Introduction

As tales of deliverance from bondage, women's stories of taking flight from domestic violence have formed a genre of mythic proportions. They are mythic in the sense that they have acquired social symbolic loadings that transcend the historical and factual specificity of the dramas. What's Love Got to Do with It?, the film based on Tina Turner's autobiography, I, Tina (1986) is such a drama in that it narrates the dangers and traps set for women as they traverse the distance from nobody to somebody. The film chronicles the formative events that shaped the life of Tina Turner – whose powerful voice evokes the rough sexuality she knew all too intimately in her violent marriage to Ike Turner. While Ike Turner is cast as a degenerate, progressively lost to sex, drugs, and prone to melancholic brooding and violent outbursts, Tina Turner, offstage, is portrayed as saintly – as perpetually good, lacking in vices, and without a trace of egoism, despite her skyrocketing success and entry into the high life. We never see her with a drink or cigarette in her hand, nor is this cinematic portrait of her marred by any unsettling suggestion of female conflict between success and maternal obligation. When she gives birth to a son, it is Ike, rapaciously driven by money and the pursuit of stardom, who extracts the newborn from Tina's arms. As Ike forces her back onto the stage, Tina wails out her postpartum blues in a state of anguish, projecting a bold sexuality that co-mingles with erotic surrender.

Many women in the audience may identify with this successful black woman who "sings like a man" – belting out songs aggressively, her movements conveying a bold, defiant sexuality – because her private persona conforms to middle class standards of womanhood. In the film, Tina Turner is cast as virtuous wife – chaste, loyal, and having the sole tragic flaw of suffering from too much virtue. Knowing what it is like to lose someone she loves, having lost her own mother in childhood, she refuses to leave Ike, even as he beats her with increasing frequency and ferocity. At the film's denouement, Tina finds the strength to leave, with the help of a woman friend and her newfound conversion to Buddhism.

The film foregrounds, rightfully, how a woman's successes can be terrifying to a man, and how violence can be a means of bringing her down. Yet the narrative structure of this melodrama sends a reassuring message to white audiences. The pernicious threat to the black woman's survival emanates entirely from her black husband. In this gripping tale of emancipation from abuse, there are no exploitive white people. Whites are cast as respectful, helpful, and generous toward blacks, often aiding Tina in her struggle to escape her demonic husband. Ike emerges as the singular source of evil, the place where the badness in Tina's life (and a sexist society) may be safely located and contained.

At the first of a series of training sessions I attended at a local shelter for battered women as part of a larger study of domestic violence programs, we were encouraged to see What's Love Got to Do with It? More than other popularized films on domestic violence, our trainer suggested, this film captures the issues women confront in battering situations. An issue often neglected in the domestic violence field, however, concerns the social structuring of women's stories (see Haaken, 2002a, 2002b; Haaken and Yragui, 2003). The film about Tina Turner's harrowing and heroic struggle with domestic violence inadvertently dramatizes key dilemmas that organizers face, as do women leaving abusive relationships: the female protagonist must meet an extreme standard of virtue in order to be cast as a legitimate victim, and her story must conform to the standard plot line that I described above – a plot line that has gained currency in the domestic violence field, as well as within popular culture (Haaken, 1998; Lamb, 1999).

Advocates I have interviewed in the course of my research on domestic violence generally begin by emphasizing how psychologists blame the victim by promoting couples counseling that puts women at greater risk and redeems men by focusing on childhood trauma rather than on male power and control motives (see Mankowski et al., 2002; Haaken et al., 2007). Psychoanalytic psychology is viewed as particularly problematic, advocates insist, because the focus on unconscious motivation bypasses the political source of the problem. Further, introducing the concept of the unconscious, with its tricky reversals, seems to redeem men and villainize women. In response, I generally ask why we have not been able to go beyond these crude versions of psychology and psychoanalysis. With the enormous influx of women into the field and the feminist reworking of major areas of psychoanalytic theory, do we need to remain so fearful of acknowledging the personal side of domestic violence?

This paper takes up a series of questions concerning the narrating of domestic abuse, seeking a rapprochement between psychoanalytic cultural theory and domestic violence politics. I make use of a line of psychoanalytic theory pursued by Frances Restuccia (2000a), in Melancholics in Love: Representing Women's Depression and Domestic Abuse, as my point of departure. Working against (and with) the ideas set forth by Restuccia, I introduce alternative pathways for navigating between psychoanalytic cultural theory and a feminist politics of battering. My analysis centers on the narrative strategies deployed in the domestic violence movement, starting with the work of Lenore Walker (1979, 1984), who has been the most visible and leading professional in the field. Her work spans several decades of feminist research and registers key historical shifts in the field. An analysis of the narrative strategies deployed in the Duluth "power and control" model follows. My interest is in explicating how this model gained such wide currency, particularly in the movement to jettison psychology from accounts of domestic abuse. In bringing psychology back into analyses of stories about battering, I draw on the texts cited during the course of carrying out research on domestic violence in an indigenous community, with my reading informed by psychoanalytic cultural and social theory.

