Sociology Compass 5/5 (2011): 311–322, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00360.

Rethinking Gender and Violence: Agency, Heterogeneity,

and Intersectionality
S.J. Creek* and Jennifer L. Dunn
Department of Sociology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Abstract
This paper is a consideration of the increasing diversity of images of gender violence and its vic-
tims, as both the grassroots antiviolence activists, and the scholars of the movements and the vio-
lence that inspires the activism, engage with cultural codes and feeling rules that tend to narrow
the criteria for what constitutes gender violence and victimization. We are coming to better
understand that social location, including but not limited to positions within patriarchal systems of
stratification, shapes violence and victimization in many different ways. Since the inception of the
women’s movement, the discourse of victimization has grappled with the implications of con-
structing ‘pure victims’, and despite the tremendous progress in the resources available to survivors
of gender violence, we find the tensions between victimization and agency, and between simplic-
ity and complexity, reemerging repeatedly in the stories victims, activists, and scholars tell about
this social problem. Below, we review the sociological research and activism, in conjunction with
the collective narratives in the social movements against gender violence, to show how the issues
of perceptions of women who are framed as victims began and remain central to feminist research
in this area. We also explore the newest visions of gender violence, that broaden theorizing and
activism to include multiple dimensions of inequality and their intersections. Taken together, these
debates reveal multifaceted layers of complexity that inform the contexts and lived experience of
violence, and that continue to enter into our storytelling.

In this paper, we review and reflect upon the development of activist, scholarly, and
everyday understandings of gender violence and especially of its victims. We are
increasingly learning that social location, importantly but not solely within patriarchal
systems of stratification, shapes violence and victimization in complex ways. We have
also been attending more closely to the consequences of images of violence and victim-
ization for identification of and responses to the abuse of the less powerful members
of society. We begin with a brief review of the research and role of sociologists in
the early years of the anti-rape, battered women’s, and child sexual abuse survivor
movements, and some constructions of gender violence that emerged as a conse-
quence. We then explore debates about agency and victimization in the context of
gender violence. Concerns about the limitations of ‘either ⁄ or’ constructions of gender
violence victims inspire further venturing into feminist scholarly arguments that pre-
vailing typifications of gender violence – even now – do not capture the heterogene-
ity of actual, everyday victims and victimization. Finally, we explore new visions of
gender violence emerging out of these debates and the increasing awareness in sociol-
ogy that people stand at the intersection of social forces and structures. These typifica-
tions broaden theorizing and activism to include multiple dimensions of inequality and
their interrelationships, and new categories of interest, including state-sanctioned
violence against men of color.

ª 2011 The Authors

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312 Gender and Violence

Taken together, these debates reveal layers of complexity that inform the contexts and
lived experience of violence. The study of intimate partner violence, rape, and child sex-
ual abuse is moving beyond gender, ‘pure victims’, and extreme violence to encompass
more nuanced and subtle conceptions and realities. Our object then is not to critique,
but to articulate these various social constructions, in a necessarily brief and partial social
history of the changing discourses of gender violence victimization.

