at risk from their partners’ violence. The worst injury reportedly
sustained was a split lip, and only five men (15 percent) reported sustaining any
injury. Female partners reportedly sustained injuries in 14 cases (42 percent).
Although the majority of the injuries reportedly inflicted on female partners con-
sisted of bruises and scratches, a few women were hospitalized, and two women
sustained broken ribs. These findings corroborate previous studies showing that
women suffer more injuries from domestic violence than men (Langhinrichsen-
Rohling, Neidig, and Thorn 1995). Moreover, because past studies suggest that
male batterers underreport their perpetration of violence (Dobash and Dobash
1998), it is likely that respondents engaged in more violence than they described in
these in-depth interviews.
Domestic violence is gendered through social and cultural practices that advan-
tage men in violent conflicts with women. Young men often learn to view them-
selves as capable perpetrators of violence through rough play and contact sports, to
exhibit fearlessness in the face of physical confrontations, and to accept the harm
and injury associated with violence as “natural” (Dobash and Dobash 1998; Messner
1992). Men are further advantaged by cultural norms suggesting that women
should pair with men who are larger and stronger than themselves (Goffman 1977).
Women’s less pervasive and less effective use of violence reflects fewer social
opportunities to learn violent techniques, a lack of encouragement for female vio-
lence within society, and women’s size disadvantage in relation to male partners
(Fagot et al. 1985; McCaughey 1998). In a culture that defines aggression as unfem-
inine, few women learn to use violence effectively.

Gendered Depictions and Interpretations

Participants reported that they engaged in more frequent and serious violence
than their partners, but they also reported that their violence was different from that
of their partners. They depicted their violence as rational, effective, and explosive,
whereas women’s violence was represented as hysterical, trivial, and ineffectual.
Of the 22 participants who described violence perpetrated by their partners, twelve
(55 percent) suggested that their partner’s violence was ridiculous or ineffectual.
These respondents minimized their partners’ violence by explaining that it was of
little concern to them:

I came out of the kitchen, and then I got in her face, and I shoved her. She shoved, she
tried to push me a little bit, but it didn’t matter much. (Adam)
I was seeing this girl, and then a friend of mine saw me with this girl and he went back
and told my wife, and when I got home that night, that’s when she tried to hit me, to
fight me. I just pushed her out of the way and left. (Shad)
364 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2001

This minimizing discourse also characterizes descriptions of cases in which female

partners successfully made contact and injured the respondent, as in the following
account:

I was on my way to go to the restroom. And she was just cussing and swearing and she
wouldn’t let me pass. So, I nudged her. I didn’t push her or shove her, I just kind of,
you know, just made my way to the restroom. And, when I done that she hit me, and
she drew blood. She hit me in the lip, and she drew blood. . . . I go in the bathroom and I
started laughing, you know. And I was still half lit that morning, you know. And I was
laughing because I think it maybe shocked me more than anything that she had done
this, you know. (Ed)

Although his partner “drew blood,” Ed minimized her violence by describing it as

amusing, uncharacteristic, and shocking.
Even in the case of extreme danger, such as when threatened with a weapon,
respondents denied the possibility that their partners’ violence was a threat. During
a fight described by Steve, his partner locked herself in the bathroom with his gun:

We were battering each other at that point, and that’s when she was in the bath-
room. This is—it’s like 45 minutes into this whole argument now. She’s in the bath-
room, messing with my [gun]. And I had no idea. So I kicked the door in—in the
bathroom, and she’s sitting there trying to load this thing, trying to get this clip in,
and luckily she couldn’t figure it out. Why, I don’t—you know, well, because she was
drunk. So, luckily she didn’t. The situation could have been a whole lot worse, you
know, it could have been a whole lot worse than it was. I thank God that she didn’t fig-
ure it out. When I think about it, you know, she was lucky to come out of it with just a
cut in her head. You know, she could have blown her brains out or done something
really stupid.

This account contains interesting contradictions. Steve stated that he had “no idea”
that his partner had a gun, but he responded by kicking down the door to reach her.
He then suggested that he was concerned about his partner’s safety and that he
kicked in the door to save her from doing “something really stupid” to herself. Simi-
larly, Alejandro minimized the threat in his account of an incident in which his part-
ner picked up a weapon:

So, she got angry and got a knife, came up at me, and I kick her. And then what hap-
pened? Well, I kick her about four times because she—I kick her, and I say “Just stop,
stay there!” and she stand up and come again and I had to kick her again. Somebody
called the police, somebody called the police. I guess we were making a lot of noise.
And I couldn’t go out, I couldn’t leave home, because I was not dressed properly to go
out. And so I couldn’t go, so the only alternative I had at this moment was to defend
myself from the knife. So I had to kick her.

