A recent New York Times article reported the story of Nadia Saavedra, whose husband, Alejandro Uribe, abused her for many years. On her 34th birthday, he killed her and himself in front of their two children (Mueller et. el., “A Familiar Pattern in a Spouse’s Final Act,” April 9, 2016). The article hints that a communication breakdown explains Saavedra’s death: The police were not aware of the abuse, and friends and neighbors were puzzled that she did not leave him sooner. Yet Uribe was often unemployed and drank heavily; Saavedra’s neighbors, relatives, and a local nonprofit knew that Uribe regularly beat and humiliated her; and a few months prior to her death she filed a temporary order of protection against him. In light of this story (and so many similar ones), Kathleen Arnold’s Why Don’t You Just Talk to Him? is a timely book that considers how women like Saavedra can be targets of a broad range of controlling and abusive tactics yet not find help, short of fleeing.
To address this problem, Arnold considers the relationship among Enlightenment thought, capitalism, and liberal notions of contract, rationality, mutuality, egalitarianism, and violence. Drawing from a wide range of political theory and research about domestic abuse, Arnold demonstrates how the law, service provision, and social science research has conceived domestic abuse as a private matter that occurs “outside” of normal daily life and Enlightenment values of rationality and mutuality. This conception has promoted therapy, communication, and family reunification as solutions, which places the onus on victims to “say something” and deflects attention from the abuser and abuse prevention. In response, Arnold proposes a realist understanding of domestic abuse as a regular feature of the American political-economic tradition; as such, it is a public and political issue. Countering “gender symmetrical” understandings that assume men and women to be similarly violent and politically and economically equal, Arnold argues that domestic abuse is profoundly gender asymmetrical—it is a form of “intimate terrorism” (p. 6), where women are targets of an all-encompassing range of practices and behaviors that occur within broader structures of subordination. While this has been the standard view in feminist theory and practice for decades, some men’s rights activists and psychological research have challenged gender-asymmetrical accounts of domestic abuse.
To illustrate, Chapter 1 demonstrates how domestic abuse has been depoliticized and individualized in research and policy. Drawing largely from feminist legal theory and social science research, the chapter links domestic abuse to broader dynamics of economic, political, and social inequality, and it presents Arnold’s “realist” understanding of the issue. Chapter 2 then considers the broader context of domestic abuse and the limits of liberal rights, family law, welfare policy, and the shelter system. Drawing largely on Anna Marie Smith’s work, the chapter indicates how conservative, individualistic values have fostered research and policy that increase abusers’ power, promote communicative solutions to abuse, and ignore women’s structural subordination.
Chapter 3 then draws on Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, among others, to examine two asylum cases where the U.S. government recognized the women as part of a social group whose domestic abuse was a function of state inaction and patriarchal cultural norms in their home countries. Although these cases falsely positioned the United States as a “haven” for domestic violence victims, they indicate how domestic abuse may be understood as a political and asymmetrical issue. Chapter 4 then uses Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon to link violence to Enlightenment reason, and it draws on Sigmund Freud’s notion of a “death drive” to characterize abusers as “monsters.” Using contract theory, the chapter problematizes the notion that intimate relations are rational and domestic abuse is merely anomalous. The Conclusion argues for a realist and intersectional approach to domestic abuse that mitigates race, class, and gender biases and encourages targets to articulate their experiences and needs.
In light of cases like Saavedra’s, Arnold’s book provides a timely examination of domestic abuse: This is not a private, random phenomenon, but a regular part of life for many women in a supposedly liberal, enlightened society. Yet this point (and others) was often hard to follow for two key reasons. First, Arnold presumes that readers are quite familiar with the extent of domestic abuse and the related laws and policies in the United States. She refers often to the “network of providers,” for example, but explanations of such terms are only sporadically offered in the text or buried in the (extensive) endnotes. A more explicit overview of the extent of domestic abuse and its related policy and service systems would help readers better understand the author’s arguments about the limits of symmetrical understandings of and approaches to domestic abuse. Second, and relatedly, Arnold’s theorizing was sometimes difficult to grasp. For example, she does not explicitly define “Enlightenment,” a central concept, until Chapter 4. And while she marshaled an impressive array of theorists from Niccolo Machiavelli to Catharine MacKinnon for her analysis, their purpose was not always clear. For example, Chapter 3 features a dense discussion of Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Foucault, and Fanon on statelessness, speech, violence, and colonialism, but this was only briefly connected to her arguments about domestic abuse at the end.
Even with these limitations, this book helps us understand why “spectacular” domestic abuse cases like Saavedra’s receive news coverage, while more routine experiences of stalking and harassment are largely ignored. Therefore, to draw attention to the ongoing, systemic nature of abuse, Arnold, like others (e.g., see Rhonda Hammer, Antifeminism and Family Terrorism, 2002), suggests characterizing domestic abuse as terrorism and victims as targets. Yet these can be totalizing terms that raise questions of agency and strategy. Reading domestic abuse as terrorism can cast it as an individually perpetrated problem, and describing victims as targets portrays them as somewhat fixed and always under attack. All of this risks minimizing the structural reasons why women remain in abusive relationships and their possibilities for agency. Furthermore, how do we address domestic abuse as terrorism? Given the ongoing failure of the “War on Terror,” and the overwhelming tendency to adopt carceral solutions to social problems in the United States, is it realistic to imagine a war against domestic-abuse-as-terror that addresses the conditions of structural vulnerability? Arnold’s asylum cases indicate that this is possible, and even if we have our doubts, we must applaud her call for radical, preventative solutions to a problem that is clearly without end.
Beyond the issue of domestic abuse, Why Don’t You Just Talk to Him? also challenges the assumption that scholars must be Enlightenment figures who are necessarily (objectively) detached from research. At the end of the book, Arnold writes that she was and continues to be a target of domestic abuse. To argue that this experience “biases” her arguments only reinforces the bind for so many targets of abuse: They are expected to communicate about their experience, but when they do, this is often dismissed for its particularity. Arnold challenges this bind, showing that domestic abuse is a public and political problem for both college professors (like her) and housekeepers (like Saavedra), and arguments to the contrary allow it to persist and undermine women’s full democratic citizenship. In developing this account, Arnold has performed an important service.