What's psychology got to do with it?

In her exploration of textual representations of domestic violence, Frances Restuccia (2000a) also makes use of Tina Turner's autobiography as prototype of a woman caught in a vicious cycle of abuse. Framing Turner's story as the struggle of a gifted woman to free herself from the maniacal control of her husband, Restuccia introduces a third protagonist – the absent mother imago that casts a longer shadow over the thwarted subjectivity of this tragic heroine than does her abusive husband. Following on the work of Jessica Benjamin (1988), who similarly invites reflection on mother/daughter dynamics in systems of gender domination, Restuccia goes beyond literary texts and moves into the rough terrain of domestic violence politics.

My interests in Restuccia's text on melancholia and domestic abuse are twofold. First, her analysis registers a broader set of dilemmas that arise in bringing the psychology/subjectivity of abused women to the foreground of feminist analysis. Particularly problematic, as Restuccia herself concedes, is her focus on the mother/daughter relationship as the core unconscious dynamic that traps women in cycles of abuse. While she does not turn a blind eye to patriarchy, Restuccia foregrounds the imprint of the "dead mother" on the psyche of the battered woman – an encrypted image that overshadows the imprint of the husband's fist. Although she attempts to keep patriarchy in focus, Restuccia places the malignant melancholia of the mother at the center of the drama.

Nonetheless, in her effort to work between literary representations of abuse and the lived experiences of battered women, Restuccia (2000a, 2000b) takes us part way through difficult terrain. As a cultural theorist engaged in deconstructing representations of female victimization in literary, cinematic, and popular texts, Restuccia attempts to loosen the chains of signifiers that shackle feminist analyses while not losing sight of the concrete realities of the signified.

Through close readings of women's novels, Restuccia identifies a long tradition of literary works where domestic abuse figures prominently as the master plot, and where a depressive daughter succumbs to an abusive husband to free herself from a pathogenic mother. Some readings of mother/daughter entrapments lend themselves to critical feminist interpretations, however. Commenting on Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, for example, Restuccia offers that "Atwood gives the mother-daughter sadomasochistic cathexis a cultural footing: Joan cannot commit 'matricide,' since in a sense culture has beat her to it" (p 48).

Restuccia points out how anxieties and defenses pervade some of the writings of female literary critics who take up these same motifs. Julia Kristeva (1989), whose Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia situates feminine masochism in a pernicious mother/daughter dynamic, serves as her critical text for working through these reactions, some of which are in opposition to feminist readings that focus exclusively on patriarchy. In concurring with elements of Kristeva's analysis, Restuccia aligns herself with the feminine project of emancipation from maternal control. Referencing Kristeva, Restuccia suggests that "it makes sense that conquering the all-consuming, death-bearing mother would entail a blow of some sort" (p 41). Yet Restuccia cautions against the prescriptive theory of Kristeva, with her focus on emancipatory matricide in the realm of the symbolic, and introduces a more feminist-psychoanalytic interpretation: Through writing, the less than perfect mother, no matter how cruel, may be duplicated without the reinflection of abuse. In addition, the sources of the mothers' own despair and/or anger may be taken into account, so that she may be therefore held onto, instead of abjected...(p 55)

Following in the steps of Jessica Benjamin (1988), who similarly enlists classic novels by women to construct a psychoanalytic cultural theory of female subjugation, Restuccia implicates the melancholic woman in her own state of bondage. Anger and rage toward men are muted motifs, however, read primarily as displaced expressions of the matricidal impulses the daughter cannot bear to confront in herself. Yet in invoking the absent, cruel, or emotionally dead mother so compulsively, Restuccia overlooks the role of archaic fantasies in literary critical texts, including in those focused on representations of the mother.

Because images of woman battering are so fraught with painful histories of misrecognition, where psychologists and academics have colluded in turning away from the corporeal reality of abuse, the question of how we regain the right to speak requires some understanding of the rocky history of psychology and politics in the campaign against wife abuse. In my own feminist research and writing, I typically begin with a summation of dilemmas as they have emerged in the context of feminist practices – and acknowledgement of the reality-basis of advocates' resistance to psychological theorizing. I also work with texts – novels, films, music, and popular literature – that are cited by activists as important to their political work. These works are often the royal road to the social unconscious of the anti-violence movement because they represent motifs otherwise closed off in daily practice. While the stories of women battering distributed in the domestic violence field tend to conform to a stereotypical good victim/bad perpetrator plotline, the literary works cited in various training workshops invite possibilities for theorizing that the demands of political work too readily foreclose.

