Violence against LGBTQI+ family members in the past and present societies
Queering Migrant Family: intersection of migration, family practices and queer subjectivities
PI Marianna Muravyeva, University of Helsinki
As a result of our QFV project, we have been looking at queer(ing) migrant families and their practices as well as how queer migrants think about families and what kind of best practices they see important for themselves as well as for the community. Now we are focussing on LGBTQI+ migrants from the post-Soviet countries.
Check our call for respondents here
The Journal of Family Violence invites potential authors who look at dynamics of violence in families that include queer members, at existing prevention and intervention programmes related to such violence, and new theoretical issues of queering family violence. We intend to assess the prevalence of abuse, conceptualise queer family violence, and highlight possible ways to improve public policy and social services regarding well-being.
Please submit abstracts of your proposed article of no longer than 800 words (including the paper’s title, references, and author’s name, affiliation, and contact details) as a Word-processing document attachment to email at queeringfamilyviolence@gmail.com with the subject line ‘Queering Family Violence: Special Issue.’ Deadline for submission is April 1st, 2022.
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/queering-family-violence/events/workshop-2/
by Kris Clarke, Mona Livholts & Christopher B. Sullivan
Considering the themes of queer grief and family violence in our research during this year of Covid-19 has made us reflect on the early days of the AIDS pandemic. An estimated 32 million people have died globally since the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS was identified in the early 1980s. Initially seen as an illness that solely affected gay men, narratives of the early AIDS pandemic often focused on the social and family rejection that many seropositive gay men faced both when coming out and at the end of life. Contemporary dramatizations that deal with the AIDS pandemic, such as Tales of the City and It’s a Sin, highlight the significance of the story of ‘queer chosen families’ as a refuge of acceptance from the emotional violence of family of origin disconnection, especially during end of life.
The postwar generation of LGBTQ+ people in the United States faced many challenges and breakthroughs in coming out as their authentic selves. Western culture constructed homosexuality as pathological and criminal during much of the 20th century, propelling many LGBTQ+ people to large urban centers like New York and San Francisco where queer cultural enclaves thrived (Bérubé, 1990). However, the scars of societal stigma and family rejection created a collective generational trauma that was often internalized through self-shaming and dysfunctional behaviors (Bower et al., 2021). An archetypical gay coming out reflected the need to choose between family acceptance in an inauthentic life or family rejection when moving into an authentic life. Until 1971, homosexuality was viewed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. Further, non-heteronormative sexual relations and gender fluid presentation were largely criminalized by a variety of local, state and federal laws through statutes that banned dressing in the clothing of the ‘wrong’ gender or dancing with a same-sex partner. The open and accepting culture of Castro Street in San Francisco and Christopher Street in New York City drew thousands of LGBTQ+ people from across the US, and indeed around the world, fleeing homophobic small towns and unaccepting families.
The act of rediscovering hidden LGBTQ+ histories has been an important means of challenging the stigma and shame of erasure, pathologization and dehumanizationIn order to re-envision social justice, Plummer (2019, 156) argues for a recognition of ‘critical cultural memory’: of people, of groups, of places, of events and of states themselves.’ As social science researchers interested in the different aspects of memory, queer grief and memorialization, we have been discussing how the collective and specific personal memory of the AIDS pandemic informs concepts of queer grief and social injustice through the legacy of coping with social and family rejection. We have reflected on how critical cultural memory can thus challenge the emotional violence of family of origin estrangement and assert the value of queer relationships.
Recognition of grief and loss through memorials in the collective sphere creates its own challenges and opportunities. National memory politics tend to privilege elites and silence marginalized groups, but there is also agency in creating counter-memory and living transitional memorials (Livholts 2021). Erll (2020, 865) writes that pandemics have been less “tellable … than stories of heroic deaths on the battlefields.” Indeed, there are few public memorials that acknowledge the various epidemics that have ravaged the United States. There is one memorial bench in a Barre, Vermont cemetery built 100 years after the 1918 influenza pandemic that took the lives of 675,000 Americans. Though masculine representational themes of war prevail among American memorials, death due to epidemic has traditionally been viewed as a private family matter which often contests the inclusion of queer kinship.
The National AIDS Memorial Grove is nestled in a dell that was long derelict in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Conceived by local residents in 1988, the Grove was recognized as a national monument by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Densely forested and scattered with small stones engraved with names and the ‘circle of friends’ memorial at the center, the Grove is a constantly metamorphosing site as the vegetarian grows and visitors leave mementos amidst the natural landscape. As a memory project, the AIDS Grove had several intentions. It is a site for traumatic private memories where people can come to remember friends, lovers and community members. Stories of being excluded from the funerals of partners by biological families were frequent during the height of the AIDS pandemic, which left loved ones with no place to mourn. At the same time, the Grove resists categorization of belonging to any particular group. Though gay men are the majority of the Board, the Grove has tried to decenter a white gay male narrative and be more inclusive of diverse stories of those lost to the virus (Gamson 2018). Nearly 40 years since the first cases of HIV were detected, notions of chosen family have been enshrined in patient rights throughout the United States. One of the lasting legacies of the AIDS pandemic is the assertion of the right to queer kinship. Next-of-kin is no longer automatically assumed to be the closest blood relative but can be designated by patients themselves. The body of law that has emerged since the height of the AIDS pandemic reflects a dramatic shift in rejecting the potential for a family of origin to exert emotional abuse or violence in situations of critical illness or death.
