Telling It Like a Man

Abstract

Despite the increase in recent decades in research on men's violence against women, few studies focus exclusively on men's verbal accounts of this violence. In this article, the author compares men's accounts offered to her as a researcher with those accounts reportedly given to female partners. Although the author expects men to attempt to excuse their violence when accounting to her as a researcher, men make overwhelming use of justifications. Somewhat as expected, they say they apologize to their partners following a violent incident, but surprisingly, they also refuse to account to their partners at times. A deeper look into these contradictory accounts reveals the creative ways men use verbal strategies as redress for various forms of masculinity they feel have been taken from them by their partners and/or agencies of the state and how hegemonic masculinity enables them to use certain accounts in the first place.