Alejandro suggested that his partner’s attack with a knife was not enough of a threat
to warrant his leaving the house when he was “not dressed properly to go out.”
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 365

In addition to emphasizing their partners’ incompetence in the practice of vio-

lence, some respondents depicted the violence perpetrated by their partners as
irrational:

She has got no control. She sees something and she don’t like it, she’ll go and pull my
hair, scratch me, and [act] paranoid, crazy, screaming loud, make everybody look at
her, and call the police, you know. Just nuts. (Andrew)
She came back and started hitting me with her purse again so I knocked the purse out
of her hand, and then, she started screaming at me to get out. I went back to the room,
and she came running down the hall saying she was going to throw all my stuff out and
I’d just had enough so I went and grabbed her, pulled her back. And grabbed her back
to the bed and threw her on the bed and sat on her—told her I wasn’t going to let her up
until she came to her senses . . . she came back up again and I just grabbed her and
threw her down. After that, she promised—she finally said that she had come to her
senses and everything. I went into the other room, and she went out to clean up the
mess she had made in the living room, and then she just started just crying all night
long, or for a while. (Phil)

Phil and Andrew described their partners’ acts as irrational and hysterical. Such
depictions helped respondents to justify their own violence and to present them-
selves as calm, cool, rational men. Phil described his own behavior of throwing his
partner down as a nonviolent, controlled response to his partner’s outrageous
behavior. Moreover, he suggests that he used this incident to demonstrate his sense
of superior rationality to his partner. Phil later reported that a doctor became “very
upset” about the marks on his wife’s neck two days after this incident, suggesting
that he was not the rational actor represented in his account.
In eight other cases (36 percent), respondents did not depict their partner’s vio-
lence as trivial or ineffectual. Rather, they described their partners’ behavior in
matter-of-fact terms:

Then she starts jumping at me or hitting me, or tell me “leave the house, I don’t want
you, I don’t love you” and stuff like that. And I say, “don’t touch me, don’t touch me.”
And I just push her back. She keeps coming and hit me, hit me. I keep pushing back,
she starts scratch me, so I push hard to stop her from hurting me. (Mario)

Other respondents depicted their partner’s violence in factual terms but empha-
sized that they perceived their own violence as the greater danger. Ray took his part-
ner seriously when he stated that “she was willing to fight, to defend herself,” yet he
also mentioned his fears that his own violence would be lethal: “The worst time is
when she threw an iron at me. And I’m gonna tell you, I think that was the worst
time because, in defense, in retaliation, I pulled her hair, and I thought maybe I
broke her neck.” Only two respondents—Alan and Jim—consistently identified as
victims:

One of the worst times was realizing that she was drunk and belligerent. I realized that
I needed to take her home in her car and she was not capable of driving. And she was
366 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2001

physically abusive the whole way home. And before I could get out of the door or get
out of the way, she came at me with a knife. And stupidly, I defended myself—kicked
her hand to get the knife out. And I bruised her hand enough to where she felt justified
enough to call the police with stories that I was horribly abusing. (Jim)

Jim reported that his partner has hit him, stabbed him, and thrown things at him.
However, he also noted that he was arrested following several of these incidents,
suggesting that his accounts tell us only part of the story. Moreover, like Steve and
Alejandro, he did not describe feelings of fear or apprehension about his partner’s
use of a knife.
Although female partners were represented as dangerous only to themselves, the
participants depicted their own violence as primal, explosive, and damaging to
others:

I explode for everything. This time it was trying to help my daughter with her home-
work, it was a Sunday, and she was not paying any attention, and I get angry with my
daughter, and so I kick the TV . . . I guess broke the TV, and then I kick a bookshelf. My
daughter tried to get into the middle so I pushed her away from me and I kicked
another thing. So, she [his partner] called the police. I am glad she called the police
because something really awful could have happened. (Alejandro)
She said something, and then I just lost control. I choked her, picked her up off her
feet, and lifted her up like this, and she was kind of kicking back and forth, and I really
felt like I really wanted to kill her this time. (Adam)
I feel that if there had been a gun in the house, I would have used it. That’s one reason
also why I refuse to have a gun. Because I know I have a terrible temper and I’m afraid
that I will do something stupid like that. (Fred)

