Things seemed to fall apart when he was in the room: Survivors' representations of violence, agency, power, and resistance in their online posts

In this research, I examined the ways in which survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) negotiated, in their online narratives, multiple IPV and gendered discourses to represent the context of men’s violence and to construct their subjectivities. I analyzed 26 online forum posts using Coates, Todd, and Wade’s (2003) interactional and discursive view of violence and resistance and Baxter’s (2003, 2008) feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis. The integrated findings demonstrated that the survivors drew from multiple competing discourses in their constructions of men’s violence and in constituting themselves as women, partners, mothers, and survivors. The results of analysis also identified how dominant IPV and gendered discourses worked intertextually to position survivors in shifting relations of power, to constrain their agency, and to delimit their strategies of resistance. However, the survivors also resisted IPV in meaningful ways. The limitations and the implications of these findings for research and counselling are discussed.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science (MSc)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education Graduate Program – Educational Psychology

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Werklund School of Education

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Loewen, Shannon G.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cairns, Sharon L.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Mudry, Tanya E.
• Radtke, H. Lorraine

• intimate partner violence
• discourse
• online forum
• power
• agency
• resistance
• feminist poststructuralism
• interactional and discursive view of violence and resistance

Statement dc:rights

• University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/36375

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/110187