Abstract
Intimate partner violence is more than a social problem; it is a strategy of power built into contemporary social structures through historical processes of oppression and domination. This dissertation compares two distinct, but related, fields of action against intimate partner violence to analyze how historical processes and social relations produce variances in field dynamics. It focuses on the cases of the intimate partner violence fields in Boston, United States and Buenos Aires, Argentina between 2015-2020. These cases of the intimate partner violence movement in the United States and Argentina are exemplary ones of how a field of action can evolve to include complex and contingent relationships with a variety of social institutions. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the temporality of these fields of action, introducing the concept of temporal regimes and extending the concept of slow violence in its examination of Boston’s and Buenos Aires’s field of action. In Buenos Aires and Boston, the central organizations Ni Una Menos and Jane Doe Inc. distribute their discursive and material resources according to distinct patterns of temporal orientations. In Boston, the dominant regime is one of prevention; while in Buenos Aires, Ni Una Menos has successfully oriented the field towards a regime of recuperation. In each of these fields, their distinct logics constrain and enable actors in their definitions of gender, violence, and action throughout their encounters with the problem of intimate partner violence. Despite variances between the fields, there are also similarities in the challenges faced by these actors in their work due to the complex temporality of intimate partner violence itself. By extending and complicating the framework of slow violence to these cases, this dissertation analyzes how service providers in both sites navigate these challenges in their definition of the problem, the scope of their work, and the range of their solutions.