Unexpected Subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. A study of institutional devices, it focuses on women’s practices of resistance and the elicitation of intelligible subjectivities. Using Italy as an illustrative case, Alessandra Gribaldo explores the problematic encounter between the need to speak, the entanglement of violence and intimacy, and the way the law approaches domestic violence. On this basis she advances theoretical reflections on questions of evidence, persuasion, and testimony, and their implications for ethnographic theory. Gribaldo analyzes dynamics that create the victim-subject, shedding light on how the Italian legal system reproduces broader conditions of violence against women. This book will be of great interest to all social scientists concerned with gender and the law. 

"With her book, Gribaldo makes her mark in advocating for women to be heard and for institutions and the public to listen closely. It asks us to rethink the expectations of the socio-legal system and to incorporate the unexpected in the narrative reconstruction of cases of intimate partner violence. Above all, she provides a much-needed challenge to the standard for intelligible subjectivities and shows how the process of elicitation in the way law enforcement, social services, as well as courts handle cases of intimate partner violence, distorts realities and produces contradictory subjectivities which harm the solidity of the case." - Anthropos

"This book is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. Using Italy as an illustrative case, Gribaldo focuses on women’s practices of resistance and the elicitation of intelligible subjectivities, and explores the problematic encounter between the need to speak, the entanglement of violence and intimacy, and the way the law approaches domestic violence. She analyzes dynamics that create the victim-subject, shedding light on how the Italian legal system reproduces broader conditions of violence against women." - Law & Social Inquiry

"In Unexpected Subjects: Intimate Partner Violence, Testimony, and the Law (2021), Alessandra Gribaldo interrogates the intersections between intimacy, dependency, and ambivalence with legal regimes of proof and evidence in domestic violence cases." - PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review