NCJ Number
171740
Journal
Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology Volume: 25 Issue: 2 Dated: November 1997 Pages: 199-209
Date Published
1997
Length
11 pages
Annotation
This critical review of the emerging postmodern-feminist literature on wife abuse focuses on the impact of postmodern ideas on strategies for addressing this problem.
Abstract
The traditionalist feminist perspective is woman-centered and is concerned with the power relations between men and women. A traditionalist view of wife abuse focuses on the modernist concern with the sociohistorical context of the family, particularly the issue of gender and power. Postmodernists, especially the more skeptical or nihilistic ones, believe that traditional feminists replace one set of repressive ideas with another when they posit that historically situated, patriarchal social relations are the cause of women's oppression, or of social problems such as wife abuse. This argument, say the postmodernists, replaces the hegemony of patriarchy with the hegemony of the feminist. The review of the literature yielded four observations that are germane to the postmodern-feminist approach to wife abuse. First, the deconstruction of wife abuse in clinical therapy is sometimes done in a way that places women at great risk. Second, the failure to focus on the abuse of the woman in therapy obfuscates the male-female power dimension in the couple's relationship, and when applied in joint therapy can be dangerous to the woman. Third, new histories of wife abuse are not always relevant to the problems abused wives face today; and fourth, a potential new political agenda for abused women appears at a level of abstraction too high to attract the critical mass needed to initiate local ameliorations. 57 references