Indexicality and ideology in narratives about intimate partner violence
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Jennifer Andrus
Jennifer Andrus is an Associate professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. She teaches courses on rhetorical theory, discourse analysis, legal rhetoric, and gender & rhetoric. Her research for the last decade has been on domestic violence and law and law enforcement. She has written numerous articles and has published two books
, Entextualizing domestic violence: Language ideology and violence against women in the Anglo-American hearsay principle (2015, Oxford University Press) andNarratives of domestic violence: Policing, identity, and indexicality (2020, Cambridge University Press). 
Abstract
Theories of indexicality explain the ways in which linguistic forms are linked to social forms. As such, indexicality deals in part with ideology and cultural discourses. This article demonstrates the ways in which intimate partner violence (IPV), seen as an indexical, discursive formation, facilitates the material and social manifestations and ramifications of IPV. I argue for an expansion of the concept “indexical field” to account not only for phonemic variables, but also lexicosemantic variables. Such lexicosemantic variables are legible in narratives, in particular stories, that are circulated in and around IPV discourse. The indexical field forms a web of potential meanings for IPV. In the indexical field, variables have multiple potential and sometimes conflicting meanings, which can be and indeed are activated and made meaningful differently by different groups of speakers. My data are made up of 57 interviews, 34 with victims/survivors of IPV and 23 with police officers. The differences in indexical meaning surrounding IPV are analyzed from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. In this article, I show how victims/survivors of IPV animate variables in the IPV indexical field with meanings that conflict with the meanings attributed to the same words, phrases, and events by police officers. Because police officers have more institutional power, their indexical meanings often receive preference and coordinate with those of the society at large.
About the author
Jennifer Andrus is an Associate professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. She teaches courses on rhetorical theory, discourse analysis, legal rhetoric, and gender & rhetoric. Her research for the last decade has been on domestic violence and law and law enforcement. She has written numerous articles and has published two books, Entextualizing domestic violence: Language ideology and violence against women in the Anglo-American hearsay principle (2015, Oxford University Press) and Narratives of domestic violence: Policing, identity, and indexicality (2020, Cambridge University Press).
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Chris Weigel who read and gave useful comments on many versions of this paper. I owe a debt of gratitude to Nicole Clawson who read, gave feedback, and helped with the formatting. Thanks, too, to the Department of Writing and Rhetoric who provided time off to pursue research full time. I am grateful to the editor of this journal, Srikant Sarangi, and three anonymous reviewers whose ideas and critiques have certainly improved this article. I am also hugely grateful to the victims/survivors and the police officers who generously contributed their stories to this research. I would not have been able to complete this research without their stories, help, and interest. As always, of course, any remaining error in this paper is mine alone.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Indexicality and ideology in narratives about intimate partner violence
- With or without a purpose? Judges’ appraisal of offenders or their behaviour in six sentencing remarks
- Text as tautology: an exploration in inference, transitivity, and logical compression
- The effects of manipulative rhetoric in Kevin Spacey’s “Let Me Be Frank” YouTube video
- Conversation analysis and Wittgenstein
- Fighting terrorism, fighting the West: Them versus Us appraisal in Chinese media’s discursive war on terror
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Indexicality and ideology in narratives about intimate partner violence
- With or without a purpose? Judges’ appraisal of offenders or their behaviour in six sentencing remarks
- Text as tautology: an exploration in inference, transitivity, and logical compression
- The effects of manipulative rhetoric in Kevin Spacey’s “Let Me Be Frank” YouTube video
- Conversation analysis and Wittgenstein
- Fighting terrorism, fighting the West: Them versus Us appraisal in Chinese media’s discursive war on terror