In contrast to their reported fearlessness when confronted by women wielding

weapons, respondents constructed their own capacity for violence as something
that should engender fear. These interpretations are consistent with cultural con-
structions of male violence as volcanic—natural, lethal, and impossible to stop
until it has run its course.
Respondents’ interpretations of ineffectual female violence and lethal male vio-
lence reflect actual violent practices in a culture that grants men more access to vio-
lence, but they also gender violence. By denying a threat from women’s violence,
participants performed masculinity and reinforced notions of gender difference.
Women were constructed as incompetent in the practice of violence, and their suc-
cesses were trivialized. For example, it is unlikely that Ed would have responded
with laughter had his lip been split by the punch of another man (Dobash and
Dobash 1998). Moreover, respondents ignored their partners’ motivations for vio-
lence and their active efforts to exert change within their relationships.
In her examination of Irigaray’s writings on the representation of women within
the masculine economy, Butler (1993, 36) writes that “the economy that claims to
include the feminine as the subordinate term in a binary opposition of mascu-
line/feminine excludes the feminine—produces the feminine as that which must be
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 367

excluded for that economy to operate.” The binary representation of ineffectual,

hysterical female behavior and rational, lethal male violence within these accounts
erases the feminine; violence perpetrated by women and female subjectivity are
effaced in order that the respondents can construct masculinities.1 These represen-
tations mask the power relations that determine what acts will qualify as “violence”
and thus naturalize the notion that violence is the exclusive province of men.

Gendering Blame

The research participants also gendered violence by suggesting that their female
partners were responsible for the violence within their relationships. Some respon-
dents did this by claiming that they did not hit women with whom they were
involved in the past:

I’ve never hit another woman in my life besides the one that I’m with. She just has a
knack for bringing out the worst in me. (Tom)
You know, I never hit my first wife. I’m married for five years—I never hit her. I never
struck her, not once. (Mitchell)

Respondents also shifted blame onto female partners by detailing faults in their
partners’ behaviors and personalities. They criticized their partners’ parenting
styles, interaction styles, and choices. However, the most typically reported criti-
cism was that female partners were controlling. Ten of the 33 respondents (30 per-
cent) characterized their partners as controlling, demanding, or dominating:

She’s real organized and critiquing about things. She wanna—she has to get it like—
she like to have her way all the time, you know. In control of things, even when she’s at
work in the evenings, she has to have control of everything that’s going on in the
house. And—but—you know, try to get, to control everything there. You know,
what’s going on, and me and myself. (Adam)
You know, you’re here with this person, you’re here for five years, and yet they turn
out to be aggressive, what is aggressive, too educated, you know. It’s the reason they
feel like they want to control you. (Mitchell)

In a few cases, respondents claimed that they felt emasculated by what they inter-
preted as their partners’ efforts to control them:

She’s kind of—I don’t want to say dominating. She’s a good mother, she’s a great
housekeeper, she’s an excellent cook. But as far as our relationship goes, the old tradi-
tional “man wears the pants in the family,” it’s a shared responsibility. There’s no way
that you could say that I wear the pants in the family. She’s dominating in that sense.
(Ted)
You ask the guy sitting next door to me, the guy that’s down the hall. For years they all
say, “Bill, man, reach down and grab your eggs. She wears the pants.” Or maybe like,
“Hey man, we’re going to go—Oh, Bill can’t go. He’s got to ask his boss first.” And
they were right. (Bill)
368 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2001

These representations of female partners as dominating enabled men to position

themselves as victims of masculinized female partners. The relational construction
of masculinity is visible in these accounts; women who “wear the pants” disrupt the
binary opposition of masculinity/femininity. Bill’s account reveals that “one is
one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender” (Butler 1990, 22); he is
unable to perform masculinity to the satisfaction of his friends when mirrored by a
partner who is perceived as dominating.
Moreover, respondents appeared to feel emasculated by unspecified forces.
Unlike female survivors who describe concrete practices that male partners utilize
to exert control (Kirkwood 1993; Walker 1984), participants were vague about
what they meant by control and the ways in which their partners exerted control:

I don’t think she’s satisfied unless she has absolute control, and she’s not in a position
to control anyway, um, mentally. . . . When you said that, um, that she wasn’t really in a
position to control, what did you mean by that? Well, she’s not in a position to control,
in the fact that she’s not, the control that she wants, is pretty much control over me. I’m
pretty much the only person that she sees every day. She wants to control every aspect
of what I do, and while in the same turn, she really can’t. (George)