Sociologists researching gender violence

Beginning with the anti-rape movement that emerged out of the consciousness-raising
groups of the early 1970s women’s liberation movement, sociologists have played an
active role in bringing gender violence to the attention of the public and creating images
of victims of rape, battering, and child sexual abuse. Among the best known in the anti-
rape movement is Diana E. H. Russell, who published an influential feminist analysis of
rape based on interviews with victims. As early as 1976, Murray Straus was writing about
‘wife-beating’, and attributes the exponential growth of sociological articles on domestic
violence between 1974 and 1988 to increasing numbers of women, influenced by the
women’s movement, entering graduate school in sociology. Scottish sociologists
R. Emerson Dobash and Russell Dobash articulated patriarchy and wife abuse in 1979.
Mildred Pagelow’s wrote a foundational sociological study published in 1981. David
Finkelhor began publishing on child sexual abuse in 1977 and continues to be prominent
today.
All of these authors were explicitly feminist, explaining gender violence as a function
of patriarchal social structures and as a means of the social control of women and chil-
dren. Due in part to their taking of this stance, they are also united in how they created
images, or ‘typifications’ (Best 1995) that deflected blame from victims. They set out to
counter what they termed widespread prevailing cultural ‘myths’ about what Menachem
Amir (1971) controversially called ‘victim precipitation’ – that is, any notion that victims
were somehow responsible for the crimes committed against them.
By framing victim precipitation in gender violence as mythological, feminist sociolo-
gists in the social movements against rape, and battering, and child sexual abuse shifted
responsibility away from individual victims (and even individual victimizers) and toward
the social structures of patriarchy. In doing this, not only did they assign a different
cause, but they did so in accordance with cultural feeling rules (Hochschild 1979) that
govern toward whom we normally direct our sympathy (Clark 1997). Of necessity,
they created images of innocent victims. Rape victims were never at fault, because they
were helpless to resist, whether it be due to the physical forces arrayed against them or
their own socialization into acquiescent gender roles. Battered women were trapped
by the same social forces and cultural norms, and the child victims of incest even
more so.
This ‘myth-debunking’ (Plummer 1995) was necessary, instrumental, and effective, but
the typification of ‘pure’ and innocent victims has yielded some unintended consequences
(Davies et al. 1998) that have been a source of debate ever since. As early as 1979, Kath-
leen Barry argued that pure victim images narrowly constructed women as the recipients
of violence rather than as actors in their own right. There is a tension adhering to social
constructions of helpless victims, because the lack of agency that defines victimization is a
form of disempowerment. The qualities of victims mirror too closely a traditional femi-
ninity. Feminists in and out of sociology continue to contend with this issue, a discourse
that is the subject of the next section.

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Victims and agents: the discourse of dichotomy and disempowerment

Beginning with Barry (1979), much scholarly talk of victims has engaged with the need,
on one hand, to show that they are not to blame. As Barry (1979) puts it, ‘Making the
victim responsible for her victimization declares her the cause of her own anguish’ (35).
On the other hand, what Barry (1979) calls ‘new definitions’ can lead to
victimism … which establishes new standards for defining experience; those standards dismiss
any question of will, and deny that the woman even while enduring sexual violence is a living,
changing, growing, interactive person. (38)
For Barry, then, even as a victim complies with a victimizer, she has agency, but not
responsibility – a more complex characterization that accounts for her ‘complicity’ (which
fosters victim-blaming) without completely disempowering her.
Ever since, feminist scholars of gender violence have assiduously argued for the agency
of rape victims and battered women, and the term ‘survivor’ has become a widely used
substitute for ‘victim’ (Dunn 2004, 2005, 2010). In the late 1980s in particular, when Liz
Kelly, a British sociologist, wrote Surviving Sexual Violence (1988) and two books titled
Battered Women as Survivors appeared (Gondolf and Fisher 1988; Hoff 1990), the term
gained popularity. Kelly’s (1988) objective was to shift ‘the emphasis from viewing
women as passive victims of sexual violence to seeing them as active survivors’, because
calling women victims ignores the ways that women ‘resist, cope, and survive’ (163–4).
Gondolf and Fisher (1988) argued that the ‘fundamental assumption’ of their book was to
show that contrary to the ‘helpless and passive victim[s]’ that battered women have been
‘typically characterized’ as, in their efforts to survive, ‘battered women are, in fact, hero-
ically assertive and persistent’ (11, 18). Two years later, in her book (also titled Battered
Women as Survivors), Hoff (1990) describes the women she studied as ‘survivors who
struggled courageously’ (x) rather than ‘merely passive victims’ (1990, 8). Hoff (1990)
presented the women in her study as ‘capable, responsible agents’ (65).
Other scholars have brought the discourse into a consideration of legal realms, where
‘victim contests’ (Holstein and Miller 1990) so frequently play out. For example, sociolo-
gist and expert witness Pamela Jenkins discusses testifying on behalf of battered women
charged with crimes. While recognizing the ‘historical’ tendency to blame women for
their own victimization, Jenkins (1996) critiques the concept of ‘battered woman syn-
drome’ as a perspective that renders women ‘passive’ – ‘trapped by the violence and held
hostage by their own perceptions’ (95–6). In contrast, Jenkins (1996) frames battered
women as, first, agents who are ‘active and courageous’, and ‘determined and brave’,
and, ultimately, as both victims and agents (110).
By constructing battered women this way, Jenkins avoids what Kay Picart (2003) calls
the ‘perniciousness of this binary dichotomy’, which puts women in a ‘double bind’ (97);
in her recent discussion of battered women ‘confronting victim discourses’, Amy Leisen-
ring (2006) similarly refers to the ‘double-bind of victimhood’ for women who simulta-
neously ‘claim’ and ‘reject’ victim identities (315, 326). We also find this double-bind in
the discourse of victim advocates, who assert that ‘everybody makes choices’ even as they
attempt to account for what they see as the ‘bad choices’ made by battered women who
return to their abusers (Dunn and Powell-Williams 2007). So while scholarship may be
identifying and rooting out the source of these identity dilemmas, in practice, they con-
tinue to pose significant problems for victims and for those who would help.
In this brief and selective survey, we can see that since the early days of the social
movements mobilizing against gender violence, scholarly activists have seen that images

