Examining an array of representations since 1990, I critique the metaphors most often used to comprehend abuse and power relations known culturally as Domestic Violence. Working intertextually with artifacts from Hollywood movies, popular news accounts, and legislative debates surrounding the Violence Against Women Act, this dissertation demonstrates how the U.S. public culture has developed a vocabulary for thinking about Domestic Violence that constricts problematically the agency of both victims and abusers. Seeking to account more fully for this abuse as it operates within a complicated matrix that includes private physical, emotional, and sexual violations as well as economic oppression, narrow policy-making, and reified notions of what it means to ameliorate gendered abuse, this project aims to provide a productive critique of Domestic Violence as a discourse.;Specifically, this dissertation traces three key metaphors---Disease, War, and Crime---to demonstrate the ways in which conversations about Domestic Violence rely on linear narratives that either efface or demonize abusers and place victims in the double bind of being utterly victimized and yet responsible for their own salvation. Complicating liberal feminist quests for equality and broader conservative investments in individualism, I argue that implicating communities in Domestic Violence is necessary to move beyond isolated social dramas. Framed as a rhetorical critique, this project draws upon a variety of disciplinary literatures including social and political theory, feminist theory, critical legal studies and feminist jurisprudence, media studies, film theory, and criminal justice to argue for a more robust conception of gendered violence.
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