Respondents who claimed that their partners are controlling offered nebulous
explanations for these feelings, suggesting that these claims may be indicative of
these men’s fears about being controlled by a woman rather than the actual prac-
tices of their partners.
Finally, respondents gendered violence through their efforts to convince female
partners to shoulder at least part of the blame for their violence. The following com-
ments reflect respondents’ interpretations of their partners’ feelings after the argu-
ment was over:

Finally, for once in her life, I got her to accept 50/50 blame for the reason why she
actually got hit. You know, used to be a time where she could say there was never a
time. But, she accepts 50/50 blame for this. (Tom)
She has a sense that she is probably 80-90 percent guilty of my anger. (Alejandro)

Contemporary constructions of gender hold women responsible for men’s

aggression (Gray, Palileo, and Johnson 1993). Sexual violence is often blamed on
women, who are perceived as tempting men who are powerless in the face of their
primal sexual desires (Scully 1990). Although interviewees expressed remorse for
their violent behavior, they also implied that it was justified in light of their part-
ners’ controlling behavior. Moreover, their violence was rewarded by their part-
ners’ feelings of guilt, suggesting that violence is simultaneously a performance of
masculinity and a means by which respondents encouraged the performance of
femininity by female partners.
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 369

“The Law Is for Women”: Claiming Gender Bias

Participants sometimes rationalized their violence by claiming that the legal sys-
tem overreacted to a minor incident. Eight of the 33 interviewees (24 percent)
depicted themselves as victims of gender politics or the media attention surround-
ing the trial of O. J. Simpson:

I think my punishment was wrong. And it was like my attorney told me—I’m suffer-
ing because of O. J. Simpson. Mine was the crime of the year. That is, you know, it’s
the hot issue of the year because of O. J. Two years ago they would have gone “Don’t
do that again.” (Bill)
I’m going to jail for something I haven’t even done because the woman is always the
victim and the guy is always the bad guy. And O. J., I think, has made it even worse—
that mentality. I know that there’s a lot of bad, ignorant, violent guys out there that
probably think that it’s wonderful to batter their wife on a regular basis, but I think
there’s a lot of reverse mentality going on right now. (Jim)
I don’t necessarily agree with the jail system, which I know has nothing to do with
you guys, but you have to sign a form saying that you’ll come to counseling before
you’ve ever been convicted of a crime. And, like I said, here I am now with this [inau-
dible] that I have to come to for 21 weeks in a row—for what could amount to some
girl calling—hurting herself and saying her boyfriend or husband did it. (Tom)

These claims of gender bias were sometimes directly contradicted by respondents’

descriptions of events following the arrival of the police. Four participants (12 per-
cent) reported that the police wanted to arrest their female partner along with or
instead of themselves—stories that challenged their claims of bias in the system. A
few of these respondents reported that they lied to the police about the source of
their injuries to prevent the arrest of their partners. Ed, the respondent who sus-
tained a split lip from his partner’s punch, claimed that he “took the fall” for his
partner:

They wanted to arrest her, because I was the one who had the little split lip. And I told
them that—I said, “No, man, she’s seven months pregnant.” I told the officer, you
know, “How can you take her to jail? She’s seven months pregnant!” And I said,
“Look, I came in here—I started it, I pushed her. And she hit me.” You know, I told
them that I had shoved her. And after that they said, “Okay, well, we have to remove,
move you out of this—out of this situation here.” Something about the law. So, I said,
“Well, you know, I started it.” I told them I had started it, you know. And, they said,
“Okay, well, we’ll take you then.” So I went to jail. (Ed)

When the police arrived, these respondents were in a double bind. They wanted to
deny their own violence to avoid arrest, but they also wanted to deny victimization
at the hands of a woman. “Protecting” their female partners from arrest allowed
them a way out of this bind. By volunteering to be arrested despite their alleged
innocence, they became chivalrous defenders of their partners. They were also, par-
adoxically, able to claim that “gender bias” led to their arrest and participation in the
370 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2001

FVDN program. When Ed argued that the criminal justice system is biased toward
women, we confronted him about this contradiction:

Ed: I am totally against, you know,—ever since I stepped foot in this program and I’ve
only been to the orientation—[that] it speaks of gender, okay, and everything that—it
seems like every statement that is made is directed toward men, toward the male
party. . . . as I stated earlier, the law is for women. In my opinion, it—
Interviewer: Although, they would have arrested her if you hadn’t intervened.
Ed: They would, that’s right. That’s another thing. That’s right, that’s right. They would
have arrested her. But, you know even, even with her statement saying, look this is
what, this is what happened, I’m not pressing charges. The state picked up those
charges, and, they just took it upon themselves, you know, to inconvenience my life, is
what they did.
Interviewer: Okay. And the other alternative would have been that she would have been
going through this process instead of you.
Ed: Well, no, the other alternative, that was, that was, that would come out of this, is [that]
I would have spent 30 days in jail.

