She has published work on the public communication of domestic violence, soap opera, and advertising representations of women. Her research interests include modes of audience reception of television and film, discursive negotiations around femininity, motherhood, and the family, and assisted reproductive technologies. C. Kay Weaver is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management Communication and director of the Bachelor of Communication Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her publications include (with Philip Schlesinger, R. Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash) Women Viewing Violence (British Film Institute, 1992) and (with Cynthia Carter) Violence and the Media (Open University Press, 2003). Her current research projects include two New Zealand Foundation of Research, Science and Technology funded investigations, 'The socio-economic impacts of information communication technologies' and 'The socio-economic impacts of biotechnologies'. Abstract This paper examines three television documentaries--entitled Not Just a Domestic (1994), Not Just a Domestic: The Update (1994), and Picking Up the Pieces (1996)--that together formed part of the New Zealand police 'Family Violence' media campaign. Through a Foucauldian, feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, the paper examines how these texts assert and privilege particular understandings of domestic violence, its causes, effects and possible solutions. The analysis illustrates the way in which five discursive explanations of domestic violence--those of medical pathology, romantic expressive tension, liberal humanist instrumentalism, tabula rasa learning and socio-systematic discourse--are articulated and hierarchically organised within these documentaries, and considers the potential hegemonic effects of each text's discursive negotiations. It is argued that the centrality of personal 'case studies' and the testimonies of both battered women and formerly violent men work to privilege individualistic rather than sociopolitical explanations of domestic violence. Additionally, the inclusion of extensive 'survivor speech' means that women are frequently asked to explain and rationalize their actions as 'victims' of domestic violence, while fewer demands are placed on male perpetrators to account for their violent behaviour. Consequently, the documentaries leave the issue of male abuse of power largely unchallenged, and in this way ultimately affirm patriarchal hegemonic interests.
