Honor,Abjection,and the Politics of Gendered Violence

Abstract

The protection of male honor through gendered violence is generally considered relevant only to Eastern cultures where patriarchal relations are more visible. This article draws on Bourdieu's writings to explore how concealed forms of male-coded honor and female abjection similarly shape gendered violence in contemporary neoliberal Western contexts. The article also examines the role of female-coded honor in women's responses to violence, demonstrating how it can frame women's actions in contexts of violence and abuse. New approaches to primary and secondary prevention that engage with the honor-bound nature of violence against women are considered.

Keywords

honor abjection gendered violence Bourdieu masculinity

Introduction

Violence against women occurs in all population groups and in every country across the globe. In a seeming paradox, improvements in gender equality, shifts in gender norms, and decades of multidimensional intervention in some countries, including Australia (Mathews et al., 2025), the United Kingdom (Strid et al., 2021), and the Nordic countries (Wemrell et al., 2022), have not brought about any reductions in the reported prevalence. Instead, there are indications that certain forms of gendered violence are increasing in some places, including in Australia (ABS, 2023), when other types of violent crime are on the decline (Sarre, 2024). In view of this, it seems reasonable to suspect that our understandings of the core drivers of gendered violence and the best ways to address them are falling short in some way. Since the turn of the millennium, researchers have increasingly focused on the impact of gendered violence in highly specific sub-populations and while the findings from this work have been crucial in guiding the provision of appropriate support, efforts to better understand the common drivers across population groups have fallen away (Berggren et al., 2021). Relatedly, and notwithstanding the dedicated work of many over the years, prevention and intervention with male perpetrators has changed little despite outcomes that can only be described as extremely modest (Berggren et al., 2021).

It is generally agreed that hegemonic masculinities are causally implicated in some way in the perpetration of gendered violence (Hearn, 2012; Oddone, 2020). Despite wide attention to the concept, perhaps surprisingly there has been little historical attention to teasing out how of hegemonic masculinity manifests in, and drives, violence against women (Berggren et al., 2021; Hearn, 2012); our search of the contemporary literature confirms that this continues to be the case, which other commentators have similarly attested to (see Berggren et al., 2021). More specifically, theorization has not fully engaged with the question of how violent and controlling masculinities come to be socially embodied over time (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005), or why it is that they become embodied in some men but not others. Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) point out that hegemonic masculinity can be understood as “the most honoured way of being a man” (p. 832), yet the particular role of honor in the masculinities implicated in gendered violence have similarly received little to no explicit attention outside consideration of its role in family honor systems in certain Eastern cultures where patriarchal relations are more visible. Hearn (2012) makes the important point that while male violence against women can be a source of pride and therefore honor, it can also be experienced as shameful because it betrays a lack of control over a female partner, or might involve simpler and more brutal reaffirmations of power. He goes on to argue that these different elements of male violence point to the complex and contradictory interconnections within masculinities between “responsibility” and “violence,” “honour” and “violence,” and “respect” and “violence” (Hearn, 2012, p. 602). We also agree with Hearn's (2012) argument that the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” presents a number of problems in furthering understandings of men's violence against women. Not least of these involves the assumption of men's violence as “strategic, to pre-existing ends,” rather than as constitutive of gender relations themselves (Hearn, 2012, p. 592); this second understanding necessitates analysis of the embodied material-discursive practices of men's violence against women, rather than critiques of masculinity per se.

In this article, we draw on Bourdieu's (1979) writings to explore how concealed, oftentimes subliminal forms of male-coded honor might frame and shape aspects of gendered violence in contemporary neoliberal Western cultures. Violence against women premised on honor is usually associated with Eastern countries and communities; however, we argue that Bourdieu's concept of the habitus offers scope in revealing how subliminal affects and emotions related to feeling dishonored can also lead to intimate partner violence (IPV) in Western contexts. We also draw on Kristeva's (1982) concept of “the abject” to examine how male-coded honor works in concert with female abjection. Lastly, we examine the role of female-coded honor in gendered violence to consider how this might frame some of women's actions in violence and abuse. In turning our attention specifically to the role of honor in gendered violence in Western contexts, we are not suggesting that it stands apart from other aspects of masculinity and the inherent contradictions pointed to by Hearn and others, or that honor is the only driver of violence. Rather, we want to take some beginning steps in this article toward exploring how honor, particularly at less explicit subliminal levels, might drive certain forms of male-perpetrated violence and coercive control against female partners in Western cultural contexts as an arguably under-developed area of scholarship. We draw on evidence in the existing body of published research, including our own, to make our case.

While different types of gendered violence share many of the same drivers, our analysis focuses on IPV in heterosexual relationships where there is coercive control because this manifestation is widespread and has long-term, interconnected, and compounding negative impacts that include, in the worst-case scenarios, the deaths of women and children (Franzway et al., 2019; Johnson, 2006). We are principally interested here in better understanding how the meanings embedded within the gender practices related to honor and abjection in IPV can become so habituated as to be intuitive, instinctive, and not necessarily within the explicit awareness of the individuals involved. Our aim in exploring the more subterranean drivers of IPV is to better understand how gendered violence persists despite major societal shifts and dedicated intervention in the hope that this might point a pathway out of the current theoretical and practical impasse in this field.

The Current State of Knowledge and Practice

The body of knowledge about gendered violence, including coercive control, is vast. Feminists in Western countries were the first to draw attention to violence against women as a significant and widespread social problem during the second wave of the women's movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminists have historically understood patriarchy as the structural and ideological basis for gendered violence (e.g., Brownmiller, 1975; MacKinnon, 1993; Millet, 1970), with its unequal gender power relations understood as enabling and driving all forms, from domestic violence and child sexual abuse to rape, sexual harassment, and the proliferation of violent pornography (Berggren et al., 2021; Breckenridge, 1999; Reavey & Warner, 2003). However, other disciplines became increasingly involved in the gendered violence space from the late 1980s onward, including psychology (Calvete et al., 2007), sociology (Straus & Gelles, 1986), and epidemiology/public health (Bowman et al., 2015).

Since the 1970s, there has been a particular burgeoning of psychological research into gendered violence, and it has taken a vastly different orientation to feminist approaches. Psychological research predominantly focuses on the individual drivers of abuse and its impact, including research into the influence of cognitive schemas on perpetration and victimization; trauma and the relationship between growing up in IPV or child maltreatment and later perpetration or victimization; the impact of violence on neural pathways; and the role of mental health problems and drug and alcohol use in IPV (e.g., Rees et al., 2011; Semiatin et al., 2017; Senkans et al., 2020). With few exceptions, psychological approaches are presented as if they are gender-neutral, but they are actually at once gender-blind and profoundly gendered in their underlying masculinist assumptions about gender and mental illness, often falling into pathologizing both victim-survivors and perpetrators (Moulding et al., 2021). As such, few connections are made in the bulk of psychological research between violence and its unequal gendered social context, meaning or impact, leaving unexplained why it is cis-gendered heterosexual men who are the main abusers when so many more women and LGBTQIA+ individuals report histories of trauma and mental illness (Moulding, 2016; Moulding et al., 2021). Without eliding that some men who use violence and control have experienced trauma, casting their later violence as almost entirely a consequence of this plays down the role of gender inequalities and power imbalances between men and women in IPV (Moulding et al, 2021).

While there is some theoretical variability in the contemporary feminist research into IPV, most researchers continue to primarily situate the problem in unequal gender power relations and, depending on the theory, related gendered norms, ideologies, beliefs, or discourses (e.g., Franzway et al., 2019; Taylor & Jasinski, 2011; Wendt & Zannettino, 2015; Westmarland & Kelly, 2013). Post-structural feminist work situates IPV in the wider gender discourses that enable it; however, ideas about gendered violence as “doing masculinity” and “doing femininity” do not tell us enough about how these gender identities and practices become socially embodied. Over the past decade, intersectional feminist analytic frameworks have also been widely applied, bringing important insights into how gender intersects with other social inequalities in the experience and impact of IPV, such as those related to class, race, (dis)ability, and sexual and gender diversity (see, e.g., Thiara et al., 2011). Feminist research, in particular, has made and continues to make critically important contributions to how we understand gendered violence and respond to it. Beginning in the early 1970s, feminists were responsible for the development of women's shelters (Pizzey, 1974) and have advocated over decades now for increased services and resourcing to support women who leave violent relationships, including the establishment of domestic violence leave and coercive control legislation in some jurisdictions (Franzway et al., 2019). However, unlike the earlier radical feminists, contemporary feminist research has increasingly focused on the impact of IPV in increasingly specific groups of women, with less attention going to better understanding the core drivers of violence that are likely to be relevant across most if not all populations (Berggren et al., 2021). Interestingly, some commentators have observed that different groups of male perpetrators appear to be singing from the same songbook, displaying similar patterns of behavior and adopting almost identical tactics of control, notwithstanding variations in intensity, impact, and the extent to which they come to the attention of authorities (Hill, 2020; Stark, 2007). Stark's (2007) research is particularly compelling for its demonstration of the almost uncanny similarities in the tactics adopted by male perpetrators to coercively control their female partners.