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of victims as helpless and passive, while averting blame, have potentially disempowering
consequences. At the same time, such conceptions are overly simplistic – no victim is
likely only a victim, or, conversely, if an agent in some ways, thereby not a victim. Alter-
nate conceptualizations of women and children as victims and agents call upon us to dis-
mantle the binary, either ⁄ or structures of our thinking about victims and survivors and
develop ideas that can encompass both ends of a continuum and all that falls between.
Feminist sociologists have gone yet further, however. As Sharon Lamb (1999) points out,
our requirements of victims have also caused us to ‘focus on extreme and pathological
versions’ and a ‘narrow and extreme prototype’ (109). We turn now to scholarship on
discrepancies between idealized typifications of victims in activists’ framing and the ‘het-
erogeneity’ of real victims and their lived experiences (Loseke 1992).

Dismantling the dichotomy and constructing complexity

In looking back at the stories activists in the anti-rape and battered women’s movements
told about victims of these crimes (Dunn 2010), there are some women whose stories
challenge the requirement that victims be ‘pure’ in order to be ‘innocent’. Susan Grif-
fin’s (1971) groundbreaking article in Ramparts tells the story of a stripper raped by the
men attending a bachelor’s party. Griffin makes no comment about the circumstances or
the victims’ occupation, implicitly suggesting that even women likely to be seen as
‘legitimate victims’ (Weis and Borges 1973), i.e. socially acceptable to or deserving of
rape, are true victims. Diana Russell is more explicit. In a chapter of The Politics of Rape
called ‘The Virgin and the Whore’ is the story of a young girl, ‘Rosalind’, who had
been having sex with multiple partners, sometimes on the same occasion, and was even-
tually violently gang-raped by over 20 men. Russell (1975) includes Rosalind’s history
of what many people might call ‘promiscuity’ because she believes that it ‘illustrates very
dramatically what the costs of a sexual double standard can be, and how it can relate to
rape’ (26). But because the interview includes the graphic and horrific details of the gang
rape as well as the earlier promiscuity, the story also can be seen as an example of show-
ing that ‘bad girls’ can still be raped, or, put differently, rape victims can still be bad
girls.
Donileen Loseke has focused her attention on images of battered women, and of some
further unintended implications of activists’ ‘typifications’ (Best 1995). In 1989, in a chap-
ter titled ‘‘‘Violence’’ is ‘‘Violence’’ … or Is It?’, she points to potential disparities
between ‘clear and vivid images of acts and actors’ and ‘real-life events’ that police offi-
cers and others have to interpret in order to decide how to respond (Loseke 1989, 200).
Here and elsewhere, Loseke (1989) argues that the images activists and other claims-mak-
ers create, in part because they are extreme and unambiguous, ‘do not reflect the com-
plexity of social life’ (203). In her study of staff decision-making in a battered women’s
shelter, one consequence was that women whose situations did not conform to relatively
narrow definitions of what constitutes ‘abuse’ could be denied assistance (Loseke 1992).
More recently, Loseke compares the ‘lived realities’ of women participating in a support
group for battered women and the ‘formula stories’ they hear. The formula story, in
which the battered women is necessarily a ‘pure victim trapped in her victimization’ is
problematic because ‘this narrative does not easily encompass the messiness of the lived
experience of troubles in general’ (Loseke 2001, 122, emphasis added).
This messiness is vividly captured in the stories women in prison for violent offenses
against their abusive partners and others told Kathleen Ferraro (2006). Ferraro, who titles
her account and frames these women as ‘neither angels nor demons’, argues that the