In their “The Central Valley HIV/AIDS Project” Clarke & Sullivan are currently exploring how people in Central California remember the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s. Through interviews with long-term survivors, care workers, and family members, they are examining social narratives of grieving and loss that have rarely been publicly acknowledged. Clarke & Livholts continue working on studies at the intersection of memory and social work.
Kris Clarke is an Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests center on decolonization, structural social work, and the significance of place and social memory. Clarke recently published Decolonizing Pathways towards Integrative Healing in Social Work with Michael Yellow Bird. She is currently working on a public history project documenting local stories of social work on the Social Work Routes podcast.
Mona Livholts is Professor of Social Work, University of Helsinki. She works with global- and post anthropocentric perspectives in social work, intersectionality, and creative life writing methods such as memory work, diaries, letters and photography. Research topics include sexual violence, gender and space, narrative inequality and monuments, socially engaged art and environmental sustainability in urban spaces.
Christopher (Chris) Sullivan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Fresno. His research focuses on understanding how processes of globalization influence social institutions – from large-scale financial institutions like the World Bank, to more local institutions centered around HIV care in California’s Central Valley. Sullivan lived and conducted research in mainland China for nearly 5 years. He has published research on Uyghur Muslim restaurants in the United States, and on the rise of accountability mechanisms that handle human rights grievances brought against international financial institutions.
Author: Jennifer Marchbank
Creating Canada’s first educational materials on LGBT elder abuse – an intergenerational art for social change project, presented by Jen Marchbank, dept of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University, Canada
As someone who teaches about violence and resistance, I was delighted to present on the above project at the Queering Family Violence workshop series. We began this project in 2015 focusing on what my colleague Dr Claire Robson calls ARTivism – that is the use of art to create social change. The project was led by Dr Gloria Gutman from our Gerontology Research Centre and Claire and I were co-investigators. It also involved two LGBTQ2SIA+ activist groups in a unique inter-generational project that brought together queer youth – Youth 4 A Change – with queer senior citizen creative writers QUIRK-e (queer imaging and writing collective of elders). My wife, Sylvia Traphan, and I run Y4AC and at the time Dr Robson was the artistic lead for QUIRKes – we are all from SFU. The project involved our creative collaborator Dr Kelsey Blair. The youth involved were, at the time, 16-22 years old and the QUIRK-es involved were in their 70s and 80s. The creative team met in a Surrey, BC youth centre each week eventually having to expand to weekend meetings whist researching, creating, filming and editing.
Our first finding was that there was no Canadian data on elder abuse as experienced by LGBTQ2SIA+ folks. So, I researched and found relevant materials from the UK, USA, Australia that we used to inform our team. In the end this project created a set of 3 videos and 5 posters (in English, Punjabi and Mandarin) and fact sheets designed to raise awareness and address elder abuse in the LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender & plus) community. These were premiered in 6 Town Hall meetings held in 6 British Columbian cities and beyond. Dr Gutman hosted the Town Halls which each had one youth and one elder member of the creative team in attendance. Note that the acronym used by the project is LGBT – we dropped the Q in recognition of the fact that it makes some elders uncomfortable as they had queer thrown at them in harmful ways.
As I said in my presentation, we know that LGBT seniors face particular vulnerabilities as they may not have family or have been ostracised from family members; may face the burden of internalised homophobia and transphobia inflicted on them in their youth and are especially vulnerable to threats of blackmail.
The youth and seniors wrote, acted, directed, edited and produced materials to foster social change aimed at ensuring those working with elders are educated on the issue, thus promoting healthy ageing and well-being. Little did we realise at the beginning of the process that these materials were Canada’s first educational materials on this issue. The materials are still available free from SFU Gerontology website.
You can read more about interpersonal violence and LGBTQ2SIA+ folks in this free e-book published in June2020.
Authors: Nik Taylor, Heather Fraser, Damien Riggs and Shoshanna Rosenberg
We’ve recently had a paper published outlining the results of two different studies that looked at the roles of domesticated animal companions in the lives of transgender and non-binary (TNB) people. In one of these studies we analysed survey responses from 23 people who were asked about the overlaps between human and animal directed violence. In the other we used data from interviews with eight TNB people who were asked a variety of questions about their relationships with their animal companions. This paper is the latest in a series of work we have done looking at TNB people and their animal companions, with a focus on how these strong, loving, relationships might help both the humans and the animals, especially if they are recovering from domestic and family violence.
