Masculinity and Spousal Violence: Discursive Accounts of Husbands Who Abuse Their Wives in Ghana

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of cultural notions of masculinity and its enactments on husband-to wife abuse in Ghana from a discursive psychological perspec tive. Two focus group discussions and four in-depth personal interviews were conducted with 16 perpetrators (husbands) from rural and urban Ghana. Participants’ discursive accounts revealed that social anxieties of husbands, their fear of being perceived by others as weak or emasculated, and their disap pointment with unfulfilled notions of masculine sovereignty influence conjugal violence. Perpetrators constructed a wife’s expression of dissent to her husband’s wishes and commands as an encroachment on masculine spaces, a gender-norm vio lation, or as providing a public challenge to male identity and thus violence could be used as an obligatory passage to man hood. Perpetrators also mobilized shifting and ambivalent dis courses that draw upon culturally familiar notions of maleness to both resist and authorize a patriarchal privilege in marriage.