Masculinities scholarship, which is often feminist-informed, has also grown over the past few decades, yet there has been surprisingly little attention directed toward gendered violence despite its high prevalence and heavily gendered nature (Berggren et al., 2021). Well-known masculinities scholars, such as Connell, Hearn, Kimmel, and others, touch on violence against women, but there are few who focus specifically on it (Berggren et al., 2021). Berggren et al. (2021) provide a very useful summary of the main strands of masculinities scholarship in the gendered violence area, which is drawn on here. Key early masculinities scholars drew, and continue to draw, on socialist feminism's engagement with Marxism and the concept of hegemony, as in Connell's idea of hegemonic masculinity and masculinity as a practice (Connell, 1995). Hegemonic masculinity is understood as representing the most highly valued way of “doing masculinity” and sits in a hierarchical relation to other masculinities and, of course, to all femininities and other non-binary gender identities (Connell, 1995). Within this perspective, violence against women is understood as one of a myriad of gender practices reflective of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995; Hearn, 2012; Messerschmidt, 2012). Other research into gendered violence and masculinities focuses more specifically on men's own accounts of abuse to explore how they discursively justify their problematic behavior (Kelly & Westmarland, 2016; Stokoe, 2010). A further group of masculinities scholars draw on social network theory to understand how men's relations with other men enable violence against women (DeKeseredy et al., 2009; Hearn & Whitehead, 2006; Kimmel, 2010). Intersectional masculinities research focuses on how interpersonal violence is shaped by the different ways that gender intersects with class, race, sexuality, and age (Boonzaier et al., 2020).

Lastly, some masculinities researchers have explored how early family relations might be critical to masculine subject formation and the later perpetration of violence against intimate partners, sometimes referred to as the “cycle of violence” or as the “intergenerational transmission of violence” (Gadd & Jefferson, 2007). Some studies have focused more specifically on how early trauma among men might be implicated in violence against female intimate partners (e.g., Kaplenko et al., 2018; Seymour et al., 2023). While most of this research attempts to retain a feminist understanding of the social construction of gender, it also assumes that trauma related to either growing up in domestic violence or experiencing childhood abuse is the substantive driver of later partner abuse, rather than structural and symbolic gender inequality, including gender relations in the family of origin. More significantly, though, less than a third of men who perpetrate violence against their partners grow up in domestic violence (Roberts et al., 2010), while evidence for clear-cut links between trauma related to childhood abuse and later interpersonal violence perpetration is highly contested. For example, a matched prospective study using a population sample (rather than a retrospective design using a clinical sample) found that individuals with and without backgrounds of child abuse actually report equal rates of IPV perpetration as adults (Widom et al., 2014). Moreover, it is important to be aware that perpetrators could report past abuse to justify their violent behavior (Romans et al., 1995) and that many perpetrators never come to the attention of authorities because they do not live in circumstances of social disadvantage with high rates of childhood adversity. Some of the research into trauma in perpetrators also relies on psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, and attachment theories, which assume universal (and unproven) intrapsychic structures and dynamics (Buchanan & Borgkvist, 2024). As such, there is a tendency in this work, despite good intentions, to slide into an intrapsychic focus, losing touch with the sociocultural and structural dimensions of violence (Berggren et al., 2021).

Most significantly, though, like other contemporary feminist research, much of the masculinities research tends to presume and over-emphasize explicitly conscious individual psychological processes in the attempt to understand the drivers of men's violence (Berggren et al., 2021), such as the role of gendered thoughts, attitudes and beliefs, or the individual discursive narratives offered by perpetrators to justify their violence. In this way, perpetrators are understood to be “overly instrumental, and men are positioned as essentially strong and powerful,” which is “neither intellectually coherent nor recognisable to the men themselves” (Berggren et al., 2021, p. 42). And when emotions are considered, also in common with recent feminist research, trauma discourses are often brought into play that are overly trained on personal histories and re-make men into victims, just like the women they persecute; arguably, attention to the role of emotion in violence perpetration over more recent decades has been almost entirely captured by individually focused psychological trauma discourses which downplay the unequal gendered social processes that infuse violence against women.

Psychological, feminist, and masculinities perspectives on IPV are generally brought together in efforts to prevent violence in the first place or to stop known perpetrators. Men's behavior change programs are almost universally premised on a pro-feminist social learning model that is usually cognitivist in orientation, with behavior change understood to flow from changed beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings (Morran, 2011). Even programs that use a post-structural feminist lens and a narrative-discursive approach to therapeutic change (e.g., Wendt et al., 2020) are nonetheless essentially cognitivist in nature through their focus on individual men's explanations, justifications, and conscious understandings of their violence, perhaps in an effort to try and hold men accountable for their violence. Other programs take a more trauma-informed approach, focusing on the role of trauma-related shame in the perpetration of abuse and drawing on an intergenerational understanding of trauma (Haines et al., 2022). However, such programs have been shown to have at best modest (Arias et al., 2013) to poor outcomes (e.g., Bowen et al., 2005; Bowen & Gilchrist, 2006).

In a similar vein to perpetrator programs, primary prevention—usually in the form of anti-domestic violence education campaigns—employs a public health behavior change approach that is almost always informed by pro-feminist social psychology and the assumption that changes in gendered attitudes and beliefs will lead to reductions in gendered violence (Salter, 2016). In spite of many such campaigns, no such reductions have occurred (World Health Organisation [WHO], 2010), and they are unlikely to in the future through such an approach (DeGue et al., 2012). It has been well-established for decades now that health promotion campaigns do not change behavior on their own in the absence of structural change (Baum & Miller, 2014). However, reductions in some measures of structural gender inequality and shifts in gender roles and expectations in some countries over the past five decades have not brought about any concomitant decrease in the rates of violence either (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2023; Gracia & Merlo, 2016). Even more concerningly, there are indications that sexual violence (including within intimate relationships) has actually increased in some places, including Australia, over the past few years (ABS, 2023). It is almost certainly the case that more could have been done, given the sheer extent of the problem and the unwillingness of many neoliberal governments to properly step up.

Since the 1990s, then, there has been remarkably little advancement in our understanding of the core drivers of gendered violence and coercive control in everyday relationships. While there has arguably been a lack of attention to structural gender inequalities in IPV research and practice (Salter, 2016), we argue that the cultural “gender norm” side of the gendered violence equation is also bereft due to under-exploration of the more subliminal aspects of IPV, limiting insight into the everyday drivers and responses and thereby hindering the scope for ending it (Berggren et al., 2021).

Theorizing Honor and Abjection in Gendered Violence

As noted earlier, hegemonic masculinity can be understood as “the most honoured way of being a man,” yet the concept of honor has not been much studied by masculinities scholars (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 832; Hearn, 2012) and has not been explored at all in relation to gendered violence in Westernized contexts (Baker et al., 1999). The Oxford Dictionary defines honor as “the quality of knowing and doing what is morally right”—honor is quite simply a positive individual quality or virtue. We acknowledge that some violent men believe they are morally superior to women and describe their abusive behavior as attempts to correct their immoral, errant female partners (Stark, 2007), but this does not mean that violent men's behavior is honorable or virtuous in any way. However, the Oxford Dictionary also defines honor as “a quality that combines respect, being proud and honesty” and “something that you are very pleased or proud to do because people are showing you great respect.” In this definition, honor involves feelings of high personal regard and pride in oneself that are dependent on a show of esteem—or practices of honoring—on the part of others. It is this more social, relational, emotional, and hierarchical version of honor and related practices of honoring that we are concerned with here, not the virtue per se. Indeed, some in the gendered violence field refuse to use the language of “honour killings” or “honour-based violence,” because, as they rightly point out, there is nothing conceivably virtuous about abusing and killing partners, ex-partners, or children. So let us be crystal clear here—we are not talking about honor as a virtue. Rather, we are talking about forms of masculinist-defined honor and the associated material-discursive practices that are part-and-parcel of it.

