Janice Ristock 

Faculty of Arts

University of Manitoba

(Canada)

Research on violence in same-sex relationships has primarily consisted of survey research in order to document the incidence and prevalence of this form of violence. A wide range of incidence rates have been reported by different studies and these results reflect problems with sampling and with differing definitions of violence being used. Further, very little research has been done to include the experiences of transgender, intersex and bisexual people and most studies have focused on the experiences of white, well-educated gay men and lesbians. 

This paper reports on findings from a qualitative interview study conducted in six Canadian cities with 102 women who experienced violence in their same-sex relationships. The study also examined institutional responses to same–sex relationship violence in English-speaking countries including Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia. The paper argues that there is a need for more contextualized community-based research that uses a race, class, gender, sexual orientation intersectional framework to better understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirit and queer [lgbttq] people who have experienced relationship violence. The paper extracts and examines three themes that emerged from the larger interview study with women which illustrate the importance of understanding differing social and historical contexts and hearing the voices of women at the margins. 

The themes/social contexts brought forward are: dislocation, a lifetime of violence, and racism as a form of violence in interracial relationships. The findings reveal that there is not one homogeneous experience of domestic violence in same-sex relationships. The analysis highlights the way particular social locations of women based on race, ethnicity, immigration status, a history of colonization and familial relationships shape their experiences of domestic violence. The findings further reveal that despite the good intentions of many social and healthcare services to respond to intimate partner violence, prescriptive practices, exclusionary mandates, and homonormalizing discourses were found to operate within these services. 

The paper explores how "regimes of truth" on domestic violence operate in social services to obscure, delegitimize or subjugate certain knowledges or subjects while legitimizing or normalizing others. The discursive processes of institutionalization are examined in some organizational websites. In analyzing websites we can see the way space is homogenized; how violence in different people's lives is constructed as the same and as therefore requiring the same solutions even though differing sexual identity categories are being used. We need to ask: "What are the ethical implications of the simplification of the spaces of violence?" Overall queer theorizing is needed to help disrupt the effects of these institutional ‘heterofactories’ and more research is needed that can account for the complexities of lgbttq people’s lives rather than enforcing universality and a simplifying of experiences of relationship violence. The paper concludes by offering ways that we can create more innovative, helpful responses to address violence in lgbttq intimate relationships.

About Janice Ristock 

Janice Ristock is Associate Dean (Research)and Professor of Women's Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Manitoba in Canada. She recently published No More Secrets: Violence in Lesbian Relationships, Routledge Press. Her current research includes: a project with the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS network on the experiences of two-spirit women; and involvment on a Canadian multi-discplinary research team focused on the lgbttq issues.