Abstract
This interdisciplinary, transnational collection of current work on intimate partner violence in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities is essential reading for scholars of intimate partner violence; it will also be useful to sociologists of social problems and those with interests in gender, sexuality, feminist, queer, and intersectionality studies. On the whole this volume comes at an ideal time to reflect on our current understandings of LGBTQ partner violence and to transform approaches to anti-violence intervention accordingly. The book successfully embodies the juncture at which we who study intimate partner violence find ourselves, and demands that its readers make informed, strategic choices about next steps. At this point, many scholars and anti-violence practitioners have articulated apt critiques of mainstream feminist understandings of and interventions in intimate partner violence (e.g., Sokoloff’s indispensable 2005 collection). The current volume extends and complicates these critiques—particularly regarding heteronormativity, failures to account for intersecting identities and the ways they shape LGBQ and T (more on the “and T” below) experiences of both intimate partner violence and anti-violence services, and the continued marginalization of LGBQ and T people from a range of racial/ethnic, class, and cultural backgrounds across a range of institutional contexts.
In fourteen chapters plus Janice Ristock’s introduction, many of the English-speaking world’s leading experts on LGBQ and T intimate partner violence offer qualitative, quantitative, theoretical, and clinical analyses grounded in sociology, social work, psychology, nursing, and several anti-violence practice modalities. Contributions include reports of research conducted in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as theoretically-oriented literature reviews and critical reflections on the state of the field. The authors’ contributions are thus conceptual as well as empirical, representing a healthy range of disciplinary approaches and balancing academic perspectives with those of experienced anti-violence practitioners and activists at the cutting edge of queer and trans anti-violence work.
Ristock has organized a diverse spectrum of work into three themes: “framing and conceptualizing violence; exploring the lived experiences of violence; and responding to violence” (p. 4). Part I takes on core assumptions about gender, sexuality, power, and risk that LGBQ and T communities and their advocates face in their work against violence, highlighting the need to refuse heteronormativity and incorporate intersectionality in meaningful conceptualizations of violence. Part II presents four qualitative interview-based studies, a quantitative web-based survey study—each addressing specific aspects of abuse in LGBTQ contexts—and an insightful critical review of the literature on gay male abuse by Maurice Kwong-Lai Poon. Chapters in Part III assess healthy relationship curricula and social service approaches. Exemplary of this section, Chapters 12, 13, and 14 report on years of urban LGBTQ anti-violence in three countries. Whereas Patricia Durish and Kate Duffy’s reports of multi-year inter-agency efforts in Toronto, Canada and New South Wales, Australia respectively, summarize challenges and successes, Jesmen Mendoza and Diane R. Dolan-Soto’s comparison of “same-sex” batterer groups in New York and Toronto provides not only a summary but a critical reflection on similarities and contrasts in the two agencies’ experiences, and specific recommendations that should prove useful in implementing similar projects elsewhere. The book concludes with a call to action, co-authored by Ristock and Catherine G. Taylor, calling upon violence researchers to decolonize the research process by simultaneously confronting state violence, partnering with communities and committing to the “OCAP” process put forth by the First Nations Centre of Ottowa, which respects the “rights of Indigenous peoples and communities to Ownership of the project, Control of the process, Access to the data, and Possession of the findings” (p. 302).
Helpful examinations of intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and culture as the overarching context for violence and for attempted interventions permeate this volume. In terms of gender identities, overall the collection offers a good balance of research and reflection on LGBQ women’s, men’s, and transgender relationships and experiences of violence. In fact it offers groundbreaking articulations of the challenges and opportunities associated with anti-violence work with transgender people, their partners, and the organizations attempting to incorporate them into service models not initially designed to accommodate their lived realities. In particular, Joshua Mira Goldberg and Caroline White’s critique of the near-automatic inclusion of the “T” with “LGBQ” (problematically implying that all transgender and transsexual people naturally share identities, outlooks, and/or political projects with LGBQ people) is illuminating, as is their discussion of the problems of collapsing a wide array of identities and experiences under the “trans” umbrella. As they point out, “homogenizing the T becomes extremely problematic if not dangerous when considering the dynamics of violence and services required across different gender identities” (p. 68).
Although most selections address intersections of race and class with gender and sexuality in the context of intimate partner violence in some respect, some readers may be frustrated by the limited coverage of LGBQ and T communities of color. Three studies in Part II incorporate U.S.- and Canada-based people of color in their samples, and the chapters co-authored by Ristock address the experiences of Aboriginal people in Canada. Several chapters address intersections of class and poverty with gender, sexuality, race, substance use, HIV, and a range of physical and mental health histories.
From my perspective, the collection’s most innovative contributions advance understanding of dominant discourses of intimate partner violence and how they position diverse communities of LGBQ and T people. This kind of discussion is vital for researchers, practitioners, and communities attempting to halt cycles of violence and promote healthy relationships—in fact to begin to define what exactly a healthy relationship looks like. Key concepts at the heart of such discourses have formed the bedrock of anti-violence theory and practice. This book’s contributors offer the kind of thorough examination and critique now required in order to make visible the shifting meanings of these foundational ideas and to reconsider, deeply, their ongoing relevance—ideas such as risk, power, gender, love, pathology, victim/perpetrator, minority stress, neo-liberal self-governance, and accountability—not only on the part of participants in violence, but by those who work in anti-violence research, advocacy, counseling, activism, and criminal justice.
Ristock and her collaborators model what they collectively counsel by putting diverse communities that have been marginalized in feminist anti-violence discourses at the center of their analyses, and by boldly delving into the difficult dialogues that students of violence must have in order to crack open the complex and destructive set of interwoven injustices that lead to intimate partner violence among LGBQ and T people, and everyone else.