Examining the functions of women's violence: Accommodation, resistance, and enforcement of gender inequality.

The present study contributes to the literature on the consequences of social inequality through a qualitative examination of the social functions and meanings of violence in the lives of 20 marginalized women. All of the women in the sample were at some point court involved and were victims, as well as perpetrators, of violence. Findings indicate a need to expand the extant theory to address enforcement (i.e., strengthening) of status level, social inequities (e.g., gendered power disparities), adding to the accommodation/resistance paradigm. Consistent with scholarship conceptualizing violence as contextual and gender as a socio-structural variable, results support the need to better understand the ways in which contexts of gendered inequality - and inequality in general - may promote processes through which survivors of violence accommodate, resist, and enforce oppression. Implications for research and practice related to social inequality are discussed.

The dissociative bond.

Dissociation leaves a psychic void and a lingering sense of psychic absence. How do 2 people bond while they are both suffering from dissociation? The author explores the notion of a dissociative bond that occurs in the aftermath of trauma--a bond that holds at its core an understanding and shared detachment from the self. Such a bond is confined to unspoken terms that are established in the relational unconscious. The author proposes understanding the dissociative bond as a transitional space that may not lead to full integration of dissociated knowledge yet offers some healing. This is exemplified by R. Prince's (2009) clinical case study. A relational perspective is adopted, focusing on the intersubjective aspects of a dyadic relationship. In the dissociative bond, recognition of the need to experience mutual dissociation can accommodate a psychic state that yearns for relationship when the psyche cannot fully confront past wounds. Such a bond speaks to the need to reestablish a sense of human relatedness and connection when both parties in the relationship suffer from disconnection. This bond is bound to a silence that becomes both a means of protection against the horror of traumatic memory and a way to convey unspoken gestures toward the other.