Pierre Bourdieu (1979) examined cultural honor systems in the Kabyle community during his ethnographic research in Algeria in the 1960s and while this analysis occurred in a very specific socio-historical context, aspects of his work are useful for understanding how male-coded honor systems might operate in other cultures and historical periods. In his writings, Bourdieu (1979) described “the sense of honour” as a form of cultural capital embedded in concealed systems of “prestige, esteem, standing [and] distinction” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 107). He goes on to show how dishonoring (or disrespecting) within the honor system is experienced as an “attack on self-esteem” that can bring shame, the oppositional counterpart to the point of honor (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 96). Moreover, the restoration of “respectability, the obverse of shame, is essentially defined by its social dimensions, and so it must be won and defended in the face of everyone” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 113). Bourdieu (1979) illustrates the different ways that honor can be restored, including through punishment and different forms of banishment, which amount to “social death” (p. 129). For Bourdieu, honor and its meanings and practices arise in the habitus, which is “a system of durable, transposable dispositions that mediates an individual's actions and the external conditions of production” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72), where social action involves both determination by structures and agency (McNay, 2004). Within Bourdieu's (2000) theory, fields of action are understood as producing the specific habitus, and these are acknowledged to be gendered, with the family variously described as the original habitus (Bourdieu, 2000) and as a small-scale field (Atkinson, 2014). Other fields, such as those of school and work, are understood as drawing in individuals whose original habitus is consistent with a field's given habitus (Miller, 2016). Hence, particular forms of habitus are understood to emerge from “the interplay of socialization with the experiences of personal and collective history, giving rise to durable dispositions which (unconsciously) shape perception and actions” (Adkins, 2004, p. 193).

Gender identities can be therefore understood as dispositions that arise in the habitus (Miller, 2016), including the original habitus of the family as well as the gendered habitus associated with other key fields of action. Importantly, because gendered dispositions are so deeply inscribed onto the body and psyche over time, they are highly resistant to change (McNay, 2004, p. 98). Within this conceptualization, then, the sense of male honor is central to certain masculine dispositions that are not so easily supplanted when there are shifts in the structures and gender norms that helped give rise to them (Ewing, 2008, p. 142). Importantly, the values that inform honor can be so deeply habituated that they often sit outside individuals’ full conscious awareness such that “the system of honor values is enacted rather than thought, and the grammar of honor can inform actions without having to be formulated” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 128). Lastly, and importantly for our purposes, honor in patriarchal cultures is deeply gendered through its associations with men, the masculine and the public realm, while women are generally positioned only as guardians of honor and as honor-bearing subjects on the part of men, but with little capacity for honor in their own right (Bourdieu, 1979). As such, systems of honor in patriarchal societies are a specific permutation of the historical hierarchical gender binary, or gender order, where men and masculinity are superior and aligned with the mind, culture and the public realm, rationality, morality and being in control, while women and the feminine are inferior and aligned with the body, the private realm, nature, disorder, irrationality, immorality, and lack of control. We also need to emphasize again that honor-bound systems of prestige are but one aspect of the male-dominated gender order that is implicated in the perpetration of IPV.

The idea of “the abject” captures the feminine side of the gender binary, sitting as it does in a shame-ridden oppositional relation to that of honor. Julia Kristeva developed the notion of the abject, which literally means “to cast off, exclude or prohibit” (Warin, 2010, p. 112). Kristeva's concept of the abject seeks to:

…describe and account for temporal and spatial disruptions within the life of the subject and in particular those moments when the subject experiences a frightening loss of distinction between themselves and objects/others. The abject describes those forces, practices and things which are opposed to and unsettle the conscious ego, the “I”. It is the zone between being and non-being, “the border of my condition as a living being”. (Kristeva, 1982, p. 3)

Abjection therefore refers to forces, practices, and things that do not “respect borders, positions, rules” and “disturb identity, system, order,” leading to the breakdown of meaning (Kristeva, 1982). Kristeva (1982) specifically demonstrated how the abject is historically associated with women and the feminine realm of the body, disorder, and irrationality (Kristeva, 1982). Drawing on Kristeva's concept of the abject, Spivak (1988) posited the notion that the “subaltern,” or subliminal subject, is produced by structuring structures of colonialism, where identity formation may be shaped by marginalization, othering, and beliefs of inferiority. While Spivak focused on colonialist contexts, her work draws attention to the ways that the female body is positioned as abject to reinforce power dynamics and silence marginalized voices. In the following analysis, we show how female abjection can work in concert with gendered forms of honor in and through the gender power dynamics structuring IPV that marginalize and silence women. As noted earlier, we are particularly interested in how the meanings and practices associated with honor and abjection operate in ways that are not necessarily within the explicit awareness of the individuals involved but are, nonetheless, sensed, known, and habituated at deeper, more subliminal intuitive, and instinctual levels; Bourdieu's (1979) insights into the workings of male-defined honor and Kristeva's (1982) theory of abjection are well-suited to this purpose.

We also draw on Ahall's concept of the politics of emotion, and Wetherell's concept of affective-discursive practices to help make sense of the ways that honor and abjection become socially embodied through affects and practices that specifically play out in gendered violence. Gendered violence is distinguished by interactions between bodies that are profoundly visceral, intersubjective, socially embodied, and political. Yet the body—its sensations, desires, affects, emotions, and interactions with other bodies—has received surprisingly little attention from researchers in the gendered violence field. Ahall's (2018) concept of the “politics of emotion” is useful in attempting to understand the bodily, affective dimensions of gendered violence. She defines it as the effort to capture “the political effects of emotional practices,” where “emotion” refers to representations of bodily feelings or sensations and “affect” points to “energies transmitted through bodily encounters” (Ahall, 2018, p. 38). While both emotion and affect are understood to be social and gendered, emotion is largely conscious and affect generally non-conscious or less-conscious and intersubjective (Ahall, 2018, p. 40). We also adopt Wetherell's (2012) concept of affective-discursive practices, which “focuses on the emotional as it appears in social life and tries to follow what participants do” (Wetherell, 2012, p. 5). Here, then, affect involves doing while emotion is more about the felt. Hence, the affective and emotional point to the material and discursive realms in what is actually felt and the practices flowing from this, as well as representations of emotion in language.

Male-Coded Honor in Gendered Violence

As noted earlier, honor is generally considered relevant to gendered violence only in relation to so-called “honour killings” or “honour-based violence” in more visibly patriarchal migrant communities and countries (Cooney, 2019; Idriss, 2017). Research in this field tends to focus on migrant groups in Western countries where honor-related violence and honor-related killings of women have increased in recent years (Aplin, 2019; Grzyb, 2016; Mayeda & Vijaykumar, 2016). This research focuses on violence against women perpetrated by male partners or other relatives, including beatings, abductions, forced marriage and, in some African diasporas, practices of female genital mutilation. Within this body of work, honor-based violence is primarily understood to occur because of incompatibility between Western and Eastern cultures, with young women seen as having become “too westernised” (Cooney, 2019; Idriss, 2017). Through this exclusive focus on Eastern cultures, honor-based violence has been effectively “orientalised” into a dominant orientalist discourse where honor is associated with an inferior “other” that has “failed” to assimilate to Western ideals (Grewal, 2013; Hamad, 2019; Olwan, 2013). Hence, in the orientalist discourse of honor-based violence, “some cultures are understood solely through patriarchy while others are understood to have outgrown it” (Grewal, 2013, pp. 2–3). These ideas can be linked to colonial problematizations of certain peoples and their customs, and the long-term impact that has had on the ability of colonizers to control and implement discourses around groups and behaviors (Cooney, 2019; Spivak, 1988). Colonialism has therefore enabled the West to establish itself as superior to other cultures and religions, who become the “other” in need of assistance before they can modernize (see also Aslan, 2009; Asquith, 2015; Spivak, 1988). Through this history, then, honor-based violence has become an issue specific to Eastern cultures while violence against women in Western contexts is specific to individuals rather than to broader social and cultural structures and norms (Abu-Odeh, 1997; Asquith, 2015).

However, honor is socially constructed and can occur in any social context and while it varies across cultures, it tends to include a number of common elements (Gill, 2019; Mayeda et al., 2018). So-called honor killings and honor-based violence may not be traditionally associated with Westernized communities, but this violence principally occurs in situations where symbolic patriarchal power and control over women's bodies is undermined so that hegemony can no longer be maintained through symbolic violence alone and must be reinstated through actual violence (Grzyb, 2016). This confinement of honor-based violence to Eastern cultures therefore disguises the reality that violence against women to correct perceived transgressions is carried out in Western cultures, too (Asquith, 2015). In fact, until recently, men who committed lethal violence against their intimate partners in Australia could claim a provocation defense, which often included charges of infidelity (Fitz-Gibbon & Pickering, 2012). While male-coded honor is not generally researched in Western communities, there is evidence that gendered honor systems operate in these contexts, although there is only passing attention to gendered violence in these studies. For example, Vandello and Cohen (2003; 2009) undertook studies in Brazil, Chile, Canada, and the United States, illustrating that in all four countries a significant portion of respondents agreed that female honor was central to the family name, and that men were responsible for protecting it (see also Walker, 2019), with violent actions to restore honor sanctioned; the so-called protection of “female fidelity” was important in this (Vandello & Cohen, 2003). Manning (2014) suggests that families in the United States use purity pledges to normalize and mark heterosexuality as pure and venerable, based on the idea that sexuality, specifically control of female heteronormative sexuality, and familial honor in Western societies are intertwined just as they are in Eastern cultures (see also Asquith, 2015; Khan et al., 2017).

