Research and Insights into Male Dominance and Female Resistance

Abstract (About this book)
This book aims at shifting the emphasis from a general vision of gender-based violence to a more opaque, yet equally destructive one, that related to “proximity violence”. The investigative tension of this book aims at bringing to light the crevasses where violence lurks ready to return in disguise as well as the lairs where it hides. Like a whirlwind, violence appears in all its destructive might and disappears. Precisely because violence is of a proxemic kind it is hard to position with respect to those who wish to objectify it. Its screens are many and the causes that feed it are endowed with a good dose of relational and lexical ambiguity. Because it is profoundly unjust, unfair, wrong, and at the same time intimate and socio-emotional, it is often justifiable and justified by the victims themselves.

The author underlines as proximity violence provides and includes a fiduciary kind of “proximity”, of “dependent intimacy”, where the trust that the victim places in the other (her tormentor) favours the exercise of violence itself, allowing it to take place, thus making it practically imperceptible when not actually normal, in extreme cases.

In turn, this confidence is comparable to “a veil of Maja” which, in conditions of vulnerability typical of victims, attenuates the consequences of the violence undergone or the omens of what becomes violent action.

The conceptual triad – proximity violence, vulnerability, resistance-resilience – is explored in this volume in the five main chapters and in the details aimed at identifying, in the final chapter, the mutual interconnections.