Psychoanalysis, in part, offers a theory of storytelling (Obeyesekere, 1990). The politics of storytelling includes attentiveness to what Amy Shuman (1986) terms "storytelling rights" – contestations over how stories should be told and who (or which group) has the right to tell them. From a psychoanalytic perspective, stories about others are, in part, stories about the self – with other protagonists in the drama sometimes registering unconscious or split-off aspects of the inner world. The victim's story about an abuser may be both an account of an objective event and a means of representing disturbing currents within the self. Images of beastly villains or scenes of violence may register split-off aspects of the self (or the group), just as they may represent actual external events.

A key argument that guides my analyses of feminist campaigns, such as the campaign against wife abuse, centers on the idea that reliance on stock scripts – for example, the standard melodrama of a virtuous female protagonist and a one-dimensional male villain – strips women of complex subjectivity. In enlisting schema for recollecting the past, many feminists have cautioned against this romanticizing of women, including over-emphasis on an inherent female "goodness" (Haaken, 1998; Minsky, 1998; Westkott, 1998). Breaking out of domesticated scripts means claiming a broader range of idealized female images than those culturally authorized for women. Social change, on personal and collective levels, requires the capacity to produce stories that explore moral dilemmas associated with fighting back. If women are cast as good by nature, if all acts of female resistance are portrayed as just and noble, the drama collapses into a morality play.

Cultural theory, politics and woman battering

Feminist cultural theory encompasses analyses of literary texts, films, and other social discourses, and centers primarily on deconstructing and analyzing processes of representation, with psychoanalytic contributions focused on the constitution of subjectivity. Psychoanalytic social theory also theorizes subjectivity, but situates subjectivity within the framework of historical and social forces. For critical social theorists there is a dynamic interplay between psyche and society (see Rose, 1986; Alford, 1989; Bhabha, 1994).

Whether through cultural or social theory, psychoanalysis introduces a wider set of mediating determinants between the object and its representation, between the signifier and the signified, than other theoretical perspectives within psychology. There is a close affinity between psychoanalysis and radical politics in their joint concern with subtexts and knowledge at the margins of what is most readily noticed. Any radical project of social change requires means of re-interpreting the world and of generating working understandings of anxieties and defenses associated with social change. Radicals, like good therapists, must be able to locate sites of conflict, consider the timing and framing of interpretations, and convey a sense of hope and possibility for change.

A key area of tension between cultural and social theorists centers on the nature of the political "cure." Restuccia seeks recuperation for the melancholic female subject in the realm of aesthetics. Absent from Restuccia's diagnosis of the melancholic woman, as well as from her prescriptive moves, are references to sisterhood and social movements. Although she acknowledges that most women do not become novelists and that representational processes take many forms, Restuccia remains steadfastly committed to the writing cure.

In establishing political alliances with feminism, Restuccia takes up the question of her own storytelling rights. In cultural studies, this question has been framed as a problematic of untangling violence and representation. On one side of the debate, there is the position that all forms of representation deploy violence. On the other side are those who weigh the ethical issues through a ledger of storytelling rights, a stance of less interest to cultural theorists. This latter position, a form of feminist realism, celebrates the claiming of voice on the part of victims or oppressed groups.

Working within the discourses of cultural studies, Restuccia takes issue with the position that the writer does violence to the excluded other (the subject that is not a subject) by entering the realm of the symbolic on behalf of that other. There is some merit to the argument advanced by Armstrong and Tennenhouse (1989), Restuccia concedes, that all discursive projects, whether in post-colonial, feminist, or critical studies, register forms of power. Restuccia rejects the conflation of discursive power and domination, insisting on a critical difference between forms of power "congruent with the dominant ideology" and "power on the side of the powerless...literature that fights back/talks back/spectacularly gazes back" (p 106). Such self-righteous totalizing claims are potentially paralyzing, Restuccia suggests, and offer little in the way of working through the political implications of various forms of discursive power.

In settling the case so decisively, however, Restuccia forecloses on dilemmas that arise in translating and circulating stories. Although she concurs with the feminist project of "disrupting the phallocentric gaze" (see Mulvey, 1988), Restuccia shifts from melancholia to mania in her belief in the power of images produced by women. In moving from the 19th century novels of Jane Austen to contemporary texts, including I, Tina and the 1994 documentary, Defending Our Lives, Restuccia celebrates the emergence of a broader range of literary and cinematic portrayals of abused women. Yet the stories recounted in Melancholics in Love focus too narrowly on the solitary victim, unable to break free of a pathogenic mother, and they are ultimately stereotypical. Passing over the history of sisterhood, that Third Term that has been so vital in women's emancipation from domestic confinement, Restuccia overlooks the broad and complex cast of characters on the internal stage, as well as the historical staging of various versions of familial abuse. Restuccia also overlooks the variable audience responses to stories of domestic bondage and how images of visceral violence acquire social symbolic loadings¹. Since domestic abuse thrives in the realm of the "asymbolic," muzzled by the dead mother within the melancholic female subject, Restuccia suggests that: It therefore seems crucial to keep up the current surge of representations of woman abuse – the more spectacular the better? – in an effort to capture the hold of spectacular violence against women in pain, to keep the public eye riveted on manifestations of such pain...(p 83)