Within a male-coded honor system, wherever it occurs, women's actions are understood as damaging to men's, and by extension familial, reputations (Vandello & Cohen, 2003), with men granted permission to treat women as extensions of themselves; men's control of female behavior therefore becomes imperative to maintain an appropriate image of themselves in the world (see also Brown et al., 2014; Nisbett & Cohen, 1996; Vandello et al., 2009). Hence, gendered violence, whether it occurs in Eastern or Western cultural contexts, is better understood as part-and-parcel of the heteronormative patriarchal context of men's domination of women's bodies and behavior, which occurs on a continuum where the main purpose is the protection of male honor (Asquith, 2015; Gill, 2019). Arguably, then, gendered violence in the West and so-called honor-based violence in the East are both “honour-bound” to some extent, even if the details differ. Moreover, both can be understood as part of a wider global phenomenon of violence against women as patriarchies respond to the loss of symbolic dominance over women that cuts across race and class (Grzyb, 2016, p. 1037). In Western contexts, this loss of symbolic dominance is often referred to as “backlash violence” in the face of women's equality gains over the last half century (Gracia & Merlo, 2016; Stark, 2007), but it is male honor that is often at stake, even if it is not named as such. As can be seen, then, the escalating violence against women in Western contexts in recent decades should be understood as having similar drivers to the escalation and increasing severity of domestic violence in migrant communities’ post-migration to Westernized countries (Erez et al., 2009).

It is clear from the above that male-coded honor systems are alive and well in Western cultural contexts, yet there has been little explicit attention to their specific role in gendered violence. Nonetheless, while most studies conducted in Western contexts fail to explicitly name male honor or focus on its role in violence, the findings from some of this research do provide important clues about its presence and operation. As a case in point, in her Italian study, Oddone (2020) cites numerous male perpetrators claiming that they feel disrespected by their partners as a precursor to their violence. More specifically, some of the men explain their violence as a way of “saving face” in response to what they perceive as a “degradation of their status [as] ‘men’” by their female partners, with violence a way of re-establishing their status before her but also before other men (p. 255). Another man in this study talked about his violence as “giving her a lesson” in appropriate female behavior (Oddone, 2020, p. 252), positioning himself as offended and degraded by his partner's supposedly “unfeminine” conduct, as if she were effectively an extension of himself in the world. In an Australian study, Hill (2020) describes numerous men she interviewed citing “disrespect” as the trigger for their violence and coercive control. For example, one man is described as saying to his partner before he bashes her in public in front of his male friends, “Don’t you dare disrespect me in front of my mates,” while another claimed that he was violent toward his partner because she “tried to make [him] look like a dickhead in front of [his] mates” (p. 45).

Such comments are offered up as examples of men subscribing to beliefs consistent with hegemonic masculinity and assumptions of male superiority, entitlement to deference, and the ownership of women (Oddone, 2020), with this adherence usually assumed to be explicit and conscious. We are not questioning the links with problematic forms of masculinity; however, the relationship between subscribing to traditional gender- and violence-condoning beliefs (or discourses, norms or attitudes, if you like), and the violent and controlling practices themselves, is not necessarily a straightforward one. In fact, there can be marked ruptures between “thinking,” “believing,” “saying,” and “doing.” Hence, while men who use violence more commonly admit to certain types of masculinities where dominance and the control of emotion are paramount, as well as violence-condoning attitudes (Flood & Pease, 2009), their violence is not always reflected in explicit gender-inequitable or violence-condoning views (Fulu et al., 2013; Gibbs et al., 2020). It is, of course, possible that some violent men are not open about their beliefs or are too ashamed to admit to them (Zapata-Calvente et al., 2019). However, recent evidence suggests that gendered and violence-condoning attitudes are usually so well-established by the time violence is enacted as to be automatic, implicit, habituated, and not necessarily fully “conscious” (see Pornari et al., 2021; Zapata-Calvente et al., 2019). It is therefore necessary to go beyond cognition to properly unpack the socially embodied nature of male violence against women.

Violent men's oft-cited comments about “feeling disrespected” and “degraded” as men by their female partners certainly seem to point to a sense of feeling dishonored in specifically gendered ways in their intimate relationships and, perhaps, in their wider lives too. Cultures of male-coded honor that presume men are entitled to respect, deference, and esteem from others simply because they are men most certainly emerge from a historical hierarchical gender order sustained by long-standing dominant masculinity discourses about male superiority intertwined with unequal structural gender power relations. But masculinized honor and practices of honoring do not reside in thought, belief, ideology, discourse, or structure alone. As noted earlier, entitlement to honor is also sensed as well as (sometimes) explicitly thought and believed, with related cultural meanings and practices deeply habituated and often outside conscious awareness (Bourdieu, 1979). Within this understanding, then, when a violent man experiences himself as dishonored in some way by his female partner, this can be sensed automatically as an unwarranted attack on his self-esteem as a man. Keeping in mind the insight that many violent men experience their female partners as honor-bearing subjects on their behalf (Bourdieu, 1979), and as extensions of themselves who reflect back on them as men (Vandello & Cohen, 2003), the list of female behaviors that could be interpreted as threats to their honor can be vast indeed. Our prior research shows that these range far beyond direct verbal “insubordination” from partners to multifarious signs of female autonomy and agency, especially signs of sexual agency, including: the wearing of certain types of clothing; talking to other men; non-submissive behavior that is taken to be “unfeminine” and thereby insulting; directing attention toward the children and not him; the partner engaging with her own family and friends; studying at university if he has not, and other types of self-betterment; earning more money than him; career success, and the list goes on (Franzway et al., 2019; Moulding et al., 2021). Our previous research has shown how male perpetrators commonly react to these signs of female agency and achievement as direct attacks on their pride as men, with women studying at university particularly disturbing because of its high social status but also, perhaps, because it might herald economic independence (Franzway et al., 2019). Most importantly, though, the socially embodied emotions, sensations, and affects that arise in male perpetrators in response to perceived attacks on their self-esteem are very often immediate, in the moment, habituated and not always explicit or thought-through (Pornari et al., 2021); this is the important point we are making here. Certainly, some violent men describe their anger building in response to perceived criticisms from their partners, read as slights to their status as men, until the rage suddenly explodes in violence and abuse (Oddone, 2020). For example, in another Italian study, Rollero (2020) offers up the following account from a violent man:

[When the violence was imminent] I felt like … the sleep of reason. It was like a blackout. When I thought she did something to upset me, I felt offended, insulted … immediately the blackout happened, and violence was the only answer. Now I feel more conscious: it's not just a blackout. It's how you react to the argument, that's the point. (Rollero, 2020, p. 756)

The moment right before the violence is eloquently described here as “the sleep of reason,” meaning rational thought was absent, but there was an awareness of feeling offended and insulted by the female partner's behavior—other words for shame and dishonor—and this in turn was followed by “the blackout” (Rollero, 2020, p. 756). Other violent men have also described their abusive behavior as occurring in the absence of specific thought (Whiting et al., 2020), portraying it as primarily bodily and instinctual (Oddone, 2020). For these reasons, some violent men report that their abusive behavior is perplexing to them and feels out of control, and that they are unable to see themselves as the powerful and agentic users of violence and coercion they are often taken to be (Berggren et al., 2021; Oddone, 2020). Following Bourdieu, these findings suggest that the sense of honor and, more importantly, of dishonor, is highly implicit and habituated in some of these men and is not necessarily always within their full awareness (Bourdieu, 1979). At the same time, though, we are not suggesting that the men's violence is out of their control or unintentional; these men most certainly mean to hurt and punish their female partners (Bancroft, 2002; Hill, 2020), even if they are not always entirely clear on why.

