The power of a look: Tracing webs of power in intimate partner violence through an everyday act

Abstract

The relationship between power, control, and violence defines the experience of intimate partner violence, abuse that occurs within the context of a current or former intimate relationship. Coercive control, including using violence and threats of violence to restrict another’s freedom, is an especially dangerous manifestation of intimate partner violence. In this article, we point to an under-explored modality of power and control as well as resistance to intimate partner violence: the act of looking. Our analysis of interviews with 18 intimate partner violence survivors in the United States identified ‘looking’ as an emergent category in their experiences. We read these mentions of ‘looking’ through select insights from symbolic interactionism, post-structuralism, and postcolonial studies. We argue that acts of looking are everyday mechanisms for both the contestation and the maintenance of power and control in survivors’ lives, highlighting dynamics of intimate partner violence that extend beyond physical violence. Paying attention to everyday forms of interaction like looking helps illuminate the webs of power in which survivors’ intimate relationships are situated, including at the social and institutional levels. Tracing the ‘looks’ of survivors also underscores both the social nature of abusive intimate power and the social embeddedness of survivor healing.