The Theatre of Domestic Violence in Central Australia

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 5) Gendered Violence, Risk, and Vulnerability

Abstract

There is remarkably little ethnographic research or microsociological accounts of domestic violence as an interactional practice unfolding in real time. Drawing on thirty-one months of ethnographic fieldwork shadowing Aboriginal families in Central Australia, this article offers a rare vantage point on domestic violence as a lived social practice. In Aboriginal families, marriages are embedded within dense kinship networks, and conflict is public, collective and heavily ritualized. Drawing on observations of dozens of incidences of violence alongside participants' own interpretations of them, I reconstruct four recurrent forms of “husband and wife” violence: arguments, fights, hidings and horrors– each governed by distinctive scripts, roles and pathways of escalation, intervention and reconciliation. This microsociological account allows five breaks with existing representations of domestic violence: first, domestic violence appears not as alcohol-fuelled chaos, but as expressive and communicative action structured by tacit rules and limits; second it is not private or dyadic but public and collective; third, domestic violence does not follow a linear escalation pathway from minor conflict to severe abuse, but couples circulate among forms, with kin and institutional intervention periodically interrupting trajectories; fourth, women are not only passive victims but infrastructural actors who anticipate, mediate and redirect violence, even as they remain physically exposed to it; finally the emotional grammar of violence extends beyond rage to include humiliation, shame, threats of self-harm, and demonstrations of vulnerability. By foregrounding domestic violence as a relational and expressive practice embedded in kinship and colonial governance, the article challenges liberal assumptions about intimacy and domestic violence that underpin contemporary policy responses.

Author

• Jenae Carpenter, University of California Berkeley