In view of reported absences of explicit cognition in some men before and during the perpetration of violence against female partners, it is important to more fully examine their automatic emotional reactions to perceived dishonoring as potentially important affective-discursive drivers of abuse. While anger and shame are commonly identified (Oddone, 2020), a veritable cocktail of other affects and emotions will also be involved in feeling “dishonoured” (or disrespected) as a man by a female partner, and a perpetrator will not need to have suffered personal “trauma” to feel them. In addition to anger and shame, this affective mix will include indignation, grievance, resentment, rage, outrage, a desire for revenge, disgust toward oneself and/or the intimate partner, and extreme jealousy that has little to do with actual infidelity (Franzway et al., 2019; Stark, 2007). Perhaps counter-intuitively, though, there is evidence that fear may be the primary emotion experienced by violent men, with shame and anger secondary (Siltala et al., 2020). Siltala et al. (2020) elaborate this further as the fear of being seen to lose control of others or of a situation. This implies that it is the more specific fear of shame—that counterpoint to honor—that is likely to be in play here, which violent men then externalize and project onto others through shame-avoidant abuse (Anderson, 2009; Harper & Arias, 2004). Drawing on the concept of affective-discursive practices framed by male-coded honor, then, shame-ridden abjection is shifted onto the female partner through fear-based, face-saving abuse in response to a perceived attack on the perpetrator's self-esteem as a man, read here as honor. The goal of the abusive practices is to re-establish honor in the eyes of the female partner but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the eyes of a spectral audience of other men (Oddone, 2020) because masculinity is primarily performed for men, not women (Hearn, 2012; Pease, 2021; Tomsen, 2005). As has been argued by Bourdieu (1979), “the sense of honour is enacted in front of other people … [.] … to defend, at all costs, a certain self-image intended for others” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 111); in the case of gendered violence in Western contexts, the female partner may often be the only person physically present, but the more important audience is the men living inside the perpetrator's head, so to speak. Bourdieu (1979) goes on to argue that:

[t]he point of honour is the basis of the ethic appropriate to an individual who always sees himself through the eyes of others, who has need of others in order to exist, because his self-image is inseparable from the image of himself that he receives back from others. (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 113)

Hence, “respectability, the obverse of shame, is essentially defined by its social dimensions, and so it must be won and defended in the face of everyone” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 113), even if not all are physically present. In a feat of patriarchal irony, then, the violent man seeks to re-establish his honor through gendered violence but, in so doing, reveals his disposition to be especially other-dependent and lacking in self-sufficiency, one that is completely antithetical to the idealized self-contained neoliberal subject of Western capitalism (Rose, 2006). To re-quote Bourdieu's words from above, “his self-image is inseparable from the image of himself that he receives back from others” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 113); this captures the insecurity so many women intuit in their violent male partners, a shame-ridden vulnerability the men are at great pains to conceal, most especially from themselves.

The specific abusive practices men use to re-establish honor and dominance in IPV are well-known and include physical violence, sexual violence, psychological, emotional and verbal abuse, financial abuse, social isolation, and coercive control of women's movements and lives more generally. We have previously shown how these abusive practices are informed by a panoply of historical gender discourses framed around the hierarchical gender binary, casting women down as irrational and mad, stupid, weak and dependent, dirty, ugly and fat, disgusting (particularly during pregnancy, a time when violence often commences or worsens—see (Tyler, 2009), immoral, sexually out of control and dangerous (Franzway et al., 2019; Moulding et al., 2021). We are taking these insights further by showing how these affective-discursive practices effectively cast women into feminine abjection against the honorable masculine, with the meanings and related actions constituting the unequal gender relations of IPV in ways that are so deeply habituated as to often lie outside full conscious awareness.

Female Abjection and Feminized Honor in Gendered Violence

To effect change, it is undoubtedly crucial to consider what drives perpetrators when they enact violence and control against women. However, gendered violence is inherently intersubjective and interactive (Anderson, 2009), so it is equally important to understand the impact on women and how they, in turn, interact with perpetrators. In saying this, we are not suggesting that the behavior of victim-survivors “causes” or “triggers” gendered violence. Rather, we argue that it is important to properly understand victim-survivors’ responses because there has been a long history of characterizing women as passive victims without agency, victim-blaming them as causing the violence or falling into misguided notions about victim-survivors seeking out violent and controlling partners because of pre-existing trauma (Moulding et al, 2021). Hence, when we consider the role of male-coded honor and abjection in gendered violence, it is important to avoid constructing women as inherently vulnerable victims of the patriarchal order (Withaeckx & Coene, 2014). To this end, Bourdieu's concept of the habitus enables us to consider how women use agency, choice, and interpretation in their lives within patriarchal systems (Withaeckx & Coene, 2014).

We have argued that the affective-discursive practices of gendered abuse are often situated in concealed forms of male-coded honor that are informed by a host of discourses about male superiority and female inferiority (see Franzway et al., 2019; Moulding et al., 2021). Ours’ and others’ analyses of the specific nature of these affective-discursive practices illustrate very well the long-standing cultural ammunition male perpetrators can reach for to cast women down into abjection as part of protecting themselves from shame. Our previous research also illustrates the affective impact of these practices, that is, the material impact on women and the compounding effects across a number of life domains (see Franzway et al., 2019). Clearly, gendered violence results in a range of physical, psychological, and emotional consequences for women. In our past research, while most women understandably report fear, many also emphasize a range of other emotional responses as perhaps equally or more troubling (Franzway et al., 2019; Moulding et al., 2021). In particular, many place greater emphasis on how they came to feel like different persons because of the dehumanizing and objectifying nature of coercive control, fragmented within themselves, no longer confident, with no clear sense of who they are or their agency (Franzway et al., 2019; Moulding et al., 2021); this is in many ways the point of gendered violence and particularly of coercive control (see also Stark, 2007). Women in our prior research studies particularly describe the impact of coercive control as effectively obliterating their sense of who they are until they feel like nothing and nobody. The following account from a woman participating in one of these previous studies illustrates this well:

I lost my identity as an individual. My every movement and action was dictated by the fear of a negative reaction from [my former partner]. I adopted the “peace at any price” mentality. I lost my self-confidence, [developed] high levels of anxiety and depression, which he threatened to leave me over if it would be an ongoing issue. (Moulding et al, 2021, p. 12)

Many women offered accounts similar to the one above, illustrating how IPV and coercive control can strip women of their very sense of themselves. Drawing on Giddens (1991), we have previously argued that this undermines women's sense of ontological security (Franzway et al., 2019), effectively depriving them of their capacities to live as equal citizens in good health, which is compounded by other interconnected negative impacts across other domains of citizenship including access to decent shelter, work and income, and social participation (Franzway et al., 2019). The ways that women describe the impact of IPV on their lives is aptly captured by Tyler in her notion of gendered violence as “abjection lived” (Tyler, 2009, p. 90). Tyler (2009) argues that “battered women's idea of themselves as individuals is gradually obliterated until they are literally pushed ‘toward the place where meaning collapses’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 2; cited in Tyler, 2009) … a state which she describes as ‘being on the edge of non-existence’ or ‘abjection lived’” (Tyler, 2009, p. 90; see also Spivak, 1988). This conceptualization is entirely consistent with what women have told us about the impact of IPV on them and their lives.

However, while male-coded honor frames and drives IPV, we also argue that female-coded forms of honor are also in play. Attention to the role of female-coded honor, and the affective-discursive practices comprising it, can provide a deeper understanding of women's agency in violent contexts. For example, our research shows that women do not accept abjection lightly, with many expressing feelings of anger and betrayal toward the men who have pushed them to the edge (Franzway et al., 2019; Moulding et al., 2023; Moulding, 2024). Many also express enormous shame and guilt in response to partner abuse (Franzway et al., 2019; Moulding et al., 2023). As noted earlier, abjection is the shame-ridden counterpart to the point to honor and the affective state which the pursuit of honor seeks to avoid (Bourdieu, 1979). Women's testimonies illustrate that shame and guilt are central to their affective experiences of “abjection lived” in gendered violence and that these emotions often relate to feeling responsible for the family and blaming themselves when things go awry (Franzway et al., 2019; Moulding et al., 2023). Relatedly, women tell us about how they try to overcome shame and guilt by staying in violent relationships in the attempt to live up to gendered social expectations about keeping the family together and ensuring that their children have a father, in line with hegemonic mothering and femininity discourses (Franzway et al., 2019; Moulding et al., 2023). Feminist scholars have theorized women's efforts along these lines as “doing femininity” (Wendt & Zannettino, 2015), that is, as attempting to meet hegemonic femininity ideals just as violent men are understood to be attempting to meet, however misguidedly, hegemonic masculinity ideals by “doing masculinity” through violence and coercive control (Oddone, 2020). However, ideas about “doing femininity,” or “doing masculinity” for that matter, do not go far enough because they overlook the question of the affective drivers of these so-called “doings.” As has been previously pointed out, approaching “doing gender” as the mere performance of discursive “acts” runs the risk of inadvertently turning gender practices into no more than parody, which is not what Butler intended when she developed her theory of gender performativity (Butler, 2015). Such an approach also underestimates the deeply habituated nature of gender identities and performance (Ewing, 2008). Rather, Butler (2015) acknowledges that “doing” can never be divorced from living, breathing, sensing, feeling bodies. Hence, while women's feelings of shame and guilt are part-and-parcel of female abjection in gendered violence, they also play an important role in their related efforts to keep families together. We argue that these affective-discursive practices are framed and shaped by female-coded honor informed by gender discourses that reify feminine selflessness and women's roles as carers and mothers (Moulding, 2024). In this way, then, affective-discursive practices such as staying with violent partners and trying to make relationships work might sometimes seek to circumvent abjection, shame, guilt, and female dishonor. While staying arguably keeps women trapped in violent situations by locking them into a patriarchal gender order in the home and can never be simplistically understood as a free “choice,” these practices also resist masculinized ideals and domination to some extent through a valuing of the feminine and women's generally under-recognized roles as primary carers within the family. However, nothing is ever so simple for women in a patriarchal gender order; our research also shows how women continue to struggle with shame and guilt when they do remain with violent men, blaming themselves and being blamed by others both for the violence itself and for continuing to expose themselves and their children to it (Moulding et al., 2023; Moulding, 2024). As is so often the way in a male-dominated context, women confront a “damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t”scenario in gendered violence, just as we do in many other domains of our lives (Moulding et al, 2023; Moulding, 2024). Nonetheless, though, understanding that honor and recognition are not entirely a masculine preserve and can also be feminized (see Churcher & Gatens, 2019) helps us better understand women's efforts to meet gendered expectations as partners and mothers in contexts of violence.

