Rethinking masculinities: gendered pathways in perpetrator programmes

This article explores Perpetrator Programmes as spaces in whichdiscourses, practices, and specialised knowledge are produced,enabling a critical interrogation of the links between hegemonicmasculinity and VAW. Adopting a sociological and Foucauldianperspective, the analysis investigates how such interventionscontribute to the construction of alternative masculinesubjectivities by challenging internalised gender norms andfostering practices of accountability, reflexivity, and emotionalliteracy. Drawing on the findings of a national mixed-methodsstudy, the article examines how violence is interpreted andaddressed in everyday intervention practices, and how masculinityis diagnosed, problematised, or reaffirmed within these programmes.However, the discourses produced in these contexts must besituated within the institutional frameworks that shape the aimsand orientations of intervention. In a context marked by increasingintegration of PPs into the criminal justice system and the spread ofpsycho-medicalizing knowledge, these programmes emerge asambiguous apparatuses: spaces where transformative processesmay unfold, yet which also risk reproducing forms of control andnormalisation. The article thus offers a critical reading of PPs asapparatuses traversed by heterogeneous and conflicting rationalities– capable, on the one hand, of promoting transformations inmasculine practices; on the other, of producing new forms ofdeviant subjectivity