Policing Citizenship: The State Response to Intimate Partner Violence in Centre County, Pennsylvania

Open Access
- Author:
- Cuomo, Dana Michelle
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 01, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Lorraine Dowler, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Melissa Wright, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Brian Hastings King, Committee Member
Margaret Ann Lorah, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Intimate partner violence
Policing
Citizenship
Public/Private
Neoliberalism
Security
Fear
United States - Abstract:
- For most of United States history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated in the home. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This dissertation’s inquiry centers on two policing practices that emerged in the 1980s to redress for the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence; preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution. Through a feminist geographic analytic, I examine how these two practices affect intimate partner violence survivors’ holistic security needs and ability to act as autonomous individuals. My research explores the contemporary state response to intimate partner violence by way of an institutional ethnography of the criminal justice system in Centre County, Pennsylvania. Throughout the dissertation, I grapple with a central challenge – in order for women who experience intimate partner violence to claim political subjectivity, the state must criminalize such violence. However, as I illustrate, the state response to intimate partner violence is rooted in patriarchal protection that often reproduces the very same coercive dynamics inherent in abusive relations. Consequently, women who reach out to the state for help often find themselves re-entrenched in familiar positions of coercive control. To address this challenge, I engage with three principal concepts from critical geography; public and private, citizenship and neoliberalism. By analyzing the state response to intimate partner violence through the intersection of these three concepts, I examine intimate partner violence as more than a violent act that happens at the scale of the home and body. Rather, through the triangulation of these three concepts, I examine how the response to intimate partner violence is emblematic of the neoliberal state’s abdication of social citizenship, its reregulation of spaces, subjects and insecurities, and the way patriarchal ideology remains central to the regulatory tools of neoliberal policing.