Ed repeatedly dismissed the notion that the legal system would hold his partner
accountable for her actions despite his own words to the contrary. His construction
of men as victimized by an interfering justice system allowed him to avoid the
seemingly unacceptable conclusion that either he or his partner was a victim of
violence.
Another respondent, Jim, reportedly prevented his partner’s arrest because he
felt it to be in his best interests:

She was drunk and behind the wheel and driving erratically while backhanding me.
And a cop pulled us over because he saw her hit me. And I realized that she was gonna
get a DWI [Driving While Intoxicated], which would have been her second and a
major expense to me, besides, you know, I think that there’s a thin line between pro-
tecting somebody and possessing somebody. But I protect her, I do. I find myself sac-
rificing myself for her and lying for her constantly. And I told the cops that I hit her just
because they saw her hit me and I figured that if I told them that I hit her, rather than her
get a DWI, that we would both go to jail over an assault thing. Which is what hap-
pened. (Jim)

When batterers “protect” their partners from arrest, their oppressor becomes a pow-
erful criminal justice system rather than a woman. Although even the loser gains
status through participation in a fight with another man, a man does not gain pres-
tige from being beaten by a woman (Dobash and Dobash 1998). In addition,
respondents who stepped in to prevent their partners from being arrested ensured
that their partners remained under their control, as Jim suggested when he
described “the thin line between being protected by somebody and possessing
somebody.” By volunteering to be arrested along with his partner, Jim ensured that
she was not “taken into possession” (e.g., taken into custody) by the police.2
By focusing the interviews on “gender bias” in the system, respondents
deflected attention from their own perpetration and victimization. Constructions of
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 371

a bias gave them an explanation for their arrest that was consistent with their
self-presentation as rational, strong, and nonviolent actors. Claims of “reverse men-
tality” also enabled participants to position themselves as victims of gender poli-
tics. Several interviewees made use of men’s rights rhetoric or alluded to changes
wrought by feminism to suggest that they are increasingly oppressed by a society in
which women have achieved greater rights:

I really get upset when I watch TV shows as far as, like they got shows or TV station
called Lifetime and there are many phrases “TV for women.” And that kind of made
me upset. Why is it TV for women? You know, it should be TV for everyone, not just
women. You don’t hear someone else at a different TV station saying, “TV for
men.” . . . As far as the law goes, changing some of the laws goes too, some of the laws
that guys are pulled away from their children. I kind of felt sorry for the guys. (Kenny)

A number of recent studies have examined the increasingly angry and antifeminist
discourse offered by some men who are struggling to construct masculine identities
within patriarchies disrupted by feminism and movements for gay/lesbian and civil
rights (Fine et al. 1997; Messner 1998; Savran 1998). Some branches of the con-
temporary “men’s movement” have articulated a defensive and antifeminist rheto-
ric of “men’s rights” that suggests that men have become the victims of feminism
(Messner 1998; Savran 1998). Although none of our interviewees reported partici-
pation in any of the organized men’s movements, their allusions to the discourse of
victimized manhood suggest that the rhetoric of these movements has become an
influential resource for the performance of gender among some men. Like the
angry men’s rights activists studied by Messner (1998), some respondents posi-
tioned themselves as the victims of feminism, which they believe has co-opted the
criminal justice system and the media by creating “myths” of male domination. The
interviews suggest that respondents feel disempowered and that they identify
women—both the women whom they batter and women who lead movements to
criminalize domestic violence—as the “Other” who has “stolen their presumed
privilege” (Fine et al. 1997, 54): “Now girls are starting to act like men, or try and be
like men. Like if you hit me, I’ll call the cops, or if you don’t do it, I’ll do this, or
stuff like that” (Juan). Juan contends that by challenging men’s “privilege” to hit
their female partners without fear of repercussions, women have become “like
men.” This suggests that the construction of masculine subjectivities is tied to a
position of dominance and that women have threatened the binary and hierarchical
gender framework through their resistance to male violence.

