Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on fieldwork with frontline workers in domestic violence centers in northern India to explore diverse language ideologies about how speech addresses violence, arguing that language ideologies are central to how people re-imagine the risks and potentials of relations violence's wake.

Paper long abstract:

Women’s movements around the world rely on both spatial and semiotic tools to imagine more just futures. Programs addressing gender violence, for example, have long focused on reconceptualizing the divisions between public and private—for example, liberating women from harmful private relationships. While such rhetoric relies upon spatial metaphors, these movements are also semiotic, relying on shared understandings of linguistic activity, or language ideologies. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with frontline workers in anti-domestic violence centers in northern India to explore how diverse language ideologies about how speech addresses violence complicate such spatializing metaphors. Such centers operated in a network shaped by powerful global framings of domestic violence that drew on ideologies of intervention that centered labeling “violence” in the past as a core interactive goal. As a result, when their interactive strategies did not explicitly label violence, frontline workers were treated as if they had failed to grasp the referential meaning and political importance of “violence” as a category. Such criticism was often spatial, accusing workers of sending vulnerable women “back” to the home. Yet workers’ interactive strategies relied on the ability of speech to call forth, rather than label, more caring relations in the future. With these strategies, they taught clients to transform families and communities. These findings suggest that language ideologies—and the complex connections they draw between relatedness, agency, and temporality—are at the core of the contested terms through which people re-imagine the risks and potentials of relations in the face of intimate violence.