and transgenderism have prevailed over radical feminist critiques” and have produced a more trans-inclusive perspective that views gender as an “ongoing process of becoming male or female” regardless of trans status.53 This approach may be particularly critical in incorporating trans experiences in intimate partner violence research. Because transgender individuals do not neatly fit in an essentialist gender binary, broader sociocultural explanations of gender may be limited to explaining only the experiences of cisgender individuals. For this study, moving beyond gender as a dichotomous social construct embedded and regulated in a patriarchal power structure, I viewed gender as a situational power discourse that framed the experiences of abuse for transgender victims.
In this postmodern tradition, discourse or language fosters the domination of individuals through subjective interaction. In its application to criminology, the “language of the court or law expresses and institutionalizes the domination of individuals by social institution.”54 This perspective focuses on how meaning and sense are constructed by victims, criminals, and the larger criminal justice system. As Arrigo and Bernard explained, “Postmodern criminologists maintain that there is a conflict that underscores our understanding of crime, law, order, justice, and victimization. In short, only certain definitions are used to convey society’s meanings for these constructs.”55
Scholars Davis and Glass stated that this form of theorizing, in its direct application to cisgender heterosexual intimate partner violence, “seeks to de-center the dominant homogenizing grand narrative that accounts for all violence, for all women, in all situations.”56 In essence, they sought to deconstruct the binary gender boundary that builds off the victim/perpetrator dynamic as well as the power and control assumed behind it. For example, Arrigo and Bernard stated that when rape victims testify in criminal court, “they must re-present their experiences in a way which is consistent with legally justifiable speech (i.e., acceptable, credible testimonial evidence).” Not adhering to the hegemonic discourse could result in the case’s dismal; they further claimed that “the language the victim is required to speak may also be a language that marginalizes and oppresses her.”57 Postmodern criminologists studying intimate partner violence have analyzed the language used by both victims and perpetrators to construct micro contexts of power. Following Foucauldian influence, power is not just structural or held by a group of individuals but rather emerges from the discourse between individuals. For trans victims, the power lies behind the cisgendered discourse that shapes structural responses to intimate partner violence.
Framing for the Study
While there is no singular theoretical framework that solely guided this work, it does operate from and build on existing perspectives. Broadly speaking, the inquiry is situated across queer(ing) criminology, postmodern feminism, and symbolic interactionism. I propose centering trans voices within a budding subfield perspective called queer criminology. Arguably, queer criminology lies at the intersections of critical and postmodern criminologies. The US criminal and legal systems have a long history of criminalizing LGBTQ people, and biases against the community have been documented in the literature across courtroom experiences, police interactions, the carceral system, and more.58 Similar to the aforementioned ways in which queer approaches challenge assumptions, rules, and power behind gender constructs, queering criminology involves a similar critical lens to highlight the existence of LGBTQ experiences as victims and offenders in the criminal justice system. Today, queer criminologists are pioneering studies and theoretical examinations of the lives of gay gang members, incarcerated transgender offenders, LGBTQ youth, and many others.59
While substantial groundwork has been laid for queer criminological inquiry, less work has been done to actively queer victimology. As a subfield of criminology, victimology centers victims of crime as a focal point for analysis. The field has largely been dominated by work that examines the characteristics of victims (i.e., demeanor, social status, neighborhood residency) and their relationships to offenders. Perspectives from queer criminologists provide much of the conceptual language needed to engage with victim-centered research from a queer angle. Gender, sexuality, and other intersecting identities alter the ways in which criminal legal systems view deserving victims and characterize offenders. As a relatively new subfield, queer criminology encompasses the inclusion of static identities (i.e., ensuring that LGBTQ individuals are included in discussions on crime and victimization) but also a deconstructionist approach that critiques the power of criminalization, language, and law.60 Queer criminologists have criticized the victim focus in LGBTQ research, challenging the ways in which victimization renders subjects powerless and confines analysis to one-directional thinking that does not truly “queer” (i.e., disrupt or break from normative thinking about victim and offender). As such, the research I have done here straddles both of these goals. For one, it is the first such book to include and solely focus on transgender victims of intimate partner violence. By mere inclusion alone, we gain a new insight for queer criminology, possibly for queering victimology. However, trans identity is not static, and therefore the accounts of the survivors often involve discussions of fluid transition, manipulation of identities by situation and context, and trans identity’s relation to the broader social structure.
The forthcoming accounts include descriptions of stories of victimization but also illustrate meaning and interpretation; for this, symbolic interactionism offers a perspective that examines the process of defining and constructing realities in social life. Setting out to explore the meanings behind victimization as recounted by survivors, symbolic interactionism informs the research to encompass analysis of the world from the point of view of those being studied.61 At least in part, the self and identity are characterized as a conversation between the inner, personal drives or desired actions of individuals and the expectations of society. These expectations are regulated by the shared meaning attributed to various actions or the social consequences of action. Meaning is constructed through a social process in which individuals attribute actions not only to others, but also to lived experiences. For survivors of intimate partner violence, reflecting upon their experiences and sharing stories involves a process of interpretation and meaning construction. For example, survivors must describe what dynamics and behaviors they deemed abusive. Further, these conversations may involve how these abusive behaviors were interpreted and what they meant. As such, the present work examines how transgender victims experience and interpret intimate partner violence victimization and how they negotiate the larger cultural contexts that have long ignored these unique realities.
The overall research design of this study was informed by queer and feminist perspectives. Mainly, this meant that I did not intend to locate some form of objective truth, but rather sought to examine accounts of lived experiences and highlight emerging patterns in subjective discourses.62 This feminist epistemological approach proposes that in order to understand a particular social phenomenon, one needs to first understand it from the viewpoint of those who experience it.63 Through an examination and analysis of their stories, I sought to illuminate the distinct meanings behind intimate partner violence in trans lives and develop a more refined understanding of these experiences. As such, this study obtained accounts of intimate partner violence victimization as told by transgender survivors through semistructured (and later more open-ended), in-depth interviews as well as through free-write questionnaire responses. These interviews and written accounts represent the sources of the data. One of the overarching goals of this study was to highlight otherwise marginalized voices and account for their realities to further broaden our understanding of intimate partner violence victimization outside of hegemonic, genderist discourses.
While there is significant debate on who should be considered transgender and what it means as far as identity or medicalization, I solicited participants who self-identified as transgender or under the broader trans umbrella. This means all participants were broadly considered transgender (with respect to their more specific gender identities). All respondents self-selected to participate in the study and reported a gender identification other than cisgender male or female. One of the reasons that transgender voices have long been marginalized in intimate partner violence research is the difficulty in securing participants. My recruitment strategies involved marketing the call