In interrupting the voyeuristic pleasures attached to this riveting gaze, Restuccia seeks a cure in female authorship – in the process of producing stories written by and for women. Yet in overlooking the rich variability in women's stories of abuse and the differing positions of violence in the lives and narratives of women, Restuccia ultimately retreats from the critical edge of her political project. For the palliative introduced throughout Melancholics in Love, which suggests new denouements in overcoming fatal attractions, remains all too solitary. And the project of mourning the dead mother, as the unconscious subtext that requires a feminist psychoanalytic interpretation, remains unreflective about the irrational side of the daughter's hatred of the mother. For as often as daughters depressively internalize the malignant sorrows of their mothers, so too, do prototypical daughters displace struggles for paternal recognition onto the more accessible mother figures in their individual and collective pasts.

Feminist psychology: the legacy of Lenore Walker

Much as in psychotherapy, analysis of resistances in social movements must precede analysis of anxieties and defenses. In the field of domestic violence, reactions to psychological theorizing have been shaped by the pioneering work of Lenore Walker. Lenore Walker was no ordinary psychologist, however, for her work was admittedly political from the start. Psychology was introduced pragmatically in advancing the larger project of the emancipation of women from the patriarchal family. Leading theorists and practitioners in the domestic violence field had jettisoned her pioneering work on the battered woman syndrome by the early 1990s, primarily because Walker leaned too heavily on medical discourse in making visible domestic abuse and in legitimizing feminist demands on the state (Allard, 1991). For psychologists and feminist psychoanalytic cultural theorists, the work of Lenore Walker, carefully calibrating the competing terms of feminist analysis and dominant cultural discourses, serves as a cautionary tale.

In The Battered Woman, published in 1979, Lenore Walker estimated that 50% of women in the United States were battered by their male partners some time in their lives. Much like other estimates of tabooed private behavior not readily open to public scrutiny or verification, this number has been challenged. But the precise number is less relevant here than are the discursive strategies of this fledgling movement. Walker could claim that 50% of women had been battered in part because of the definition she used to derive such a number, a definition that she has retained over the course of her work: "A battered woman is a woman who is repeatedly subjected to any forceful physical or psychological behavior by a man in order to coerce her to do something he wants her to do without any concern for her rights" (p xv).

Any movement struggling for legitimacy faces the challenge of moving from the margins to the center, of shifting the political ground from a minority to a majority concern. Walker's estimate suggested that a near majority of women are victims of male violence, ritually conducted behind closed doors. Much like changing definitions of sexual abuse, Walker's construction of the battered woman syndrome enlarged the category beyond its narrow historical borders to encompass a much broader range of "normative" male behavior than did earlier definitions of wife beating (see Johnson, 1995). Her definition included psychological coercion and lack of concern for the woman's welfare, experiences with which vast numbers of women could identify. In practice, however, the battered woman syndrome came to denote a more sustained pattern of physical assaults upon a woman. But the broadness of the definition created an implicit sense of sisterhood, a realization that overtly battered women suffered from a sickness generated by patriarchy, a sickness from which all women suffered to various degrees.

The introduction to The Battered Woman (1979) asserts that women stay in abusive relationships, not because they are masochistic, but "because of complex psychological and sociological reasons" (p ix). Walker closes the distance between the battered woman as the Other and the rest of us by painting the portrait of her along the outlines of the Good Wife. The picture that emerges is not one of an inadequate woman whose poor coping skills and low self-esteem make her the inevitable door mat of her husband but, rather, of a woman actively engaged in realizing her ambition of creating a harmonious family. The battered woman is a "traditionalist about the home, (who) strongly believes in family unity and the prescribed feminine sex-role stereotype" (p 31). The women she describes, based on her study of over a hundred battered women, did not for the most part grow up in abusive families, but rather were adored and infantilized by their fathers. They were less apt to be abused than they were over-protected and treated as porcelain dolls.