Implications for Practice

As noted earlier, masculine dispositions that are prone to violence against women are often deeply habituated and not so easily supplanted, as is evident in the extremely modest outcomes associated with most violent men's programs (Berggren et al., 2021). However, the effectiveness of these programs might be enhanced by a stronger focus on building men's emotional literacy beyond assumptions that their distress primarily results from personal “trauma” or that their feelings simply arise in a straightforward way from explicit, conscious sexism, and misogyny. Siltala et al. (2021) report on a three-step approach to non-violence developed in Norway where men are taught to distinguish between primary and secondary emotions, then reflect on the former and learn to recognize, understand, and feel empathy toward others’ emotional experience. Programs like this could be elaborated and enriched by situating violent men's emotions in deeply habituated, concealed forms of male-coded honor that are often outside conscious awareness; such an approach could specifically help to engage those men who cannot see themselves in the stereotypical depictions of the knowingly powerful, violently controlling man. Programs could also educate men about how their violence is more properly understood as an affront against women's honor (Churcher & Gatens, 2019), because it impinges on female partners’ rights as equal citizens to self-expression, health, safety, shelter, affiliation, freedom, and autonomy (Franzway, 2016; Nussbaum, 2011).

To prevent the development of violent male dispositions in the first place, there must be a significant change in the gendered fields and habitus that give rise to them, which necessitates both structural and cultural change because the two are intimately intertwined (McNay, 2004). Structural change means continuing efforts to dismantle male dominance and unearned privilege wherever it inheres in public and private life, while cultural change means actively valuing other kinds of masculinities that are emotionally literate, empathic, caring, and authentically inter-relational, rather than violent, domineering, and controlling. Criminal prosecution is necessary from a symbolic point of view, even if it is largely ineffectual, but civil penalties should also be considered and rarely are. These could include family courts refusing to grant child custody to men who are continuing to be violent and controlling in recognition that they can never be considered “good” fathers in any rational sense of the word while they are persecuting the mothers of the children in question. Consideration could also be given to redistributive justice when dividing property between men who are violent and controlling and their ex-partners, which might go some way toward protecting women (and children) against the long-term poverty and lost citizenship rights flowing from male violence (Franzway et al., 2019).

Further empirical research is also needed to investigate in greater depth how male-coded honor in Westernized contexts operates in systemic ways, including in institutions, that support and enable gendered violence. In this article, we have shown how some forms of male-coded honor frame and shape certain coercive controlling practices of IPV in these contexts, but more work is needed to understand how these values and practices operate as patriarchal systems in neoliberal societies, and the ways these might be similar to, or distinct from, the patriarchal family honor systems operating in certain cultures following migration to Western countries. Future research also needs to explore how violent masculine dispositions become socially embodied over time in some men but not others, including at more subliminal affective-discursive levels, taking care to situate individual life history narratives within wider systems of male-coded honor and female abjection. Further work is also needed to understand the relationship between male-coded honor and other aspects of masculinity, including the affective dimensions beyond more explicit beliefs and attitudes.

Conclusion

Attention to the role of concealed forms of honor and abjection in IPV, and related affective-discursive practices, engages with discourse but at the same time enables attention to “what goes without saying” and is “beyond words,” because “the logic of gender works affectively, emotionally and performatively”—that is, it works between bodies—with much occurring at a level below full awareness (Ahall, 2018, p. 43). To date, researchers have directed effort toward the worthy and necessary project of making gendered violence understandable and knowable through examination of the individual discursive narratives used by perpetrators to rationalize and explain it, the trauma, mental illness, and drug and alcohol use thought to both trigger and result from it, and the structural gender inequalities and related discourses that enable and support it. While post-structural analyses position violent and controlling practices within wider gendered discourses and power relations through the idea of “doing gender,” it is also necessary to elucidate what drives these gender practices and explore how they become socially embodied over time. We therefore argue that to better understand gendered violence, it is necessary to journey into the so-called “irrational” realm where the social meets the body in more subliminal affective-discursive practices. After all, gendered violence is ultimately self-defeating for those who use it, even if there are immediate gains to be had, driving many women away and, in the worst-case scenarios, escalating to the murders of female partners, ex-partners, and their children (Johnson, 2006). To better understand how to intervene more effectively in the epidemic of IPV in Australia and other countries around the world, better understanding of the role of gendered systems of honor and abjection, and the socially embodied and habituated affective-discursive practices inhering within them, requires further theorization and translation into practice.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Emeritus Professor Suzanne Franzway and Professor Donna Chung for their comments on previous drafts of this article.

ORCID iDs

Nicole Moulding

Ashlee Borgkvist

Ethics Considerations

There are no human participants in this article, and informed consent is not required.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Nicole Moulding is a research professor at Adelaide University and Director of the Social Relationships and Communities Research Group. Her research focuses on gendered violence and mental health. She has published four scholarly books, including Gendered Violence, Mental Health and Recovery in Everyday Lives: Beyond Trauma, and The Sexual Politics of Gendered Violence and Women's Citizenship, as well as over 50 journal articles in these fields. Nicole's recent research projects include national studies into the social dimensions of childhood emotional abuse, the long-term impact of domestic violence on women's citizenship and young women's mental health.

Ashlee Borgkvist is an interdisciplinary researcher at Adelaide University who has worked on projects exploring gendered violence, childhood emotional abuse, negotiations of work and family, and organizational culture. Her experience has included conducting interviews on sensitive topics, working with advisory groups, project management, and in-depth qualitative analysis. Ashlee's research focuses on father's uptake of flexible working arrangements, gender, and workplace culture. Her PhD and subsequent research in this area have provided extensive knowledge about how fathers negotiate work and family responsibilities, and how gender and organizational culture influence fathers’ behavior and decision-making in relation to flexible working arrangements.

References

Abu-Odeh

(1997). Comparatively speaking: The “honor” of the “East” and the “passion” of the “West”. Utah Law Review, 2, 287–307. https://doi.org/10.63140/wyo6_d9z12

Adkins

(2004). Reflexivity: Freedom or habit of gender? The Sociological Review, 52(2), 191–210. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276403206002

Ahall

(2018). Affect as methodology: Feminism and the politics of emotion. International Political Sociology, 12(1), 36–52. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olx024

Anderson

K. L.

(2009). Gendering coercive control. Violence Against Women, 15(12), 1444–1457. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801209346837

Aplin

(2019). Policing UK honour-based abuse crime. Springer International Publishing AG.

Arias

Arce

Vilariño

(2013). Batterer intervention programmes: A meta-analytic review of effectiveness. Psychosocial Intervention, 22(2), 153–160. https://doi.org/10.5093/in2013a18

Aslan

(2009). Islamophobia in Australia. Agora Press.

Asquith

(2015). Honour, violence and heteronormativity. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 4(3), 73–84. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v4i3.191

Atkinson

(2014). A sketch of ‘family’ as a field: From realized category to space of struggle. Acta Sociologica, 57(3), 223–235. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001699313511470

10.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2023). Personal Safety Survey, Australia, 2021-2022, ABS Cat. No. 4906.0. ABS, Canberra. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/crime-and-justice/personal-safety-australia/latest-release

11.

Baker

N. V.

Gregware

P. R.

Cassidy

M. A.

(1999). Family killing fields. Violence Against Women, 5(2), 164–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780129952005

12.

Bancroft

(2002). Why does he do that?: Inside the minds of angry and controlling men. G.P. Putnam.

13.

Baum

Miller

(2014). Why behavioural health promotion endures despite its failure to reduce health inequities. In Cohen

(Ed.), From health behaviours to health practices: Critical perspectives (pp. 213–225). Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118898345

14.

Berggren

Gottzén

Bornas

(2021). Theorising masculinity and intimate partner violence. In Gottzen

Bjornholt

Boonzair

(Eds.), Men, masculinities and intimate partner violence (pp. 34–51). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429280054 .

15.

Boonzaier

Huysamen

van Niekerk

(2020). Men from the South: Feminist, decolonial and intersectional perspectives on men, masculinities and intimate partner violence. In Gottzén

Bjørnholt

Boonzaier

(Eds.), Men, masculinities and intimate partner violence (pp. 52–65). Routledge.

16.

Bourdieu

(1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press.

17.

Bourdieu

(1979). Symbolic power. Critique of Anthropology, 4(13–14), 77–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X7900401307

18.

