Respecting Boundaries

摘要

This ethnographic interview study of poor, minority, drug-involved women seeks to fill a gap in the existing research on partner violence by examining the meaning women attach to their own use of violence in their intimate relationships. This paper uses theory and research on symbolic boundaries and resistance to examine what symbolic boundaries study participants draw around violence, and how their desire for respect and respectability influence the boundaries that they draw. This paper highlights the interpretive flexibility of violence as a social phenomenon—a flexibility that allows the women in this study to maintain respectability. Yet, these various interpretations, it is argued, are constrained by the matrix of domination (Collins 2000a) within which women live out their lives.