In Walker's theorizing, the battered woman syndrome, like many other medical conditions, develops in close quarters. The syndrome, then, is closely associated with the source of its incubation – the cycle of violence. In the cycle of abuse, the phases include the tension building phase, the explosive or acute battering incident, and the contrition or "honeymoon" phase, where the man attempts to make reparation with his wounded wife. This emphasis on predictable antecedents and consequent events further anchors domestic assaults on women in scientific discourse by drawing on the medical model. Just as chicken pox follows in invariable sequence of stages, while varying in intensity and manifest symptomatology, the battering syndrome follows a similar trajectory.

The Duluth power and control model

Walker's cycle of violence theory implied a neurotic folie à deux, with an injured masculinity operating in tandem with an insecure femininity. Patriarchy gave men the power advantage in that they came to feel entitled to act out their anger and distress in destructive assaults on women. But these same men guiltily sought reparation. While the man's conciliatory behavior meant that he had "paid" for his transgressions and therefore was free to initiate the cycle anew, it also suggested a capacity for guilt and remorse.

By the early 1990s, a psychopathic prototype of the batterer had displaced the "neurotic" model. The "power/control cycle" – developed by Ellen Pence and Michael Paymar (1993) of Duluth, Minnesota – had supplanted Walker's "cycle of violence" model in many training settings. The power/control "wheel," central to what is described as the Duluth model, graphically represents what are conceived to be a series of strategic choices men make, all of which have as their aim the maintenance of absolute domination over a woman. These choices include using coercion and threats, intimidation, emotional abuse, male privilege, economic power, minimizing, denying and blaming, as well as overt violence. As one trainer put it, "I used to tell women that men were genuinely sorry during this brief honeymoon phase in the cycle of violence. I don't talk about a honeymoon phase anymore. I simply tell them that it is a different strategy of control."

Also striking in the adoption of the power/control model is the jettisoning of any interactive dimensions to the cycle of violence. In her early work, Walker stressed the ways in which women's efforts to appease their husbands could inadvertently worsen the abusive cycle. The problem with this and other interactive models, however, is that it implicates women in the abusive behavior of men. As Kersti Yllö and Michele Bograd (1988) argue in their critique of Walker, "concentrating on the female victim and positing that she learns to be helpless and thus contributes to the perpetuation of the violence directed at her is similar in its implications to the old psychiatric notions of masochism and victim-blaming" (p 64).

While this shift in focus from a two-person interaction (the couple) to a one-person dynamic (the batterer) represents a collective refusal to bear the sins of men, it also collapses many dimensions of women's relational lives. This is particularly problematic given the widening of domestic violence to include emotional abuse, "spiritual abuse," and other oppressive behavior. Further, the model is highly individualistic and voluntaristic in its exclusive emphasis on conscious choice. While women's own actions, including abuse of children, are understood to be contingent and determined by social forces beyond their control, male actions are conceived as autonomous and non-contingent in nature. Women have no freedom; men have absolute freedom. Paradoxically, this model shores up the very conception of the self that feminism has sought to critique: the cultural fantasy of the autonomous male.

The adoption of the power/control model in the domestic violence field may signify a collective anxiety that any "opening" in the cycle model for representing the humanity of men inevitably signals lost ground for women. The model implicitly cautions against what women all too often experience in abusive relationships: that the emotional injuries and vulnerabilities of men take center stage in the drama, and that women are inevitably enlisted in their reparation at great personal cost. While the prototypical battered woman is presumably relieved of the burden of thinking about why she stayed, she may not have the freedom to explore the various junctures in her life when there were some degrees of freedom for her.

Feminist perspectives on battering

Feminists have criticized psychologists historically for their tendency to de-contextualize abuse and their narrow attentiveness to individual attributes at the expense of a broader political analysis. In this section, I take up differing feminist politics that have shaped understandings of woman battering, seeking to understand their various investments in the framing of the issues. In working through a political framework, we may be better able to hold the wider social context in mind as we return to the problem of literary representations of woman battering.

Radical feminism has been the anima behind domestic violence work, although liberal and socialist feminists also have been active in the movement². While socialist feminists emphasize cross-cultural variability in women's oppression and the historically shifting nature of gender inequality, radical feminists tend to stress universals (see Donovan, 1996; Hartsock, 1997). They argue that male violence is rooted in the patriarchal system of domination, a system that is the basis of economies and cultures throughout much if not most of human history. Whether feudalist, capitalist, or socialist, societies throughout history have sanctioned male violence as a means of maintaining a patriarchal social order. Men benefit materially and psychologically from the subordination of women. Further, the threat of violence keeps women from actively resisting.

Liberal feminists believe that progress is achieved through incremental reforms in the existing political and economic system. Implicit in this strategy of social change is the assumption that male violence is not a structural problem and, further, that it may be alleviated through various corrective measures. These measures include legal protections for victims, but extend as well to ideas about prevention: raising boys to be more sensitive, nurturing, and non-violent, and raising girls to be more assertive.