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binary categories of victim and offender are insufficient for understanding how these
women have come to be violent and why. This oversimplification distorts their reality
and obscures the horrific abuse they have endured, and the ‘complicated manner through
which victimization is articulated with criminal offending’ (Ferraro 2006, 4). Ferraro
(2006) describes pure victims as ‘meek and distraught, innocent of provoking their vic-
timization’, and as ‘[y]oung, white, middle-class, attractive (but not overtly sexy) women’
(19). The women she interviewed are much more complex. According to Ferraro
(2006), ‘the lives they speak of are not clean: they are complicated and confusing’ (7).
Through showing us the chaotic circumstances and contexts surrounding these women,
Ferraro (2006) seeks to invest women who kill or harm their abusers with the agency
denied them by the ‘language of intimate partner violence’ (13) even as she accounts for
the actions they took. Ferraro (2006) argues that offenders, even those who kill people
other than their abusers or who allow their children to be victimized, are still victims,
‘overwhelmed with demands they could not meet, afraid to challenge their partners, and
unable to escape their circumstances’ (244). By grappling with this paradox, Ferraro
broadens the parameters of what constitutes victimization, drawing in agency and allow-
ing for criminality, ‘blurring the boundaries’ in at least these two suggestive ways.
These are a few more of the ways, then, that sociologists have added new dimensions
and facets to images of victims of gender violence, showing a variety of divergences from
cultural codes and stereotypes. Loseke (1999) argues that sympathetic victims have to be
‘morally good people who are greatly harmed through no fault of their own’ (76). Femi-
nists and other kinds of scholar activists reveal some possibilities for greater inclusiveness:
women in questionable moral categories, women who have some agency, women who
themselves commit violence against others. There is more to consider, however, and we
turn now to some further complications, implications, and in our conclusion, suggestions
for how to build upon and further these new directions.

Inequality and the implications of intersectionality

In 1991, Kimberle Crenshaw, a critical race scholar, writes:
The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics
charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences. In
the context of violence against women, this elision of difference in identity politics is problem-
atic fundamentally, because the violence many women experience is often shaped by other
dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. (1242)
In this same piece, Crenshaw proposes the concept of Intersectionality as a methodological
and theoretical orientation for scholars concerned with the experiences of Black women.
Crenshaw’s (2005) work is rooted in Black Feminist thought, as well as in her experi-
ences as a survivor attempting to resist the violence in her life ‘at a time when the
boundaries of antiracism and feminism were revealing in popular culture the ways that
their narratives of oppression utterly marginalized women of color’ (312). Her ideas were
not new – but they crystallized for many the work that Black feminists had been doing
for at least the last decade. Crenshaw argues that contemporary feminist antiviolence and
antiracist rhetoric has obscured the experiences of women of color working to create lives
free of violence, and that research on violence in the lives of women must move beyond
discrete, hierarchical categories of race, class and gender to an intersectional analysis.
Similarly, Andrea Smith, a Cherokee feminist, problematizes Susan Brownmiller’s
(1975) assertion that sexual assault is ‘nothing more or less than a conscious process of

