Representing Domestic Violence: Ambivalence and Difference in What's Love Got to Do with It

This article investigates the problems of visibility, ambivalence, and difference as they relate to our ways of "seeing" domestic abuse. The focal point of this investigation is the 1993 Brian Gibson film, What's Love Got to Do with It, based on Tina Turner's autobiography. In this essay I "re-view" What's Love in order to consider how the complexities of gender, race, and class construct popular cinematic representations of abusive relationships and how these representations can offer us comfortable positions from which to "see" what we already assume about men as abusers, women as victims, and the racial and class politics of violence.