Both radical feminism and liberal feminism have their insights, and each may crystallize some of the underlying dynamics operating in women's experiences with abusive men. Further, these frameworks often overlap and merge, with feminists finding common ground on many issues. Nonetheless, radical feminists have had a particular interest in organizing around issues such as domestic violence, incest, rape, and prostitution because they sensitize us to the sheer pervasiveness of patriarchal violence. These issues awaken us to the horrifying totality of it all, and arouse a sense of the unifying strength of our oppositional voices. If the enemy is united, then we, too, must be united in our refusal to tolerate threats to women's lives.

Feminist politics converge on some points but differ in their views of the "depth" of the problem of male violence, its primary causes, and strategies for eliminating it. Radical feminists "maximize" whereas liberal feminists "minimize" the problem of male violence. Socialist feminists would agree that there is a palpable reality that is being figured through the lens of radical feminism, while arguing that other dimensions of women's (and men's) experience are left out. And they share with radical feminism the view that male supremacy is a structural problem requiring a transformation of society and its institutions. Violence against women is a worldwide problem that occurs in a broad range of societies – and it requires the mass mobilization of women worldwide in resisting it.

For socialist feminists, social class shapes alliances among people, including those within the family, as much as gender. Domestic violence must be understood within the wider context of social and economic forces impinging upon families and communities. Further, in advanced capitalist societies, power does not rely primarily on the exercise of direct violence. As a means of social control, violence is ill-suited to a system based on creating highly motivated workers and on extracting maximum value from human productive activity. At the same time, physical violence through police powers, as well as economic violence in the form of inadequate food, housing, healthcare, or employment, are endemic in many communities.

When we tell the story of male violence through the lens of a socialist-feminist analysis, with social class as the lens on injustice, we are able to see areas of alliance between men and women in coping with social forces that determine their common fate. Both men and women experience the harshness of life and pathologies born of alienation and despair. If the battered wife suffers from what Lenore Walker (1984) terms "learned helplessness," so too does her batterer. This helplessness results from blunted opportunities and bitter disappointments. Whereas affluent men are more consistently reinforced in their sense of entitlement to power over others, working class men are more apt to experience the unstable, shifting dimensions of manhood. For the affluent, the home is a place of calm refuge from competitive striving; for the oppressed, home is where spirits are revived, and often this takes the form of aggressive outbursts. When work involves self-monitoring and submission to hierarchical control, home is the one place where self-control may be more safely suspended (see Stacey, 1990; Barrett and McIntosh, 1991).

Bringing diversity to Duluth

Domestic violence is a recurrent motif in the writings of many women of color, writings that center on the alloy of pain and pleasure, heartbreak, and joy, that binds family members in oppressed communities (see hooks, 1997; Richie, 2000). Set against a landscape of brutal hardship, stories of family violence in oppressed communities often undermine the stability of our moral categories. And as the "power and control" model displaces an earlier focus on cycles of violence and family trauma, women of color are more apt to preserve the idea that abusers are acting out histories not of their own making (McGillivray and Comaskey, 1999; Davis, 2000).

When I interviewed advocates working with the Cangleska domestic violence program at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the women and men with whom I spoke began by telling stories (see Artichoker and Mousseau, 2003; Haaken, in press). Most of the stories centered on Lakota history and literature, but one lively discussion centered on a recent film about domestic violence set in New Zealand – a Maori community with ties to the Lakota people through shared networks of information on family violence. Once Were Warriors, based on the novel by Allan Duff, portrays the combustible mix of ethnic, class, and gender identifications in situations of family violence, and the tortured ties that bind women to the tough men in their lives. There are no domestic violence shelters in this film about a woman who suffers repeated beatings by her hard-living husband, although Maoris have been on the forefront of creating refuges for women. Once Were Warriors calls for a return to native practices in mapping the path of deliverance from the ravaging effects of family violence.

In closing this paper with an analysis of key motifs in Once Were Warriors, I hope to draw out some of the ideas that generated such animated discussion at Pine Ridge, and to extend the reach of psychoanalytic feminist theory beyond the motifs outlined by Restuccia in her literary diagnosis of masochistic melancholy. My aim is to recover more of the complexity of abuse victims, as both objects/victims of violence and active subjects, while also enlisting psychoanalytic theory to bring into focus broader social and historical forces that shape the dilemmas of protagonists. In the field research I have carried out over the past five years, I have found that minority women are particularly effective in holding in mind the complexity of domestic violence as a psychodynamic, social, and political problem. In part this is because minority women are more apt to recognize as fantasy the ideal of the self-sufficient couple, or of the cherished boundary that protects home and hearth from imagined external threats.