DISCUSSION: SOCIAL LOCATIONS

AND DISCOURSES OF VIOLENCE

Respondents’ descriptions of conflicts with female partners were similar across

racial ethnic and class locations. Participants of diverse socioeconomic standings
372 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2001

and racial ethnic backgrounds minimized the violence perpetrated by their part-
ners, claimed that the criminal justice system is biased against men, and attempted
to place responsibility for their violence on female partners. However, we identified
some ways in which social class influenced respondents’ self-presentations.3
Respondents of higher socioeconomic status emphasized their careers and the
material items that they provided for their families throughout the interviews:

We built two houses together and they are nice. You know, we like to see a nice envi-
ronment for our family to live in. We want to see our children receive a good educa-
tion. (Ted)
That woman now sits in a 2,700 square foot house. She drives a Volvo. She has every-
thing. A brand-new refrigerator, a brand-new washer and dryer. (Bill)

Conversely, economically disenfranchised men volunteered stories about their

prowess in fights with other men. These interviewees reported that they engaged in
violent conflicts with other men as a means of gaining respect:

Everybody in my neighborhood respected me a lot, you know. I used to be kind of vio-

lent. I used to like to fight and stuff like that, but I’m not like that anymore. She—I
don’t think she liked me because I liked to fight a lot but she liked me because people
respected me because they knew that they would have to fight if they disrespected me.
You know I think that’s one thing that turned her on about me; I don’t let people mess
around. (Tony)
My stepson’s friend was there, and he start to push me too. So I started to say, “Hey,
you know, this is my house, and you don’t tell me nothing in my house.” So I start
fighting, you know, I was gonna fight him. (Mario)

The use of violence to achieve respect is a central theme in research on the construc-
tion of masculinities among disenfranchised men (Messerschmidt 1993; Messner
1992). Although men of diverse socioeconomic standings valorize fistfights between
men (Campbell 1993; Dobash and Dobash 1998), the extent to which they partici-
pate in these confrontations varies by social context. Privileged young men are
more often able to avoid participation in social situations that require physical vio-
lence against other men than are men who reside in poor neighborhoods (Messner
1992).
We find some evidence that cultural differences influence accounts of domestic
violence. Two respondents who identified themselves as immigrants from Latin
America (Alejandro and Juan) reported that they experienced conflicts with female
partners about the shifting meanings of gender in the United States:

She has a different attitude than mine. She has an attitude that comes from Mexico—
be a man like, you have to do it. And it’s like me here, it’s fifty-fifty, it’s another thing,
you know, it’s like “I don’t have to do it.” . . . I told her the wrong things she was doing
and I told her, “It’s not going to be that way because we’re not in Mexico, we’re in the
United States.” (Juan)
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 373

Juan’s story suggests that unstable meanings about what it means to be a woman or
a man are a source of conflict within his relationship and that he and his partner
draw on divergent gender ideologies to buttress their positions. Although many of
the respondents expressed uncertainty about appropriate gender performances in
the 1990s, those who migrated to the United States may find these “crisis tenden-
cies of the gender order” (Connell 1992, 736) to be particularly unsettling. Interest-
ingly, Juan depicts his partner as clinging to traditional gender norms, while he
embraces the notion of gender egalitarianism. However, we are hesitant to draw
conclusions about this finding due to the small number of interviews that we con-
ducted with immigrants.
Race or ethnicity, class, and gender matter in the context of the interview setting.
As white, middle-class, female researchers, we were often questioning men who
resided in different social worlds. Like other female researchers who have inter-
viewed men with histories of sexual violence, we found that the interviewees were
usually friendly, polite, and appeared relatively comfortable in the interview setting
(Scully 1990). Unlike Ptacek, a male researcher who interviewed batterers, we did
not experience a “subtext of resistance and jockeying for power beneath the other-
wise friendly manner these individuals displayed in our initial phone conversa-
tions” (1990, 140). However, respondents may have offered more deterministic
accounts of gender and assumed more shared experiences with the interviewer had
they been interviewed by men rather than women (Williams and Heikes 1993). For
example, whereas Ptacek (1990) found that 78 percent of the batterers that he inter-
viewed justified their violence by complaining that their wives did not fulfill the
obligations of a good wife, participants in this study rarely used language that
explicitly emphasized “wifely duties.”
Previous studies also suggest that when white, middle-class researchers inter-
view working-class people or people of color, they may encounter problems with
establishing rapport and interpreting the accounts of respondents (Edwards 1990).
Riessman (1987) found that white researchers feel more comfortable with the nar-
rative styles of white and middle-class respondents and may misinterpret the cen-
tral themes raised by respondents of color. These findings suggest that shared
meanings may have been less easily achieved in our interviews conducted with
Latino, Native American, and African American men. For example, there is some
evidence that we attempted to impose a linear narrative structure on our interviews
with some respondents who may have preferred an episodic style (see Riessman
1987):