Bourdieu

(2000). Pascalian meditations. Polity Press.

19.

Bowen

Gilchrist

(2006). Predicting dropout of court-mandated treatment in a British sample of domestic violence offenders. Psychology, Crime & Law, 12(5), 573–587. https://doi.org/10.1080/10683160500337659

20.

Bowen

Gilchrist

E. A.

Beech

A. R.

(2005). An examination of the impact of community-based rehabilitation on the offending behaviour of male domestic violence offenders and the characteristics associated with recidivism. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 10(2), 189–209. https://doi.org/10.1348/135532505X36778

21.

Bowman

Stevens

Eagle

Langa

Kramer

Kiguwa

Nduna

(2015). The second wave of violence scholarship: South African synergies with a global research agenda. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 146, 243–248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.10.014

22.

Breckenridge

(1999). Subjugation and silences: The role of the professions in silencing victims of sexual and domestic violence. In Breckenridge

Laing

(Eds.), Challenging silence: Innovative responses to sexual and domestic violence (pp. 6–30). Allen & Unwin.

23.

Brown

R. P.

Carvallo

Imura

(2014). Naming patterns reveal cultural values: Patronyms, matronyms, and the U.S. Culture of honor. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(2), 250–262. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213509840

24.

Brownmiller

(1975). Against our will. Bantam Books.

25.

Buchanan

Borgkvist

(2024). Progress across bioecological systems countering intergenerational transmission of intimate partner violence. Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 8(1), 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1332/23986808Y2023D000000001

26.

Butler

(2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press.

27.

Calvete

(2007). Justification of violence beliefs and social problem-solving as mediators between maltreatment and behavior problems in adolescents. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 10(1), 131–140. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1138741600006399

28.

Churcher

Gatens

(2019). Reframing honour in heterosexual imaginaries. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 24(4), 151–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1635834

29.

Connell

R. W.

(1995). Masculinities. Polity Press.

30.

Connell

R. W.

Messerschmidt

J. W.

(2005). Hegemonic masculinity. Gender & Society, 19(6), 829–859. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243205278639

31.

Cooney

(2019). Execution by family: A theory of honour violence. Routledge.

32.

DeGue

Holt

M. K.

Massetti

G. M.

Matjasko

J. L.

Tharp

A. T.

Valle

L. A.

(2012). Looking ahead toward community-level strategies to prevent sexual violence. Journal of Women’s Health, 21(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2011.3263

33.

DeKeseredy

Schwartz

Donnermeyer

(2009). Dangerous exits: Escaping abusive relationships in rural America. Rutgers University Press.

34.

Erez

Adelman

Gregory

(2009). Intersections of immigration and domestic violence. Feminist Criminology, 4(1), 32–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085108325413

35.

Ewing

K. P.

(2008). Stolen honor. Stigmatizing Muslim men in Berlin. Stanford University Press.

36.

Fitz-Gibbon

Pickering

(2012). Homicide law reform in Victoria, Australia: From provocation to defensive homicide and beyond. The British Journal of Criminology, 52(1), 159–180. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azr060

37.

Flood

Pease

(2009). Factors influencing attitudes to violence against women. Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 10(2), 125–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838009334131

38.

Franzway

(2016). The sexual politics of citizenship and violence. Women’s Studies International Forum, 58, 18–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2016.04.006

39.

Franzway

Moulding

Wendt

Zufferey

Chung

(2019). The sexual politics of gendered violence and women’s citizenship. Policy Press.

40.

Fulu

Jewkes

Roselli

Garcia-Moreno

(2013). Prevalence of and factors associated with male perpetration of intimate partner violence: Findings from the UN multi-country cross-sectional study on men and violence in Asia and the Pacific. The Lancet Global Health, 1(4), e187–e207. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(13)70074-3

41.

Gadd

Jefferson

(2007). Psychosocial criminology: An introduction. Sage.

42.

Gibbs

Dunkle

Ramsoomar

Willan

Jama Shai

Chatterji

Naved

Jewkes

(2020). New learnings on drivers of men’s physical and/or sexual violence against their female partners, and women’s experiences of this, and the implications for prevention interventions. Global Health Action, 13(1), 1739845. https://doi.org/10.1080/16549716.2020.1739845

43.

Giddens

(1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press.

44.

Gill

A. K.

(2019). Social and cultural implications of “honor”-based violence. In Reilly

(Ed.), International human rights of women (pp. 365–380). Springer Singapore.

45.

Gracia

Merlo

(2016). Intimate partner violence against women and the Nordic paradox. Social Science and Medicine, 157, 27–30. https://doi.org/10.16/j.socscimed.2016.03.040

46.

Grewal

(2013). Outsourcing patriarchy. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2012.755352

47.

Grzyb

M. A.

(2016). An explanation of honour-related killings of women in Europe through Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and masculine domination. Current Sociology, 64(7), 1036–1053. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392115627479

48.

Haines

Andary

Amos

Louth

Mannik

Jacobs

Best

Calio

Petrovic

Scott

Vlahos

(2022). Men working with men in intensive family services: Reflections on violence, trauma lifeworlds, and organic interventions. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 43, 442–461. https://doi.org/10.1002/anzf.1517

49.

Hamad

(2019). White tears/brown scars: How white feminism betrays women of colour. Melbourne University Publishing.

50.

Harper

F. W.

Arias

(2004). The role of shame in predicting adult anger and depressive symptoms among victims of child psychological maltreatment. Journal of Family Violence, 19, 359–367. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-004-0681-x

51.

Hearn

(2012). A multi-faceted power analysis of men’s violence to known women: From hegemonic masculinity to the hegemony of men. The Sociological Review (Keele), 60(4), 589–610. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02125.x

52.

Hearn

Whitehead

(2006). Collateral damage: Men’s “domestic” violence to women seen through men’s relations with men. Probation Journal, 53(1), 38–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/0264550506060864

53.

Hill

(2020). See what you made me do: Power, control and domestic abuse. Oxford University Press.

54.

Idriss

M. M.

(2017). Not domestic violence or cultural tradition: Is honour-based violence distinct from domestic violence? The Journal of Social Welfare & Family Law, 39(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09649069.2016.1272755

55.

Johnson

C. H.

(2006). Familicide and family law: A study of filicide: Suicide following separation. Family Court Review, 44(3), 448–463. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1617.2006.00099.x

56.

Kaplenko

Loveland

J. E.

Raghavan

(2018). Relationships between shame, restrictiveness, authoritativeness, and coercive control in men mandated to a domestic violence offenders program. Violence and Victims, 33(2), 296–309. https://doi.org/10.1891/0886-6708.VV-D-16-00123

57.

Kelly

Westmarland

(2016). Naming and defining “domestic violence”: Lessons from research with violent men. Feminist Review, 112(1), 113–127. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2015.52

58.

Khan

Hall

Lowe

(2017). ‘Honour’ abuse: the experience of South Asians who identify as LGBT in North West England. Summary report prepared for Lancashire Constabulary. https://clok.uclan.ac.uk/20996/7/20996%20LGBT%20Honour%20Report%20-%20Final%20%282018%29.pdf

59.

Kimmel

(2010). Misframing men: The politics of contemporary masculinities. Rutgers University Press.

60.

Kristeva

(1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Columbia University Press.

61.

MacKinnon

C. A.

(1993). Only words. Harvard University Press.

62.

Manning

(2014). Paradoxes of (im)purity: Affirming heteronormativity and queering heterosexuality in family discourses of purity pledges. Women's Studies in Communication, 38(1), 99–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2014.954687

63.

Mathews

Hegarty

K. L.

MacMillan

H. L.

Madzoska

Erskine

H. E.

Pacella

Scott

J. G.

Thomas

Meinck

Higgins

Lawrence

D. M.

Haslam

Roetman

Malacova

Cubitt

(2025). The prevalence of intimate partner violence in Australia: A national survey. Medical Journal of Australia, 222(9), 440–448. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.52660

64.

Mayeda

D. T.

Vijaykumar

(2016). A review of the literature on honor-based violence. Sociology Compass, 10(5), 353–363. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12367

65.

Mayeda

D. T.

Vijaykumar

Chesney-Lind

(2018). Constructions of honor-based violence: Gender, context and orientalism. In Carrington

Hogg

Scott

Sozzo

(Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of criminology and the global south (pp. 947–967). Springer.

66.

McNay

(2004). Situated intersubjectivity. In B. L.

Marshall

Witz

(Eds.), Engendering the social: Feminist encounters with sociological theory (pp. 171–186). Open University Press.

67.

Messerschmidt

J. W.

(2012). Engendering gendered knowledge: Assessing the academic appropriation of hegemonic masculinity. Men and Masculinities, 15(1), 56–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X11428384

68.

Miller

D. L.

(2016). Gender, field, and habitus: How gendered dispositions reproduce fields of cultural production. Sociological Forum, 31(2), 330–353. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12247

69.

