Law, Social Movements, and the Political Economy of Domestic Violence

This article uses the occasion of the 2013 Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to review the circumstances by which legal theory and social movement discourse have circumscribed the scope of VAWA and the dominant approach to domestic violence. This article seeks to explore the relationship between domestic violence advocacy and feminist theory, which has functioned as “the ideological reflection of one’s own place in society” with insufficient attention to superstructures. Additionally, it argues for a reexamination of the current domestic violence/criminal justice paradigm and calls for the consideration of economic uncertainty and inequality as a context for gender-based violence. As an epistemology, domestic violence scholarship has fallen behind other fields of study due to its failure to address the structural context of gender-based violence. This article proposes a redefinition of the parameters of domestic violence law and presents new (and provocative) ways to think about lawrelated interventions to ameliorate gender violence.