Once Were Warriors opens with the skyline of a New Zealand city, with freeways looming over wreckage below. Rusted out shells of cars shelter the homeless, while street rappers and local food vendors suggest a restive human spirit at work. Much of the rough vibrancy of this urban scene is palpably masculine. It is a world where unemployed men idle away time pumping iron and hanging out at the local drinking spot, ironically called the Royal Bar. The men are tough, but no tougher than the world they occupy on the economic margins. The film lingers fondly on the bodies of these descendants of warriors, tracing the outlines of their hard, muscular edges and exquisite tattoo markings. The camera follows these men as they take the party home at the end of the day – men who let women in at closing time and sing to them of enduring devotion.

Juxtaposed to this masculine world of bars and empty parking lots is the more feminine world of the yards surrounding the government projects, a domestic space inhabited by women and children. Clotheslines crisscross the landscape, marking the borders of feminine identity and registering the endless toil and binding ties of women's lives. Yet the women are tough and defiant, easy companions for the rough men. And much like their men, the women insistently hold onto moments of pleasure, sucking deep and hard from life's meager offerings.

Directed and performed by Maoris, Once Were Warriors sets family violence against a backdrop of cultural devastation and frustrated desires. The film tells the story of a Maori couple, Beth and Jake, and their five children. While the ties that bind Beth and Jake grow out of a shared legacy of racism and poverty, this legacy is engraved with the complex markings of class and gender. The labile intensity of their relationship generates heat early on in the film, as Jake initiates sex with Beth on the kitchen table. Beth brushes aside worries about the children playing outside, grabbing him back, although less hungrily. The heat between them suddenly dissipates, as Jake cavalierly announces that he has lost his job. Beth stiffens with worry, and Jake storms out of the house, heading for the Royal Bar. Craving sympathy from his drinking mates, he complains about the ingratitude of women. When his mates ask for more of the story, Jake expresses his outrage. "I just told her I got laid off. You'd think my prick dropped off."

Beth and her daughter, Grace, are the shock absorbers on the domestic front, grounding the episodic storms of Jake's rage. There is an element of masochistic melancholy operating in Beth's submission to the violence of her husband, but the dynamic centers on her guilt over her own act of severing ties with her mother and grandmother. During a fight with her oldest son, Beth slaps the boy across the face. Overcome with guilt and rage, she provokes a fight with Jake, who beats her brutally. This volatile transfer of guilt and rage from one family member to another finds a hot receptor site in Jake, who lacks the moral capacities to defuse such heated confrontations.

As the film progresses, the gender divide widens to reveal a more ancient source of enmity between husband and wife. Moments of tenderness and hungry passion are perpetually overtaken by a deep resentment that wells up in Jake, an insurgent echo of past claims on him, claims that refuse to relinquish their hold. While picnicking on a hillside with three of their children, Jake and Beth reminisce over how they met. The beloved daughter of Maori royalty, Beth had defied her elders in marrying a man far beneath her in social station. As Beth looks back wistfully on her enchanted childhood, Jake overrides her story with his own bitter account of the rejection he suffered at the hands of her kinfolk. "This black ass comes along and steals her away – her royal highness...Do you know where I come from kids? A long line of slaves." This long line extends into the pre-colonial past and into Maori rulers' subjugation of Jake's ancestral tribe. As Jake and Beth recollect widely divergent pictures of the Maori past, the distance between them widens into an unbridgeable gulf. The mood of the day sours, as Jake sabotages the family outing by stopping at the bar for "just one drink."

Defeated once again by her bitter husband, Beth nonetheless recollects sounds and images from the burial grounds of her memory. In her final rebuke of Jake, who failed to protect their daughter, who was raped by one of his mates, Beth delivers a final blow. "You're still a slave, Jake," she flatly states, "to your fist, to the drink, to your self."

The film presents the warrior legacy as a two-edged sword. The destructive side of the legacy breaks out in bar fights and violence against women and children, or finds a precarious hold in the tough gangs of the urban underworld. The protective side of this same legacy finds expression in the disciplined movements of Maori martial arts and the ritual practices adopted by the younger adolescent son. The film moves between scenes of ritualized pain endured by the sons through their initiations into manhood and the humiliating blows suffered by their proud mother, foregrounding the differing fates they face in their capacities to endure pain. At the end of the film Beth triumphs over her brutal husband, returning to her ancestral community to bury her dead daughter and leaving Jake howling helplessly at the Royal Bar.

Once Were Warriors dramatizes a key conflict discussed by indigenous women in framing their own melancholic states. Warrior traditions anoint men with power to establish violent control over women, but they discipline men as well. In Once Were Warriors, the authority of clan and community ultimately trump gender. Jake lacks moral authority when he spits back at his wife, "You are all living in the past, you royal highnesses." In siding with the woman who returns as prodigal daughter, the film rejects the legacy of violence. But this same denouement represses the destructive aspects of traditional legacies. Indeed, the proud royal clan that serves as the site of the daughter's return was also implicated in the brutality of their bastard son.

