Rethinking masculinities: gendered pathways in perpetrator programmes

This article explores Perpetrator Programmes as spaces in which discourses, practices, and specialised knowledge are produced, enabling a critical interrogation of the links between hegemonic masculinity and VAW. Adopting a sociological and Foucauldian perspective, the analysis investigates how such interventions contribute to the construction of alternative masculine subjectivities by challenging internalised gender norms and fostering practices of accountability, reflexivity, and emotional literacy. Drawing on the findings of a national mixed-methods study, the article examines how violence is interpreted and addressed in everyday intervention practices, and how masculinity is diagnosed, problematised, or reaffirmed within these programmes.However, the discourses produced in these contexts must be situated within the institutional frameworks that shape the aims and orientations of intervention. In a context marked by increasing integration of PPs into the criminal justice system and the spread of psycho-medicalizing knowledge, these programmes emerge as ambiguous apparatuses: spaces where transformative processes may unfold, yet which also risk reproducing forms of control and normalisation. The article thus offers a critical reading of PPs as apparatuses traversed by heterogeneous and conflicting rationalities – capable, on the one hand, of promoting transformations in masculine practices; on the other, of producing new forms of deviant subjectivity.