We just started arguing more in the house. And she scratched me, and I push her away.
Because I got bleeding on my neck and everything, and I push her away. And she
called the police and I run away so they don’t catch me there. There’s a lot of worse
times we argued. She tried to get me with the knife one time, trying to blame me that I
did it. And the next time I told her I was going to leave her, and she tried to commit sui-
cide by drinking like a whole bunch of bottles of Tylenol pill. And I had to rush her to
the hospital, you know. That’s about it. So, in this worst fight, she scratched you and
374 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2001

you pushed her. She called the police? A few times she kicked me and scratched me on
my neck and everything, and my arms. (Andrew)

Andrew, who identifies as Latino, recounts several episodes that are salient to his
understanding of the problems within his relationship. The interviewer, however,
steers him toward a sequential recounting of one particular incident rather than
probing for elaboration of Andrew’s perceptions of these multiple events.
In contrast, racial ethnic locations can shape what interviewers and interviewees
reveal. One way in which this dynamic may have influenced the interviews was
suggested by Tom, who identified as African American:

I’ve never dated a Black woman before. Not me. That was my choice—that’s a choice
I made a long time ago. . . . I tend to find that Black women, in general, don’t have any
get-up-and-go, don’t work. I can’t say—it’s just down players. But I just don’t see the
desire to succeed in life.

Tom introduced the issue of interracial dating without prompting and went on to
invoke a variety of controlling images to represent Black women (Collins 1991). It
is difficult to imagine that Tom would have shared these details if he had been inter-
viewed by an African American woman or perhaps even a white man. Given the
middle-class bias of our sample and our own social locations, future research ought
to compare accounts received by differently located interviewers and a wider class
and racial ethnic range of respondents.

CONCLUSIONS

Many scholars have suggested that domestic violence is a means by which men
construct masculinities (Dobash and Dobash 1998; Gondolf and Hannekin 1987;
Hearn 1998). However, few studies have explored the specific practices that domes-
tically violent men use to present themselves as masculine actors. The respondents
in this study used diverse and contradictory strategies to gender violence and they
shifted their positions as they talked about violence. Respondents sometimes posi-
tioned themselves as masculine actors by highlighting their strength, power, and
rationality compared with the “irrationality” and vulnerability of female partners.
At other times, when describing the criminal justice system or “controlling” female
partners, they positioned themselves as vulnerable and powerless. These shifting
representations evidence the relational construction of gender and the instability of
masculine subjectivities (Butler 1990).
Recently, performativity theories have been criticized for privileging agency,
undertheorizing structural and cultural constraints, and facilitating essentialist read-
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 375

ings of gender behavior: “Lacking an analysis of structural and cultural context,

performances of gender can all too easily be interpreted as free agents’ acting out
the inevitable surface manifestations of a natural inner sex difference” (Messner
2000, 770). Findings from our study show that each of these criticisms is not neces-
sarily valid.
First, although the batterers described here demonstrate agency by shifting posi-
tions, they do so by calling on cultural discourses (of unstoppable masculine
aggression, of feminine weakness, and of men’s rights). Their performance is
shaped by cultural options.
Second, batterers’ performances are also shaped by structural changes in the
gender order. Some of the batterers interviewed for this study expressed anger and
confusion about a world with “TV for women” and female partners who are “too
educated.” Their arrest signaled a world askew—a place where “the law is for
women” and where men have become the victims of discrimination. Although
these accounts are ironic in light of the research documenting the continuing reluc-
tance of the legal system to treat domestic violence as a criminal act (Dobash and
Dobash 1979), they demonstrate the ways in which legal and structural reforms in
the area of domestic violence influence gender performances. By focusing atten-
tion on the “bias” in the system, respondents deflected attention from their own per-
petration and victimization and sustained their constructions of rational masculin-
ity. Therefore, theories of gender performativity push us toward analyses of the
cultural and structural contexts that form the settings for the acts.
Finally, when viewed through the lens of performativity, our findings challenge
the notion that violence is an essential or natural expression of masculinity. Rather,
they suggest that violence represents an effort to reconstruct a contested and unsta-
ble masculinity. Respondents’ references to men’s rights movement discourse,
their claims of “reverse discrimination,” and their complaints that female partners
are controlling indicate a disruption in masculine subjectivities. Viewing domestic
violence as a gender performance counters the essentialist readings of men’s vio-
lence against women that dominate U.S. popular culture. What one performs is not
necessarily what one “is.”
Disturbingly, however, this study suggests that violence is (at least temporarily)
an effective means by which batterers reconstruct men as masculine and women as
feminine. Participants reported that they were able to control their partners through
exertions of physical dominance and through their interpretive efforts to hold part-
ners responsible for the violence in their relationships. By gendering violence,
these batterers not only performed masculinity but reproduced gender as domi-
nance. Thus, they naturalized a binary and hierarchical gender system.
376 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 2001