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intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’. Smith maintains this
oversimplified approach conceals the relationship between sexual violence, racism and
colonialism, and erases significant histories (and contemporary realities) in which sexual
assault is a ‘tool’ of European colonization of indigenous women and men (2005). Many
sociologists concerned with gender and violence work in theoretical tandem with women
like Crenshaw and Smith. Patricia Hill Collins posits that race, class and gender are ‘inter-
locking systems of oppression’ (1991). Addressing how Black women have had their
experiences silenced in the either ⁄ or binary implicitly created through antiracist and White
feminist narratives, Collins (2000) writes that ‘the sexual politics of Black womanhood
reveals the fallacy of assuming that gender affects all women the same way—race and class
matter greatly’ (229).
When examining gender violence, intersectional theorists argue that no oppression –
such as gender inequality – is necessarily more salient in the situation than other forms of
oppression (Crenshaw 1991); gender can be only be understood as indivisible from
race ⁄ ethnicity, class, ability, sexual orientation, and citizenship, among other statuses. As
such, when considering social phenomena like violence, an intersectional approach places
knowledge of these interrelationships at the center of inquiry (Bograd 1999).
Feminist sociologists and other scholars writing about gender violence have joined
women of color activists, advocates in the non-profit industrial complex, and academics
across the social sciences, law and the humanities to trouble popular assumptions about
the nature and amelioration of violence against women, and to critically assess the impact
of the professionalization of antiviolence agencies on women from marginalized commu-
nities. Through their work, these sociologists have tried to show that multiple, indivisible
and messy identities inform the
meaning and nature of domestic violence, how it is experienced by the self and responded to
by others, how personal and social consequences are represented, and how and whether escape
and safety can be obtained. (Bograd 1999, 276)
Importantly, sociologists and other feminist social scientists, if not outright rejecting dis-
crete social categories for an intersectional analysis, have highlighted the homogeneity of
research on violence against women. For example, Murphy et al. (2004) show that quan-
titative scales created to measure domestic violence have rarely been developed for multi-
cultural application, and qualitative explorations of domestic violence, as experienced by
women at the intersections of various inequalities, are few and far between (Bograd 1999;
Mays 2006; Sokoloff 2008). From this perspective, much of the literature which signifi-
cantly informs and is informed by the mainstream antiviolence movement in the United
States – is limited by the underrepresentation of women of color, low-income women,
rural women, LGBTQ women, women with disabilities, and non-English speakers
(Chester et al. 1994; INCITE! 2006; Nixon 2009; Waldron 1996).
Beth Richie thus argues for a ‘radical reassessment’ of the aims of activism to date. In
their efforts to impress upon the public that violence against women – a manifestation of
gender inequality – occurs across class and racial categories, the movement has created
what Richie deems the ‘everywoman’. Whether intentional or not, the faces and leader-
ship of the movement reflect ‘neutral’ priorities and strategies that best meet the needs of
middle-class, White women survivors. As Crenshaw (1991) reminds us:
intervention strategies based solely on the experiences of women who do not share the same
class or race backgrounds will be of limited help to women who because of race and class face
different obstacles. (1246)

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Richie also calls the movement to task for the disparity she perceives between its rhetoric
of inclusion and diversity and the persistence of primarily White leadership. Meanwhile,
many women of color continue to organize on the margins of the antiviolence and anti-
racist movements. Groups like INCITE! and Critical Resistance mobilize around new
strategies to end violence that keep the safety of survivors – particularly women of color
– at the center of concern, without further contributing to the prison-industrial complex
through the arrest and incarceration of men of color. However, there is another issue
with which to contend: the forms that organizations developed to help victims have
increasingly been forced to take.

