Domestic Violence and Girlhood: The Making and Breaking of a Disordered Subjectivity

Abstract

This article examines the resistive actions and discourses that shape and reshape the hegemonic and resistant interplay between female youth with histories of domestic violence (HDVs) and educators. Taken out of a larger critical ethnographic study, discussion demonstrates how one urban middle school girl with an HDV is positioned as an object of “emotional and behavioral disorder” and how she responded to violating pedagogies through performances of cultural resistance built out of her social experience of domestic violence. The article draws upon theoretical and methodological insights, including Butler’s notion of performativity, Scott’s theory of resistance, Hill-Collins’s standpoint theory, as well as Scollon and Scollon’s mediated discourse analysis. Similar to the girls in this study, sharing an identity of being a survivor of domestic violence herself, the author discusses how she and female participants (re)worked and (re)wrote agentic social moments in the field. Telling girls’ stories through counter-narratives and participatory research practices helps to reposition the often deficit subjectivities ascribed to girls with HDV.