Dilemmas in understandings of men's victimization

What is it about?

The article analyses meaning-making around intimate partner violence (IPV) committed by women and experienced by men in online discussions with the purpose of illustrating how the communication around this issue employs culturally available, competing notions about gender, equality, and IPV. The analysis identified contradictory ways of making sense of the relevance of gender by evoking either a gender-neutral repertoire or a gendered difference repertoire, accompanied with related repertoires of gender equality as a commonplace value and gender equality gone wrong. More specifically, the study illustrates what kind of discursive maneuvres are used for legitimizing a gender-neutral approach strongly advocated in the discussions, and how those maneuvres work to portray opposing gender-sensitive approaches as inappropriate and inaccurate, while also showing how these discursive patterns are challenged in the discussions. The analysis shows how this meaning-making is based on a mixture of both factualization techniques and an affectively emphatic style of expression that accentuates the polarization of the expressed views.

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Why is it important?

The study extends understanding of how gendered (in)equalities and feminist efforts at societal change are given meaning in the context of talk about violence committed by women against men. It shows how very similar patterns of discrediting the work of feminists prevail across socio-historical contexts, and how this makes it difficult to approach intimate partner violence from a gender-sensitive perspective. Furthermore, by illustrating what kind of discursive tools are used in debates on intimate partner violence, gender and inequality, the study gives tools for a critical reading of views expressed in the context of those debates.