Further complications: the professionalization of antiviolence organizations

As we note above, feminists working with the antiviolence movement have made signifi-
cant gains over the last several decades. The sizable achievements of the antiviolence
movement in the United States have come at a cost, however. As is common within other
US social movements (McCarthy and Zald 1973), the swelling of available state and phil-
anthropic resources has created a great deal of incentive for traditional grassroots, commu-
nity-based antiviolence groups to become increasingly professionalized and formalized
non-profit agencies (Adelman 2008; Bhattacharjee 2001). Staggenborg (1988) and Piven
and Cloward (1979) find this shift in organizational structure leads to the inhibition of cer-
tain strategies and tactics, and the increasing use of non-disruptive, institutionalized tactics.
The now central strategies for combating violence against women rest heavily upon law
enforcement and the criminal justice system, and scholars argue these ignore the political
priorities and personal experiences of women of color (Bhattacharjee 2001). Natalie Sokol-
off claims that early feminist objectives to generate radical social change have been lost
through continued collusion of the mainstream antiviolence movement with the state, ‘the
velvet purse of state repression’ (Rodriguez 2007, 23). An anonymous non-profit
employee of a feminist organization illustrates this succinctly: ‘Who controls the women’s
organizations in town? It’s largely the men. We still get our funding through being good
girls’ (Riger 1994, 287; see also Johnson 1981; Martin 1990; Matthews 1994).
Critics like Sokoloff contend that these new institutionalized strategies ignore how
many communities of color experience the violence of the state. In the United States, for
example, as many as one third of all young Black men are in prison, jail, on probation or
on parole (Sokoloff 2004) – with some suggesting that the prison-industrial complex has
replaced Jim Crow laws (Alexander 2010) or even recreated slavery (Brewer and Heitzeg
2008; Collins 2004; Smith and Hattery 2008). Native Americans, too, face disproportion-
ate arrest and incarceration rates, as well as significant exposure to police brutality (Smith
1999); Latinos are twice as likely to be incarcerated as Whites (Hartney 2006). Collins
(2004) argues that this prison-industrial complex, paradoxically a central strategy for fight-
ing violence against women, fosters a ‘male rape culture’ and ‘attaches a very effective
form of disciplinary control to a social institution that is rapidly becoming a new site of
slavery for Black men’ (234).
The number of women of color in US prisons has doubled in the last decade, as well
(Chesney-Lind and Pasko 2004), while the same officers responsible for aiding women
who have experienced violence are now charged with enforcing immigration law in the
post-9 ⁄ 11 era (Versanyi 2008). Sokoloff (2008) argues that for many women of color and
immigrant women, involving the police holds the potential to bring further violence onto
their bodies and into their homes and communities. How then, can current research on
and theorizing about gender violence navigate this contested terrain?

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Troubling strategies and envisioning alternatives

Tensions surrounding the priorities and solutions of the antiviolence movement have
increased as the movement has gained ground. Beyond the antiviolence movement’s ties
with the state and the prison-industrial complex, many women of color activists remain
critical of another key movement strategy: helping women leave violent relationships.
Over time, this solution has been juxtaposed with staying, creating a mutually exclusive
and seemingly exhaustive dichotomy in which women survivors are either in a state of
leaving or staying. Thus, in the United States, formulae for safety measures and help for
battered women rest upon them leaving abusers.
Although this may be a viable response for middle-class White women, leaving is far
more complicated for women of color, low-income women, immigrant women,
LGBTQ women, and women with disabilities, according to some sociologists (Abraham
2000; Richie 2005; Renzetti 1996; Sokoloff 2008). Leaving abusers can mean having to
venture outside of one’s own community to seek help from service providers, hospitals,
or police located in dominant communities. Racism, heterosexism, homophobia, anti-
immigrant sentiment, ableism, language barriers, immigration status concerns, and fear of
the police may potentially intersect – rendering the act of leaving fraught with danger
and fear (Abraham 2000; Erez et al. 2009; Mays 2006; Sokoloff 2008; Waldron 1996).
Additionally, women leaving their racial ⁄ ethnic communities or their LGBTQ communi-
ties to seek help may feel tremendous pressure from others not to air the community’s
‘dirty laundry’ to dominant society. Sharing experiences of intimate partner violence with
an outside community leaves those experiences vulnerable to being used to further inform
narratives about and oppression towards the communities in which the survivor is a
member (De Vidas 2000; Kanuha 1990; Waldron 1996).
Sokoloff claims that this forced choice between leaving and staying inhibits or obscures
self-determined and creative alternatives that better meet the needs of women seeking
freedom from violence, as they navigate multiple oppressions and violence not only in
their own communities but in dominant society as well. Margaret Abraham (2000)
writes:
…when we assume there is one overarching problem and one way to address it, we limit both
our vision and our ability to individually and collectively contribute to the struggle to end
domestic violence. (xi)
Heeding Crenshaw’s (2005, 312) call for ‘mapping, context by context, what difference
our difference [makes]’ (312), feminists sociologists have advocated for services that truly
reflect an understanding of how marginalized identities intersect with the experiences of
domestic violence. For example, activists and writers specifically considering the needs of
immigrant women have increasingly called for multiple language interpreters, as well as
staff with a working knowledge of state and federal immigration laws (Erez et al. 2009).
Through their research, intersectional scholars have highlighted how contact with state
agencies can become problematic for undocumented women, women fearful of jeopar-
dizing their immigration status, and women from communities that have experienced
state violence and ⁄ or communities with mixed immigration statuses (Bograd 1999; Bui
2003; Dasgupta 2005; Perilla et al. 1994; Sokoloff 2008).
Others, like Byron Johnson and sociologist Neil Websdale, contend that structural
interventions are needed that offer women material resources like independent housing,
childcare, education and other services. These ‘preventative’ tactics are multi-faceted
and remove the criminal justice system as the primary response to domestic violence

