Porque te quiero te aporreo: los refranes como estrategia discursive para la legitimacion del maltrato conyugal: “I beat you because I love you”: Sayings as a discursive strategy for the legitimation of domestic abuse

This article examines sayings as a strategyin a corpus about wife abuse from the perspective of critical discourse studies. It analyses the functions of the sayings and their messages as parts of a dominant ideology they communicate about wife abuse. Several of these stand out: schemata which disguise control enacted through beating as a fundamental part of loving relationships, stereotypes of perverse women who choose to be hit for reasons of pleasure, the recommendation to leave abused women to their partners’ violence; and an insistent criticism of women who have violent partners. As a conclusion, the present study briefly considers how these sayings could function in a violent intimate partner relationship. Examining sayings in this data set elucidates part of a conservative cultural ideology about violence against women, an ideology which could be said to come from medieval times, and today is transmitted in sayings which bring up shared mental models about violence against women.