In our research we found that almost a third of our participants had experiences where an animal was threatened as part of human-to human conflict/violence. This was not only related to intimate partners, with participants discussing violence by other family members toward their animals. One person, for example, talked about how their father “used to take his anger out on the family dog”. This kind of violence had long lasting effects for some of our participants, who talked about how it still features in their flashbacks. People also told us how the abuse of their animals helped them see that they were living in an abusive situation and so their animals became a catalyst pushing them to leave their abusers. This was not always straightforward, though, with some of our participants explaining that they stayed in the abusive situation in order to protect their animals.
What was exceptionally clear from our participants was that their animals were very important to them. They told us that their animals offered stress-relief, comfort, and strength. One person told us “the love I received from my dogs helped me to endure the abuse more than I would have been able to do otherwise”. Participants also told us how their animals brought joy to their lives and offered them non-judgmental support. This was important in both recovery from abuse and in terms of their animals accepting them for who they were. As one person told us, “‘I can never be certain that [interacting with other people comes] without judgement, whereas I can with the dog.’
Our participants were also open with us about how their own behavior negatively affected their animal companions, acknowledging that witnessing human-to-human conflict often upset their animals. Some also told us how they took their own trauma out on their animals. While we acknowledge that for many people leaving abusive situations, remaining with their animals is important (for both species), we also see that sometimes the animals can be further harmed and that in some situations their humans are not able to care for them. While it is difficult to discuss this, we feel that this is an area that needs a lot more research.
Overall, the picture that is emerging from the series of research we have conducted is that TNB people encounter many issues that are similar to cisgender people in terms of domestic violence and the effects it has on their animals. But, they also have specific gender-related abuses in addition to this. Relationships with their animals offer a buffer to this kind of treatment, offering joy, relief, non-judgmental companionship and sometimes the ability to see that they are caught in abusive situations as well as to reflect on aspects of their own behavior toward animals that may not be ideal.
Picture by Heather Fraser
On the 1-4 of December 2020, our project held the first workshop ‘Queering Family Violence: setting agenda for queer wellbeing’. This event brought together scholars from all over the world. Colleagues from Northern Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Australia joined us to think queerer about family violence not by simply including LGBT people into the scope of studies of family violence, but also by looking for original ways of rethinking major concepts in the field.
The first session ‘New Theoretical Approaches’ was devoted to re-conceptualisation of currently dominant approaches to the study violence. Dr. Esra Umak, visiting scholar at the University of Oslo, opened up the panel with their presentation on psychological intimate partner violence (IPV) affecting lesbian and bisexual women in Denmark and Turkey. They approached the subject of her study using the concept of internalised heterosexism.
The second presentation by Dr. Grønli Rosten from Department of Youth research, Oslo Metropolitan University, scrutinised the phenomenon of consent in BDSM. Drawing on her qualitative interviews with BDSM practitioners, Dr. Rosten questions whether or not ‘yes’ really means ‘yes’ in complex relationships of power and authority within the studied community.
Finally, Dr. Kris Clarke and Dr. Mona Livholts, University of Helsinki, presented a research plan aimed at unpacking queer intimate partner violence. They approach ‘violence directed against and between queer people as symptomatic of cis-hetero and white patriarchal colonial frameworks.’
The second session ‘Queer Violence at Intersections’ looked at complex experiences of victims and perpetrators of violence. The presentation by Dr. Jen Marchbank from Simon Fraser University (Canada) discussed queer vulnerabilities and ageing. Dr. Jen Marchbank presented troubles and controversies around the social project on LGBT elder abuse which brought together queer youth and queer seniors.
The presentation of Nicole Ovesen, Uppsala University, continued discussion on intersection of queerness, vulnerabilities, violence and time. She talked about queering as disruption of time. Based on conversations with 25 people who have experienced violence in intimate lesbian and/or queer relationships in Sweden, Ovesen explores how IPV in lesbian and queer relationships disrupts temporalities.
Finally, Stephen Azarian, University of Roehampton, presented his project aimed at exploring public articulations of vulnerabilities expressed by the people who experienced violence based in both gender and sexuality. The project is a catalogue of all stories of violence aired during more than a decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race show where queens compete for the title of America’s next drag superstar.
The final session ‘Approaches to Queer and Violence’ highlighted the diversity of ways to address violence in queer relations. The presentation of Helga Eggebø and Elisabet Stubberud, Norland Research Institute in Bodø (Norway), revealed the experiences of violence among queer migrants in Norway. The researchers discussed how ‘vulnerability to violence is related to the wider patterns of discrimination and juridical, economic and social marginalisation’
In another presentation, Dr. Damien Riggs, Flinders University (Australia), Nik Taylor (University of Canterbury, UK) and Heather Fraser (QUT) focused on pets and other animals when looking at domestic violence (for more details see their post in our blog). On the one hand, the research revealed practices of speciesism, but also highlighted that ‘where there is violence against domestic animals, there is more extreme violence against humans.’ Moreover, violence against animals can be a form of violence against humans (in the logic of ‘I won’t feed your cat unless you sleep with me’).
These conversations have paved the way of thinking about violence in new original ways. The studies to date show that there are many queer approaches to violence in general and family violence in particular. Yet, there is also room for even queerer queer approaches that we intend to develop over the course of future workshops.
University of Helsinki