ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on recent sociological analyses of gender, power and interpersonal relationships which challenge the immutable association between masculinity and violence. Socio-biology provides one of the most pervasive, popular and enduring discourses on the relationship between gender and all forms of violence. Contemporary socio-biological research on violence largely examines the influence of hormones and genes. Psychological theories tend to focus on a priori factors considered to correlate with, or predict, heterosexual interpersonal violence. The most significant problem with psychological theories of interpersonal violence is that, like biological theories, there is a necessary reliance on the invocation of gender difference. Arguably the most significant influence on sociological theories of heterosexual interpersonal violence is feminist theory. Connell's multiple gender theory invokes a particular notion of identity, as composed of a number of 'parts', often termed 'subject positions'. Early feminist theories of interpersonal violence relied on the dominant conceptualization of power formulated in the 1960s and 1970s.
