This article examines the construction of gender within men's accounts of domestic violence. Analyses of in-depth interviews conducted with 33 domestically violent heterosexual men indicate that these batterers used diverse strategies to present themselves as nonviolent, capable, and rational men. Respondents performed gender by contrasting effectual male violence with ineffectual female violence, by claiming that female partners were responsible for the violence in their relationships and by constructing men as victims of a biased criminal justice system. This study suggests that (...) violence against female partners is a means by which batterers reproduce a binary framework of gender. (shrink)

This article analyzes data available in published studies of rapists’ self-reports and argues that according to their own accounts, many men developed inaccurate impressions of women’s desires through a confident form of role-taking. While rapists’ inaccuracies have been previously described as instances of “miscommunication”or lapsed role-taking, they do not always indicate lack of emotional or intellectual depth to role-taking. The article adds to the profeminist, symbolic interactionist literature on role-taking by arguingthat relations of disavowedmale-male desire andthe exchange of women make (...) the possibility of men’s sensitive knowledge of women’s sexual desires problematic. Some of these forms of knowledge are outlined, and an approach to rape prevention is briefly suggested. (shrink)