The Personal Is Political-and Economic: Rethinking Domestic Violence

I. Introduction All social movements that engage matters of law and intimate relationships confront the challenge of sustaining theoretical coherence. Time passes; circumstances change. Theory developed in the context of one set of objective conditions, at a discrete historical moment, must possess the capacity to adapt to different conditions at later historical moments. This is particularly true when theory serves to inform praxis and when theoretical formulations serve to inform the strategies that affect the lives of real people. The domestic violence movement is no exception. Feminist scholarship originally presented a clear and compelling discourse about the causes and consequences of domestic violence. The emphasis was on the privilege with which patriarchy was institutionalized in public realms as a matter of practice and law. Women activists responded to an emerging understanding about domestic violence and engaged in a protracted struggle to obtain public condemnation of what had been previously considered a private matter. Public attitudes did indeed change, and advocates were increasingly successful in securing legal remedies to domestic violence. The goals of domestic violence activists were explicit: to conceptualize domestic violence as an offense against women, to oblige law enforcement to treat violence against women as a legal issue - specifically as a crime - and to charge batterers with crimes commensurate with the severity of the harm inflicted on their victims.1 The passage of time and the introduction of legal strategies have raised new questions. Academics and activists alike appear to have reached the limits of theoretical possibilities within existing paradigms. Intervention strategies once deemed as vital to prevention efforts have revealed themselves wanting, both in their capacity to inform - and to be informed by - new theoretical advances in related fields, and equally important, in their capacity to provide structural relief to victims of domestic violence.2 These new concerns have emerged to challenge a discourse focused principally on the criminalization of domestic violence. Changing circumstances have revealed that the causes of domestic violence are more complicated than can be explained by patriarchy alone. To fully explain domestic violence, it is necessary to examine the private in the context of the public and the social and moral in the context of the political and economic. Structural economic dislocation, outsourcing, and plant closings (and in their wake chronic under- and unemployment, declining wages, diminishing benefits, and disappearing pensions), all hallmark features of globalization, have wrought havoc on communities across the United States. It is no longer sufficient to speak of private life (the household) as separate from public spaces (the workplace). Nor is it enough to speak of patriarchy as separate from the material conditions of daily life. The concept that domestic violence is more complex than patriarchy is to suggest the need to reexamine the dominant theoretical model concerning domestic violence and the practical strategies that it inspired. The consequences of relying on the criminal justice system, both intended and unintended, are concerns that have increasingly engaged the minds of many legal scholars.3 While the critique is ongoing and yet unresolved, the issues of the debate have been confined largely to the very concerns that the discourse seeks to challenge: the benefits of the criminal justice system and the degree to which it ought to be the principal response to domestic violence. For that reason, as this Article will argue, the debate has been limited by the very assumptions that define its scope. This Article seeks to expand the scope of the domestic violence discourse beyond the parameters of criminal justice to include the political economy of everyday experiences of households. Such a paradigm shift examines the conditions of the private sphere as a function of the circumstances of public realms. …