Conclusions

To remain a vital force for social change, movements must be able to generate complex accounts of their collective histories and move beyond stereotypical melodramas, with their typologies of all-good victims and all-bad perpetrators. Women are no longer entirely outside the kingdom, no longer completely voiceless, and our history grants us a wide vista on the past. Yet many of the vital insights and theorizing in the early period of the battered women's movement have been forgotten, "repressed" in our collective memory.

So how useful are psychoanalytic literary interpretations for grassroots feminism? Much like psychotherapy, where the "correctness" of the interpretation is not established in some abstract, formal relationship between the patient's dynamics and the interpretive formulation, the ability of a group to critically reflect upon its own processes depends on the nature of relational alliances. There are two primary axes of relationship circulating in my account: there is the relationship between cultural theory and feminist politics, and there is the relationship between feminist theorists, whether in the field of academia or grassroots feminism, and stories about and for abused women. In working with the first axis of conflict, it is important to acknowledge histories of conflict between academic and activist feminists as well as points of alliance. Psychoanalytically, we might recognize the moments of matricidal and matriphobic anxiety described by Restuccia, and uncertainties over how to navigate beyond the worlds of our collective and individual mothers. In considering the second axis of conflict, the relationship between theorists (both in academia and on the frontlines of the women's movement) and abused women, unsettling questions remain concerning the limited range of narrative strategies available for structuring their accounts. It is important to reflect on the potential, too readily dismissed by Restuccia, for symbolic violence in representing the experiences of an Other, the one who is too traumatized or marginalized to speak on her own behalf. Both academic and political contexts of interpretation introduce dilemmas over how feminists structure the stories of other women, and over the transferences (or counter-transferences) introduced, including unsettling motifs that may be omitted from prototypical tales of female captivity to domestic bondage (Haaken, 1999).

For those working on the frontlines of the movement, however, the costs of free associations in the realm of storytelling are felt most acutely. The "wounded masculinity" problem – implicit in Walker's cycle of violence theory – has been difficult to theorize within the domestic violence literature because it seems to forecast a feminine response, oriented to resuscitation of various forms of injured manhood. Women are cast as perpetual dispensers of maternal aid, nurses on the battlefields of men and on the home front. In order to escape from this rigidly stereotypical drama, feminists have insisted that men suffer various feigned injuries in order to enlist women in the revitalizing of manhood whenever it is in a state of crisis.

Narratives serve multiple purposes in the domestic violence field: helping the survivor to give meaning and coherence to her experience; intervening with batterers; helping crisis workers give meaning and coherence to their own experience; and political organizing. It is important to consider these differing functions of trauma narratives in the women's movement – as well as in the broader culture – and to consider the transformations involved as they cross the borders from one context to another. While it may be the simplest and most graphic story of violence – with clear prototypes of good and evil – that has the greatest political currency in mobilizing against the oppression of women, these righteous feminine narratives may not take us very far in the long run. Gender oppression is one form of dehumanization and blunting of human potential. But we must work the boundaries between gender violence and other dimensions of women's lives if we are to broaden the cultural space for women's stories beyond its current, stiflingly narrow terrain.

Psychoanalytic-feminist cultural theory takes us some distance in widening the terrain, even as it risks leaving too much of the politics of violence behind. Yet although women have not fully established their place in the realm of the symbolic or achieved full parity with men in the realm of the "real," we do have sufficient history to critically reflect upon from a position of collective strength. This capacity for self-reflection – and creative storytelling – is vital to feminism if it is to thrive and transform the world.

Notes

¹ For a discussion of the movement in cultural studies toward reader response and the multiple, contrary, and shifting meanings of texts, see Janice Radway (1991), Reading the Romance and Judith Mayne (1993), Cinema and Spectatorship.

² Socialist feminists were vital to early theorizing in the battered women's movement. See, for example, the work of Pleck (1987), Schecter (1983), and Gordon (1988). By the late 1980s, however, radical and liberal feminist politics dominated discourses on domestic violence. For analysis of the history of differing feminist perspectives and discussion of their political implications, see J. Donovan (1996) and Hagemann-White (1998).

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About the author

Janice Haaken is Professor of Psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist in private practice, and a documentary filmmaker. She is author of Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back (Rutgers University Press, 1998), and co-author of Speaking Out: Women, War, and the Global Economy (Ooligan Press, 2005), a curriculum book accompanying the documentary video, Diamonds, Guns and Rice. Haaken is co-editor of Memory Matters: Understanding Recollections of Sexual Abuse (Routledge Press, forthcoming).