Introduction: “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”: Normalizing Intimate Violence

 The chapter introduces the central idea behind this volume that makes it a unique contribution to literature on intimate violence. The volume reflects complexities of society and its institutions that enmesh interpersonal violence in patriarchal heteronormative ecosystems within which violence operates as a tool for maintaining inequalities in society. This chapter pivots violence as a manifestation of ‘entitlements’ based on gendered social hierarchies and critical intersectionalities. Ideological conditions created by legal, social, and economic structures allow the normalization of intimate violence. The anecdotal meets feminist theory to understand institutional responses to violence in intimate spaces. The focus remains the ecosystem of violence, the ‘space’ within which violence is situated. The volume proposes that while cis-men are the primary ‘actors’ of violence; state, society and its institutions are the ‘agents’ of violence.