This article discusses how qualitative research with children exposed to intimate partner violence deals with methodological issues of children’s voices. Violence researchers argue for the need to see children as competent social actors, di erentiate between groups of children, attending to adult– child asymmetry in research and acknowledging children’s individual experiences. However, little is said about how children’s voices are produced in their local, cultural and societal contexts. There is also an ignorance of the politics of representation, which may hamper the development of ethically responsible research on children exposed to intimate partner violence. 

The concept of hegemonic masculinity has been used in gender studies since the early-1980s to explain mens power over women. Stressing the legitimating power of consent (rather than crude physical or political power to ensure submission), it has been used to explain mens health behaviours and the use of violence. Gender activists and others seeking to change mens relations with women have mobilised the concept of hegemonic masculinity in interventions, but the links between gender theory and activism have often not been explored. The translation of hegemonic masculinity into interventions is little examined. We show how, in South Africa and Sweden, the concept has been used to inform theoretically-based gender interventions and to ensure that men are brought into broader social efforts to build gender equity. We discuss the practical translational challenges of using gender theory broadly, and hegemonic masculinity in particular, in a Swedish case study, of the intervention Machofabriken [The Macho Factory], and illustrate how the concept is brought to life in this activist work with men. The concept has considerable practical application in developing a sustainable praxis of theoretically grounded interventions that are more likely to have enduring effect, but evaluating broader societal change in hegemonic masculinity remains an enduring challenge.

In this article, the monstrous “woman batterer” is used as a figuration and made a point of departure in order to destabilise masculine ontology. The monster is here seen as a deviant figure that gives meaning to the normal, but also as a figure that blurs the borders between the strange/unfamiliar and the known/familiar due to its contingent ontological position. This argument is developed by analysing two sources of material: a newspaper column by a conservative male author, which shows how partner-violent men are understood as monstrous woman batterers, who are seen as the Other of “normal”, gender-equal Swedish men; and qualitative interviews with 44 partner-violent men, demonstrating how they distance themselves from the “woman batterer” figure and instead understand the woman batterer as a deviant and monstrous masculinity they do not want to be associated with. The fact that “normal” men cannot completely disassociate from the monster makes it threatening – it endangers the ontological coherence of masculinity. Paradoxically, the woman batterer therefore enables a “monstrous future” – it opens up for a volatile and vulnerable masculine becoming.