Millet

(1970). Sexual politics. Doubleday.

70.

Morran

(2011). Re-education or recovery? Re-thinking some aspects of domestic violence perpetrator programmes. Probation Journal, 58(1), 23–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/0264550510388968

71.

Moulding

N. T.

(2016). Gendered violence, mental health and recovery in everyday lives: Beyond trauma. Routledge.

72.

Moulding

N. T.

(2024). Understanding the politics of emotion in gendered violence: A feminist critique of trauma and cognitivist discourses in research and practice. In C. Brown (Ed.), Critical perspectives on trauma-informed practice. Routledge.

73.

Moulding

N. T.

Chung

Zufferey

Franzway

Wendt

(2023). Social participation after intimate partner violence: Investigating the impact on women’s citizenship. Violence Against Women, 1–2.

74.

Moulding

N. T.

Franzway

Wendt

Zufferey

Chung

(2021). Re-thinking women’s mental health after intimate partner violence. Violence against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal, 27(8), 1064–1090.

75.

Nisbett

R. E.

Cohen

(1996). Culture of honour – The psychology of violence in the south. Westview Press.

76.

Nussbaum

M. C.

(2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach (1st ed.). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

77.

Oddone

(2020). Perpetrating violence in intimate relationships as a gendering practice: An ethnographic study on domestic violence perpetrators in France and Italy. Violence: An International Journal, 1(2), 242–264. https://doi.org/10.1177/2633002420962274

78.

Olwan

D. M.

(2013). Gendered violence, cultural otherness, and honour crimes in Canadian national logics. Canadian Journal of Sociology (Online), 38(4), 533–555. https://doi.org/10.29173/cjs21196

79.

Pease

(2021). Undoing privilege: Unearned advantage and systemic injustice in an unequal world. Bloomsbury Publishing.

80.

Pizzey

(1974). Scream quietly or the neighbours will hear. Penguin Books.

81.

Pornari

C. D.

Dixon

Humphreys

G. W.

(2021). A preliminary investigation into a range of implicit and explicit offense supportive cognitions in perpetrators of physical intimate partner violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 36(3–4), NP2079–2111NP. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260518755487

82.

Reavey

Warner

(2003). Introduction. In Reavey

Warner

(Eds.), New feminist stories of child sexual abuse: Sexual scripts and dangerous dialogue (pp. 1–12). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203361573

83.

Rees

Silove

Chey

Ivancic

Steel

Creamer

Teesson

Bryant

McFarlane

A. C.

Mills

K. L.

Slade

Carragher

O’Donnell

Forbes

(2011). Lifetime prevalence of gender-based violence in women and the relationship with mental disorders and psychosocial function. JAMA : The Journal of the American Medical Association, 306(5), 513–521. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2011.1098

84.

Roberts

A. L.

Gilman

S. E.

Fitzmaurice

Deckerf

M. R.

Koenen

K. C.

(2010). Witness of intimate partner violence in childhood and perpetration of intimate partner violence in adulthood epidemiology. Epidemiology, 21(6), 809–818. https://doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0b013e3181f39f03

85.

Rollero

(2020). The social dimensions of intimate partner violence: A qualitative study with male perpetrators. Sexuality & Culture, 24(3), 749–763. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119

86.

Romans

S. E.

Martin

J. L.

Anderson

J. C.

(1995). Sexual abuse in childhood and deliberate self-harm. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 152(9), 1336–1342. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.152.9.1336

87.

Rose

(2006). Governing “Advanced” liberal democracies. In Sharma

Gupta

(Eds.), The anthropology of the state (pp. 144–162). John Wiley & Sons.

88.

Salter

(2016). “Real men don’t hit women”: Constructing masculinity in the prevention of violence against women. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 49(4), 463–479. https://doi.org/10.1177/0004865815587031

89.

Sarre

(2024). Preventing crime: What we know, and what we need to do. Springer Nature Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-3488-7

90.

Semiatin

J. N.

Torres

LaMotte

A. D.

Portnoy

G. A.

Murphy

C. M.

(2017). Trauma exposure, PTSD symptoms, and presenting clinical problems among male perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Psychology of Violence, 7(1), 91–100. https://doi.org/10.1037/vio0000041

91.

Senkans

McEwan

T. E.

Ogloff

J. R. P.

(2020). Conceptualising intimate partner violence perpetrators’ cognition as aggressive relational schemas. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 55, 101456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2020.101456

92.

Seymour

Wendt

Natalier

(2023). Responding to domestic violence: Difficult conversations. Routledge.

93.

Siltala

Päivinen

Laitila

(2020). Reporting, reflecting and recognising emotions in therapeutic work with domestic violence perpetrators: Experiences of the Jyväskylä group model. In Violence, gender and affect: Interpersonal, institutional and ideological practices (pp. 135–155). Springer International Publishing.

94.

Spivak

G. C.

(1988). Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson

Grossberg

(Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 24–28). Macmillan.

95.

Stark

(2007). Coercive control: The entrapment of women in personal life. Oxford University Press.

96.

Stokoe

(2010). “I’m not gonna hit a lady”: Conversation analysis, membership categorization and men’s denials of violence towards women. Discourse & Society, 21(1), 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926509345072

97.

Straus

M. A.

Gelles

R. J.

(1986). Societal change and change in family violence from 1975 to 1985 as revealed by two national surveys. Journal of Marriage and Family, 48(3), 465–479. https://doi.org/10.2307/352033

98.

Strid

Humbert

A. L.

Hearn

Balkmar

(2021). States of violence: Exploring welfare state regimes as violence regimes by developing a violence regimes index. Journal of European Social Policy, 31(3), 321–336. https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287211002370

99.

Taylor

Jasinski

J. L.

(2011). Femicide and the feminist perspective. Homicide Studies, 15(4), 341–362. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088767911424541

100.

Thiara

R. K.

Hague

Mullender

(2011). Losing out on both counts: Disabled women and domestic violence. Disability & Society, 26(6), 757–771. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2011.602867

101.

Tomsen

(2005). “Boozers and Bouncers”: Masculine conflict, disengagement and the contemporary governance of drinking-related violence and disorder. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 38(3), 283–297. https://doi.org/10.1375/acri.38.3.283

102.

Tyler

(2009). Against abjection. Feminist Theory, 10(1), 77–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700108100393

103.

Vandello

J. A.

Cohen

(2003). Culture, gender, and men’s intimate partner violence. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 652–667. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00080.x

104.

Vandello

J. A.

Cohen

Grandon

Franiuk

(2009). Stand by your man: Indirect prescriptions for honorable violence and feminine loyalty in Canada, Chile, and the United States. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(1), 81–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022108326194

105.

Walker

T. J.

(2019). “That is How Whores Get Punished": Gender, race, and the culture of honor-based violence in colonial Latin America. Journal of Women's History, 31(2), 11–32. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2019.0012

106.

Warin

(2010). Abject relations: Everyday worlds of anorexia. Rutgers University Press.

107.

Wemrell

Stjernlöf

Lila

Gracia

Ivert

A. K.

(2022). The Nordic paradox. Professionals’ discussions about gender equality and intimate partner violence against women in Sweden. Women & Criminal Justice, 32(5), 431–453. https://doi.org/10.1080/08974454.2021.1905588

108.

Wendt

Natalier

Seymour

King

Macaitis

(2020). Strengthening the domestic and family violence workforce: Key questions. Australian Social Work, 73(2), 236–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/0312407X.2019.1638429

109.

Wendt

Zannettino

(2015). Domestic violence in diverse contexts: A re-examination of gender. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315751894

110.

Westmarland

Kelly

(2013). Why extending measurements of “success” in domestic violence perpetrator programmes matters for social work. The British Journal of Social Work, 43(6), 1092–1110. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcs049

111.

Wetherell

(2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. Sage.

112.

Whiting

J. B.

Merchant

L. V.

Bradford

A. B.

Smith

D. B.

(2020). The ecology of family violence: Treating cultural contexts and relationship processes. The Handbook of Systemic Family Therapy, 4, 153–190. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119438519.ch89

113.

Widom

C. S.

Czaja

Dutton

M. A.

(2014). Child abuse and neglect and intimate partner violence victimization and perpetration: A prospective investigation. Child Abuse and Neglect, 38, 650–663. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2013.11.004

114.

Withaeckx

Coene

(2014). “Glad to have Honour”: Continuity and change in minority women’s lived experience of honour. Journal of Gender Studies, 23(4), 376–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2013.785940

115.

World Health Organization (WHO). (2010). Preventing intimate partner and sexual violence against women: Taking action and generating evidence. World Health Organisation. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/44350

116.

Zapata-Calvente

A. L.

Moya

Bohner

Megías

J. L.

(2019). Automatic associations and conscious attitudes predict different aspects of men’s intimate partner violence and sexual harassment proclivities. Sex Roles, 81, 439–455. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-019-1006-0