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(Websdale and Johnson 2005). Andrea Smith challenges advocates to organize beyond
merely building anti-violence programs and to think about fighting broader social struc-
tures that support violence against women. She writes that women will be better served
by being seen as organizers or potential organizers, rather than as clients. Finally, Smith
calls for activists, advocates, and academics to develop strategies that speak to both state
and interpersonal violence (2008).
In sum, many scholars within and outside the discipline of sociology argue that, racism,
homophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, colonialism, and ableism are intersecting oppres-
sions that significantly complicate how women experience intimate partner violence and
the strategies they use to create lives free from violence. The activism of and intersection-
al scholarship focusing upon women at the margins of the antiviolence movement contin-
ues to challenge mainstream definitions, strategies, and rhetoric. Through these processes,
images of victims of gender violence become significantly more diverse and analyses of
their experience simultaneously broader and more focused.

Concluding considerations
As we have documented scholarly, and activist understandings of violence against
women have seen enormous shifts across the last four decades, yet continue to resonate
and reverberate in an uneasy cultural terrain. Beginning in the 1970s, many feminist
sociologists worked to explain gender violence as a function of patriarchal social struc-
tures, and as a means of the social control of women and children. Activists and scholars
alike contested dominant cultural beliefs that women were partly or wholly responsible
for the intimate violence they experienced. Radically different from patriarchal explana-
tions at the time, antiviolence advocates posited that women were never to blame for
the violence they experienced. From such explanations, typifications emerged which
inadvertently threatened to strip women victims of agency, a problem quickly recognized
by the same activists and scholars constructing gender violence victimization. We believe
that and have tried to show how these concerns lead logically to the illumination of fur-
ther deviations; scholarship contending that the narratives emerging from the antivio-
lence movement fail to adequately represent the messy, complex and diverse experiences
of everyday victims and victimization. Finally, we addressed the growing number of
scholars and activists who have demanded that discussions of gender violence include
multiple dimensions of inequality and their intersections. This trend may be influenced
in part by our growing sociological interests in intersectionality in general, but at the
same time, begins with and springs from the groundwork laid by earlier discourses of
victimization. Our hope is that scholarship on gender violence continues this trending
towards ever more nuanced and complex conceptualizations of violence and victims, that
explores further the myriad expressions of resistance and strategic compliance in which
victims and survivors engage, and that attends to the subtleties as well as the extremes of
victimization, the ambiguities as well as the obvious, and oppressions above and beyond
gender inequality.

Short Biographies
S.J. Creek’s research focuses on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and religion in
social movements. Recently, her co-authored paper on race, religiosity and attitudes
about same-sex marriage was published in Social Science Quarterly. She is a doctoral
candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is currently working on her

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320 Gender and Violence

dissertation – a consideration of the lived experiences of participants in the ex-gay

movement in the United States.
Jennifer L. Dunn’s research has examined the social construction of victims in multiple
realms; she has published work on stalking victims’ identity work and experience of being
victim-witnesses in the criminal justice system, emerging vocabularies of motive in the
battered women’s movement, and the emotional and political resonance of social move-
ments’ framing of victims. Her work appears in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography,
Social Problems, Symbolic Interaction, Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Focus, and Violence Against
Women. Her book, Courting Disaster: Intimate Stalking, Culture, and Criminal Justice, won
the Charles Horton Cooley Award of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction,
and she recently was awarded an Early Career Scholarship Award from the Midwest
Sociological Society. She earned her BA in Sociology at Sonoma State University and
her MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Davis. Her most
recent book, Judging Victims Why We Stigmatize Survivors, and How They Reclaim Respect,
examines victim narratives in survivors’ movements in contemporary United States.

Note
* Correspondence address: S.J. Creek, Department of Sociology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Faner
Hall Mailcode 4524, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA. E-mail: creek.s.j@gmail.com

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