The battering state: Towards a political economy of domestic violence

A political economy of domestic violence situates domestic violence within cultural-historical context to reveal the intersection between domestic violence and (1) the organization of the polity, (2) the arrangement of the economy, and (3) the dominant familial ideology expressed normatively through state policies. The combination of these components makes visible the articulation between domestic violence and an often invisible set of conditions in US society–structural inequality as shaped by ‘family values’ and the logic of state-economy relations. The analysis of the political economy of battering as it intersects with poverty and globalization highlights the contours of “the battering state.”.