Bodily autonomy, corporeal security and the threat of nonlethal firearm abuse

Abstract

Firearm violence in the United States is an epidemic with lethal implications for heterosexual women in abusive relationships. While mass shootings in the US receive public attention, rarely is the relationship between mass shootings and domestic violence a focus of media coverage. Yet homicide is not the only consequence of firearm violence for women in abusive relationships. Domestic violence abusers with access to firearms also commonly engage in nonlethal forms of firearm abuse. This paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship on firearm abuse by analyzing survivors' accounts of nonlethal firearm abuse in Domestic Violence Protection Order documents as a form of spatial control. Specifically, this paper details three tactics of nonlethal firearm abuse – direct firearm abuse, threats of firearm abuse and brandishing firearms – to illustrate how nonlethal firearm abuse is a form of everyday terrorism that extends abusers spatial control and threatens survivors' bodily autonomy and corporeal security. This paper's focus on survivors' experiences of fear in response to nonlethal firearm abuse illustrates the significance of emotion as a tactic of entrapment, reinforcing that survivors' feelings of fear in response to nonlethal firearm abuse is not spatially bound to the home or the actively abusive relationship.