Reconciling Intimate Partner Violence Temporally and Spatially: Prevention and Activism in Argentina and the United States

Keywords: temporality, slow violence, intimate partner violence, gender, feminist movements, Argentina, United States
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 20

Abstract

In this paper, I extend the concept of slow violence to our theorizations of IPV. This includes assessing how different forms and acts of intimate partner violence operate at different temporal scales, to different rhythms, and across spatial constructions, as well as what is specifically intimate about such violence. I draw on qualitative and archival data from my research on sites of contemporary feminist movements against violence in Boston, USA and Buenos Aires, Argentina. In each site’s definition of the problem of violence, individual and collective actors tangle with competing temporalities and spatialities of gender and intimacy, sometimes producing it as a highly local, quotidian expression of power, other times framing it as a spectacular, explosive, and transnational event.

In conversation with feminist geographies of violence/peace, I bring temporality to the question of the spatiality of violence. Focusing on the case of activism and prevention in response to IPV, I ask how violence is shaped by time and time by violence, just as de Leeuw’s (2016) asks how violence shapes space vis-à-vis tender geographies of colonialism. Space, place, and spatiality are deeply intertwined with and interpenetrated by time, temporality, and rhythm. A feminist confrontation with conceptualizing peace is faced with the paradoxical task of understanding the individual embodied experience of violence, while also grasping its processual character as produced by and productive of structural power in time and space.

References:
de Leeuw, Sarah. 2016. “Tender grounds: Intimate visceral violence and British Columbia’s colonial geographies”, Political Geography 52 (May 2016):14-23.