Conclusion

Abstract

By bringing together chapters from a variety of disciplines, this collection has questioned traditional constructions of interpersonal violence and shown how they have worked to limit understandings of how violence is enacted, experienced and represented. The disruption of the binary categories through which violence is conventionally conceptualised is a key feature of many of the chapters. The first of these binaries is that of a male aggressor enacting violence against a female victim. While the authors emphasise the significance of long-standing feminist insistence on the shocking prevalence of male violence against women, they also highlight the many sites where this does not apply and where violence is consequently overlooked and misunderstood. Several chapters undermine the familiar assumptions of violence as perpetrated by men and of women as incapable of physical violence. From a basis in historical studies, Pattinson demonstrates clearly that women are capable of killing, and in some cases are very willing to do so. However, in her discussion of Pearl Cornioley (née Witherington), who in spite of being a Resistance leader did not wish to kill, we can see gender norms being defended at the same time as they are disturbed. Violence, therefore, is never outside of gender, even when (or perhaps, especially when) gender norms are disrupted. This is equally true in Barnes’ chapter on female-on-female intimate partner abuse, where gendered norms were seen to affect to whom the categories of victim and perpetrator were likely to be attributed.