intersections of race and gender in how women of color experience violence and is often credited with coining the term “intersectionality.”30 Sociologist and criminologist Hillary Potter described intersectionality as “the concept or conceptualization that each person has an assortment of coalesced socially constructed identities that are ordered into an inequitable social stratum.”31 Within any singular identity-based community, there exist a multitude of various identities (i.e., race, class, gender, sexual orientation) that alter the standpoint and experience of any particular member.
Take, for example, the recent public gender transition of Caitlyn Jenner; her experiences show starkly different realities from those who may not share her unique social position. As a successful athlete and celebrity, Caitlyn has been afforded the ability to access the best health care and transition resources available. Caitlyn advocates for the visibility of trans communities by sharing her story as a transwoman and televising many aspects of her transition via her reality television show. Despite the connection she has established with the broader trans community, Caitlyn has continued to utilize her race and class position to subordinate entire aspects of the trans population. Her personal politics, largely informed by a life of privilege, have often seemed to clash with the broader trans experience.
For example, Caitlyn openly claimed that she “liked” Senator Ted Cruz during the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Despite offering her reservations about him, she lauded his conservative principles as his most important qualities. Primarily motivated by her elite class position, Caitlyn first advanced the notion that economic policy should serve the needs of the rich (e.g., through tax cuts and incentives for the wealthy).32 Cruz, an openly transphobic candidate, showed no love in return for Caitlyn, buckling down on his stance to deny transgender people equal and safe access to public restrooms.33 Caitlyn went on to support Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and has recently stood by her decision with “no regrets” despite the administration’s roll back of Obama-era protections for transgender people, which she simply dismissed as “mistakes.”34 An intersectional perspective illustrates how Caitlyn can afford to support transphobic political candidates at relatively no expense or suffering on her behalf. While she openly identifies as a transwoman, Caitlyn’s race and class position allow her the privilege to avoid many unpleasantries and barriers in her life. In a similar way, countless other identities intersect and shape the ways in which social realities are experienced, especially experiences with intimate partner violence.
Building on the broader foundations of intersectionality, Bograd challenged many of the assumptions underlying the dominant feminist domestic violence theories.35 Applying intersectionality to intimate partner violence demonstrates the effectiveness of a form of theorizing that includes interlocking systems of oppression (i.e., racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism) that shape distinct social localities and ultimately mold interpersonal dynamics, experiences, and understandings of violence and help seeking. While much of the early intimate partner violence work centered gender in the lives of predominately white and exclusively cisgender samples, Bograd conceptualized that intersectionality within the study of intimate partner violence has the ability to “color the meaning and nature of domestic violence, how it is experienced by self and responded to by others, how personal and social consequences are represented, and how or whether escape and safety can be obtained.”36
Consider, for example, how race complicates earlier conceptualizations of gender. In many ways, womanhood in our society has constructed white femininity as pure and in need of protection, while women of color, particularly black women, have been socially stigmatized for centuries. Cultural narratives of the “Jezebel,” out-of-control sexuality, and the construction of “working bodies” have led to distinctly racialized genders experienced by communities of color. The hostile social climates and contexts that surround the violence that occurs for many victims add multiple layers of challenges and obstacles. Individuals are victimized not only in their homes, families, and intimate relationships but also in their own communities, workplaces, and beyond. The daily aggressions of systemic heterosexism, racism, and classism compound the context of the violent experiences between partners. The devaluation of marginalized existences in our culture is often internalized, further complicating the experiences of intimate partner violence. Without appropriate theoretical understandings, research will continue to fall short on adequately capturing the experiences of survivors within historically oppressed communities.
When the inclusion of same-gender intimate partner violence research had recently begun, Bograd argued that the “invisibility of certain populations reflects more their social importance in the eyes of the dominant culture than the absence of domestic violence in their midst.”37 Since then, the field has grown to include gay and lesbian experiences while remaining stagnant in the inclusion of bisexual and transgender populations. The broader invisibility of transgender individuals inevitably led to theorization that exclusively assumed cisgender identity. As a result of that invisibility, the subsequent policy advancements that have changed how our government addresses domestic violence at large have never truly considered the impact of intimate partner violence on transgender lives.
Expanding beyond Early Feminist Explanations
In the early 1990s, psychologists David Island and Patrick Letellier made a provocative break from the dominant feminist paradigm, arguing that intimate partner violence was “not a gender issue at all since both men and women could be batterer or victim.”38 Rather, they argued that the focus should be on the batterer’s psychological characteristics, stating that “individual acts of domestic violence are not caused by a victim’s provocation, not by a violent, patriarchal society, not by alcohol or by any other excuse.” In their explanations of gay male battering, Island and Letellier proposed that violence is learned, that batterers choose to be violent, and therefore utilize it to cause harm and to enforce power and control. While these points were influential in challenging the dominant framework, they did ignore key evidence that intimate partner violence is gendered in many aspects of prevalence and dynamics (e.g., injury, outcomes, and self-defense) and that many people without psychological problems batter. As a dominant system in US culture, patriarchy indoctrinates all people (regardless of gender identity) into rigid constructs of gender that promote violence in intimate relationships.
To merge various theoretical explanations together, psychologist Gregory Merrill later proposed an integration of the social and psychological aspects of intimate partner violence.39 While learning and choosing are primarily psychological or individualistic explanations of battering, he emphasized the context of the opportunity to abuse. For batterers, the opportunity to abuse and learn what one can get away with is gendered. Here, men are particularly at risk for perpetration due to the same gender socialization factors to which sociocultural feminist researchers point. Not only are men encouraged to be violent, but they also learn that this violence is often normalized and effective, which, in turn, can further enable abuse.
As an extension to this thinking, it is important to acknowledge that gender is not the only social factor involved; race, class, sexual orientation, and gender identity all contextualize the abuser’s opportunity and choice to abuse. The connection of the broader structure to micro-level processes highlights how social context may lead to the perception that one member of the relationship has relatively more or less social power than the other. Power here can be understood as the ability to project one’s own desires onto another. With less power, there is a diminished (but not eliminated) capacity to enact negative consequences against a potential perpetrator. This can again be gendered because men in our society are typically ascribed this social power. However, in the power’s application, all relationships, regardless of the sexual orientations and gender identities involved, are subject to power dynamics that are informed by patriarchy.
Sociologist Betsy Erbaugh argued that the victim-perpetrator gendered binary in dominant intimate partner violence theorizing is a central factor in the silencing of LGBTQ victims.40 As a result of this leading framework and limited explanation of violence, the cultural construct of “victim” is gendered—always feminine. This gendered, heterosexist
