A dispositive approach: Unveiling structural and symbolic violence against women

Abstract

Violence against women, as a widespread societal phenomenon, consists of different manifestations of historically unequal power relations and is deeply inscribed in social structures. As the transposition of the complexity and of the social roots and contexts of violence against women constitutes a rather ambiguous undertaking, the discussion in this paper aims to approach the disclosure of how women’s anti-violence initiatives shape the social accounts of gender-based violence and underlying ideological concepts enclosed in their material. Which theoretical and methodological approach is capable of unveiling the dimensions of structural and symbolic violence in audiovisual discourse? Based on the concept of apparatus, the Foucauldian dispositif (Deleuze, 1989; Foucault, 1980; Jäger and Maier, 2009), I will show the core considerations towards a suitable setting to identify visualised dispositive power arrangements displayed through the (audio)visual material provided by the women’s anti-violence movement.

KEYWORDS: gender-based violence, discourse, anti-violence communication, gender, dispositive.