Sheltering Women Negotiating Gender and Violence in Northern Italy [Hardcover]

Residents of Parma, Italy pride themselves on their sophistication and connection to European modernity. But despite a reputation for civility, intimate partner violence continues to take place, largely hidden from public view. Offering a detailed ethnography of two women's sheltersone leftist, the other Catholicthis book provides the political, cultural, and legal contexts of competing explanations for intimate partner violence.

Some contend that violence against women reflects the cultural and historical gender inequalities embedded in Italian society, including old-fashioned or traditional understandings of masculinity. Others argue that it stems from confusion and ambivalence over new or modern forms of gender relations. While the first explanation places the blame on tradition and the second cites the transition to modernity, both emphasize societal understandings of gender and point to collective, rather than individual, responsibility. Through an intimate portrayal of everyday life,Sheltering Womenreveals how violence against women can be studied as one part of a continuum of locally relevant understandings of gender relations and gender change.

An ethnographic study of women's shelters in Parma, Italy, this book examines how local residents understand, explain, and negotiate gender relations and intimate partner violence. As a reader it is interesting to see how resistance to change and gender role transformation that couples experience on a daily basis can be negotiated in different ways by key informants. For people who want to have a broader understanding of intimate partner violence and how it is interwoven in Italian society, this is an interesting book that almost reads like a novel... [As] an anthropologist, the author is leading the way in conducting research in this particular domain. Sheltering Womenis an ethnographic study of grassroots efforts to counter heterosexual intimate-partner violence in a northernlӢ