The dissertation concerns young men’s violence against women partners. It is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with nine men who have been violent against women partners in their youth, and an additional interview with the mother of one of the young men. The method is informed by Hollway and Jefferson’s psychosocial methodology and Hydén’s teller-focused interview approach. The interviewees’ stories of violence are analysed combining psychoanalytic theories of intersubjectivity with an attention to discourses. The aim of the dissertation is to explore men’s experiences of being violent against women partners in youth and to investigate the gendered intersubjective dynamics of young men’s violence against women partners. Jessica Benjamin’s theories on gender and recognition are central to the analyses, and other feminist, psychoanalytic and psychosocial theories are used in the dissertation’s analysis of the men’s stories of violence. 

The study highlights the role of early relationships, gendered identifications, recognition, and discourses of masculinity and sexuality in using and desisting from violence. Men’s identifications and disidentifications with violent father figures are particularly significant, as are relationships with male peers in youth and the men’s (denied) vulnerabilities. The temporality and liminality of youth are also explored, as the first romantic relationship poses particular challenges to young men who have been exposed to violence and abuse from a young age, or who lack parental support. The time of youth figures as a porous boundary of old and new dependencies, hierarchies and relationship patterns. It is shown how the men’s definitions of violence are also shifting, and the particular nexus of love and aggression within relationships is thus highlighted. Violent situations are demonstrated to denote a breakdown in mutual recognition, which, using Benjamin’s notions, takes the form of oneness – denying difference and alterity – or twoness – over-emphasizing difference and complementarity. In line with Donald Winnicott, these processes of non-recognition involve failed destruction and survival – the inability on the part of the men to tolerate their partners’ acts of negation without retaliating. Desisting from violence consequently involves striving towards an ideal of thirdness or reciprocal recognition.

Another central finding is the prevailing experiences of exerting sexual coercion in youth. In situations of pressurized sex, the men fail to recognize the sexual subjectivity of the woman other. The change in the interviewee’s experiences troubles a linear temporality, and by using the psychoanalytic notion of afterwardsness – it is shown how the men become retroactive perpetrators, which reorganizes their embodied and affective memories and subjectivities. By stressing the nonlinear qualities of temporality and memories, this dissertation destabilizes the idea of childhood and youth, pointing to the unfinished and (re-)constructed nature of these life phases, while simultaneously arguing for their vital importance and ‘real’ influence in the lives of subjects. This is thus a contribution to youth studies as well as an argument for broadening the conception of the youth subject.

This chapter discusses different historical and contemporary approaches to men, masculinity and intimate partner violence. We present radical feminism and its analysis of men’s violence as an effect of patriarchal society, as well as a contribution to its upholding. We then discuss socialist feminist contributions to understanding masculinity and violence where the emphasis instead lies on diversity, historical change and situated action. Next, we turn to ‘accounts research’, which deconstructs how men talk about, explain and justify their violence, and to psychosocial criminology, which instead stresses the psychological history of the perpetrator, albeit within the context of structural inequality. We also consider what we call social network approaches, particularly male peer support theory, which foregrounds the role of the relational setting as a mediator between social structure and individual action. Finally, we discuss intersectional perspectives, which foreground the interconnectedness of different forms of social inequality, such as gender, sexuality, race and class. We conclude by suggesting the need for more dialogue between on the one hand research on gender and violence and on the other contemporary developments within interdisciplinary feminist theory.

Queer criminology has primarily focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people as victims and perpetrators of crime, as well as on the criminalization of non-heterosexual practices. In this article, we contribute to the emerging discussions on how queer theory can be used in relation to criminological research by exploring desistance processes from a queer temporality perspective. Desistance research emphasizes how and why individuals cease offending and is often guided by a teleology in which individuals are expected to mature and develop new, non-criminal identities. Work on queer temporality, in contrast, has developed thinking that destabilizes chronology and troubles normative life trajectories. In this article, we draw on queer temporality perspectives, particularly the concepts of chrononormativity and afterwardsness, in analysing narratives of young men who have used sexual violence against women partners in Sweden. We demonstrate how criminal identities may develop in retrospect, after desisting, and that identity and behaviour may not necessarily go together.