449.1
Material Spatiality As Condition of Female Violence. Qualitative Analysis Regarding Biographies of Young Female Offenders
Gender and violence tend to be negotiated in a restricting and stereotyping way. Not only a dichotomous construction of gender, but also the gender related generalization and homogenization of violent experiences – „women“ as victims, „men“ as perpetrators – reveals a normative reference to reality. Both deny as well the actually and constantly appearing polymorphy of gender identities in everyday life as individual life courses and experiences of violence.
In this context I will investigate the conditions of female actors in violent action, to understand how and why teenaged “girls” or “women“ act violently: What does self-exercised violence mean for them? How do they arrange it in their own biographical context? The main focus is set on material spacial conditions of female violence: To what extent do spacial structures and realities in houses, appartments, residential communities or in public transport etc. have an impact on individual or collective, verbal or physical violence? How does space possibly promote violence against the own child, a flatmate or against an assaulted man etc.? And how is spacial structure woven into the individual treatment of self-exercised violence by the authors?
These questions I will follow by showing selected empirical material about violent teen „girls“ and „women“, that was collected by students of Social Work within a teaching research project from october 2014 till july 2015. At sequences from narrative interviews, which were analyzed by Grounded Theory, I will show spacial living environments as intervening parts of female life courses and violence.