APPENDIX A
Guiding Questions for In-Depth Interviews
1. First, how did you meet your wife/partner? What attracted you to her in the first place?
What do you think attracted her to you?
2. What would you change about her if you could? Anything else? What do you think
she would change about you? Anything else?
3. Please tell me about the worst time an argument with your partner became physical.
4. Please tell me about the last time an argument with your partner became physical.
5. What does it mean to you to be a good father? A good mother? A good child?
6. (Does/do) your own (partner/wife) (and children) fit your view of a good mother (and
children)? Why or why not?
7. How do you think children should be disciplined?
 APPENDIX B
Pseudonyms and Sociodemographic Characteristics of the Sample
Pseudonym Age Education Race/Ethnicity Household Income Marital Status

Jeff 25 Some college African American $40,000-59,999 Married

Alejandro 37 College Latino $25,000-29,999 Married
Steve 35 Some college European American $15,000-19,999 Married
Mitchell 32 Vocational African American $40,000-59,999 Cohabiting
Jake 37 General equivalency diploma (GED) Native American $5,000-9,999 Married
Adam 31 High school European American $40,000-59,999 Married
Alan 37 High school European American $25,000-29,999 Separated
Tom 26 High school African American $25,000-29,999 Separated
Ray 42 Some college African American $5,000-9,999 Married
Tony 22 Some college Latino $20,000-24,999 Cohabiting
Max 29 College European American $30,000-39,999 Cohabiting
Robert 40 Vocational European American $40,000-59,999 Cohabiting
Jim 38 Some college European American $40,000-59,999 Married
Juan 26 High school Latino $15,000-19,999 Married
Fred 44 Some college European American $40,000-59,999 Separated
Chad 40 Some college European Amercian/Asian $40,000-59,999 Cohabiting
Tim 31 Vocational European American $25,000-29,999 Separated
Andrew 27 < High school Latino $10,000-14,999 Cohabiting
Mario 33 Vocational Latino $20,000-24,999 Cohabiting
Kenny 23 GED European American $25,000-29,999 Married
Phil 45 College European American $60,000-79,999 Separated
Ed 30 Some college Latino $10,000-14,999 Cohabiting
George 21 Some college African American $10,000-14,999 Cohabiting
Frank 23 Vocational European American $30,000-39,999 Married
Eric 24 < High school Latino $25,000-29,999 Married
(continued)
377
378

APPENDIX B Continued
Pseudonym Age Education Race/Ethnicity Household Income Marital Status

Shad 21 < High school African American $20,000-24,999 Divorced

Rich 47 Some college European American $10,000-14,999 Married
Leonard 38 Some college European American $25,000-29,999 Separated
Matt 31 College European American $10,000-14,999 Separated
Ted 41 College European American $40,000-59,999 Married
Ryan 22 Some college European American $15,000-19,999 Separated
Brandon 28 < High school European American $20,000-24,999 Married
Bill 34 Some college European American $30,000-39,999 Divorced
 Anderson, Umberson / GENDERING VIOLENCE 379

NOTES

1. We thank an anonymous Gender & Society reviewer for suggesting the relevance of Butler’s the-
ory to this analysis.
2. We are grateful to an anonymous Gender & Society reviewer for the suggestion that respondents
“protect” female partners from arrest to maintain control of their partners.
3. We define high socioeconomic status respondents as those who earn at least $25,000 per year in
personal income and who have completed an associate’s degree. Seven respondents fit these criteria. We
define disenfranchised respondents as those who report personal earnings of less than $15,000 per year
and who have not completed a two-year college program. Nine respondents fit these criteria.

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Kristin L. Anderson is an assistant professor of sociology at Western Washington University. She

is currently studying the interpretations of violence and harassment offered by friends, relatives,
and acquaintances of violence victims and survivors.

Debra Umberson is a professor and chair of sociology at the University of Texas–Austin. Her
recent work on domestic violence shows how the effects of relationship dynamics on mental
health differ for violent and nonviolent men. Her latest project examines gender and change in
the marital quality/health link during the life course.