Defying (Dis)Empowerment in a Battered Women's Shelter: Moral Rhetorics, Intersectionality, and Processes of Control and Resistance

Power has been fruitfully conceptualized as a relationship between two or more actors or groups (Janeway 1980; Likes 2005). Much of this work has treated power relations in generic terms (e.g., Foucault 1978; Scott 1990), paying little attention to how actors' positions in structures of inequality shape the interactional resources available to them as they devise strategies of control and resistance in interaction with one another. Here, I argue that we can better understand processes of control and resistance by examining how actors leverage their positions in structures of inequality and employ strategies likely to most deeply resonate with their (raced, classed, and gendered) target audiences. I explore these issues by analyzing how power struggles unfolded at a battered women's shelter. Using ethnographic data gathered over a ten-month period, I show how staff developed a gendered structure of control designed to obliquely manage shelter residents, while residents developed strategies of resistance that drew on resources available to them as poor and working-class women, and were directly responsive to the particular actors and structures of control they encountered in this context. The locally valued moral rhetoric of women's "empowerment" functioned as a key resource in this struggle. I aim here to broaden current discussions of control and resistance by highlighting the locally dependent, audience-specific, and profoundly intersectional nature of these interactions.