| The 1995 Annual American Medical Association guidelines reported that "family violence--domestic violence, child physical abuse and neglect, child sexual abuse and mistreatment of the elderly--was wide-spread. Each year in the United States ... two million women are battered, 1,500 women are killed by intimate partners, 1.8 million elderly people are mistreated and 1.7 million reports of child abuse are filed" (New York Times, November 7, 1995). In my dissertation, I address dominant themes in research concerning violence against women and children and offer critical perspectives on what I call "family terrorism.".;Drawing on the writings of feminist theorists, research in the areas of colonization in both theory and praxis, Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, subaltern studies, and critical social theory, I attempt to investigate the dialectical relationships between violence against women and notions of colonization through an examination of a diversity of feminist theories and practices. It is through this contextual investigation of multiple feminisms that it becomes apparent that there is a serious lacunae in much of contemporary feminist theory concerning male violence against women. Moreover, there seems to be a connection between the absence of an on-going development of a theoretically-informed, feminist praxis--which I am identifying, within this text, as one which is meta-critical and dialectical--and the conservative backlash against feminism.;Accordingly, I critically engage the emergence of a trend of anti-feminist feminism which tends to psychologize and individualize the issue of violence against women and children and that attacks feminist activism which attempts to deal with the problem. I examine the Hedda Nussbaum case as a way of talking about how anti-feminist feminists have exploited the issue of "family violence" to advance a pernicious blame-the-victim approach. Against these attempts to explain away or mystify the issue of family terrorism, I develop metacritical feminist perspectives which takes into account the ways that the issue has been relegated to the private domain and argue that it is a public issue that requires a theoretically-informed political activism. |
