Community Organizing to End Violence Against Lesbian,

Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer Women

Elizabeth B. Erbaugh
The University of New Mexico
Department of Sociology
MSC05 3080
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque NM 87131-0001

erbaugh@unm.edu
Submission to the 99th ASA Annual Meeting, San Francisco
January 2004

Session Preferences:
1. Regular Session: Violence
2. Section Session: Section on Collective Behavior & Social Movements-
Refereed Roundtables

AV equipment requested: overhead projector
Tracking number: ASA-242-12500
2
Abstract

This project investigates the relationship between community organizing and womens
identities with regard to the problem of violence against lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex
and queer (LBTIQ) women. It focuses on a new group of LBTIQ women in New Mexico
engaged in community organizing with two primary goals: 1. increasing safety for lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer women and 2. creating alternatives to incarceration for
queer women who perpetrate violence. Same-sex domestic violence poses a challenge to
theories that characterize domestic violence as a manifestation of mens dominance over women.
Further, LBTIQ womens experiences of violence challenge frameworks that assign
dichotomous, gendered roles of victim and perpetrator to participants in violent situations.
The marginalization of LBTIQ women stemming from homophobia means they often lack the
social support of family, acquaintances, law enforcement, the legal system, health care
institutions and other service providers. In this context, community organizing has emerged as a
mechanism for LBTIQ women themselves to address the problem of same-sex domestic
violence. Based on the premises that violence against LBTIQ women involves distinct
organizational challenges and that community organizing offers innovative possibilities for
addressing this violence, this study examines the ways a new community-based approach differs
from the traditional intervention approaches employed by traditional, often feminist anti-
domestic violence organizations. This project contributes to scholarship on gender and sexuality,
domestic violence, and social movements.

Keywords: community organizing, violence, sexuality
3
Community Organizing to End Violence Against Lesbian,
Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer Women

Introduction
This paper outlines a project that investigates the relationship between community
organizing and womens identities with regard to the problem of violence against lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LBTIQ) women. The project focuses on a new
grassroots organization of queer
1
women of multiple ages, ethnicities and class backgrounds who
are struggling against intersecting oppressions to reduce domestic violence and sexual assault
affecting LBTIQ women in the greater Albuquerque area of New Mexico.
The study starts from three main premises: 1. Social dynamics of gender and sexuality
shape perceptions and experiences of domestic violence. 2. Community organizing offers an
avenue toward social change for groups having either limited access to dominant social and
political institutions or the collective sense that such institutions do not serve their needs.
3. Addressing violence against LBTIQ women will involve particular organizational challenges,
responses and outcomes.
Based on these premises, the project takes as its central research questions: 1. How do
LBTIQ women define and experience violence? 2. How does LBTIQ womens anti-violence
community organizing affect the participants definitions and experiences of violence? 3. Can a
community-based organization address the problem of same-sex domestic violence in ways that
existing legal, law enforcement, medical and service institutions have not, or cannot? 4. Can
nonprofit organizations contribute to and benefit from womens community organizing, both in
the domestic and sexual violence service sector and in the nonprofit sector as a whole? If so,
how?
4
LITERATURE REVIEW
The research questions in this study relate to three core conceptual arenas: community
organizing, domestic violence and sexuality. In communities worldwide women come together
to engage in community organizing based on shared concerns and common identities. Members
of the group in this study have come together to address the problem of domestic violence
against members of their community. They bring to this work the shared experience of
negotiating identities that are stigmatized by homophobic dominant social constructions of
sexuality and gender. This project contributes to scholarship on social movements, domestic
violence, gender and sexuality.

Community organizing

Community organizing is an important means by which women express collective
identities, concerns and resistance. Although womens community organizations vary widely in
mission and structure, as a whole they have historically exemplified democratic, participatory
and feminist modes of organizing (Acker 1995; Barnett 1995; Gilkes 1988; Hardy-Fanta 1993;
Naples 1998; Pardo 1998; Stall and Stoecker 1998). Women engage in community organizing in
cities and rural areas throughout the United States. Their organizing goals and activities vary
widely, but tend to address the concerns of communities defined by geography, race, ethnicity,
class, gender and sexuality. Community organizing generally takes place at the level of
neighborhoods and localities and may or may not involve public protest or coalition-building
among multiple organizations.
1
I refer to this community interchangably as LBTIQ, queer, and lesbian. I use queer as an umbrella term
for people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex.
5
Community organizing is often overlooked in mainstream social movement literature,
partly because it infrequently culminates in large-scale social movements. The large-scale bias
in the social movement literature promotes a limited view of the goals and potential successes of
collective action, and tends to mask social movements as homogenous when in fact they are a
diverse set of identities, objectives and activities. The literatures dominant theoretical bent
emphasizes mass mobilization, public protest and policy-oriented movements. This bias
minimizes both the impact of participation in social movements on the individual and the role of
the individual in social movements. As a result the literature neglects not only important
dynamics of social change at the level of the individual but also the ways that individual and
micromobilization level dynamics (McAdam 1988; Gamson 1992) contribute to change at the
macrostructural level.
Womens community organizing as a form of collective action has received only limited
attention in the literature. Yet both social scientists and participants in womens community
organizing need to assess the impact of this form of social movement activity on womens lives,
as well as on their positions in and interactions with dominant social structures and institutions.
Understanding the microdynamics of community organizing, and not just its macro-level
outcomes, is essential to defining the standards of success to be used in evaluating organizing
efforts. Measuring social movement success only in terms of public policy change or observable
changes at macrostructural levels of society would miss important aspects of community
organizing that lead participants to consider it successful and worthy of their participation.
Involvement in collective action offers opportunities to construct new individual and
collective identities that challenge dominant perspectives (Cohen 1985; Darnovsky, Epstein and
Flacks 1995; Gamson 1992; Laraa, Johnston and Gusfield 1994; Melucci 1989). Womens
6
involvement in community organizing may lead to changes in their own perspectives and
identities that transform their social realities and experiences of power relative to the dominant
institutions that have marginalized them. These sorts of changes represent movement outcomes
that are perhaps more attainable for grassroots social activism than would be, for instance, the
eradication of all violence or even the enactment of legislation to curtail violence against LBTIQ
women. Micro-level dynamics such as individual and collective identity transformation are
worthy of more theoretical attention than they have received in mainstream social movement
literature.

Domestic violence

This project explores womens community organizing as an instrument of social change
that operates differently from most organizations in the domestic violence and rape crisis service
sectors. Traditional domestic violence, rape crisis and other service agencies are struggling to
understand and meet the needs of queer women coping with violence (Balsam 2001; Renzetti
1992). Frameworks and strategies used by organizations located within the mainstream anti-
domestic violence movement are limited in their applicability to same-sex domestic violence.
Service providers often attempt to fit situations of sexual assault and domestic violence into a
feminist framework that argues that since men have more power than women in our culture, they
have increased ability and access to abuse that power (Renzetti and Miley 1996). While this
framework is applicable in many cases due to persistent social conditions of patriarchy, its
assumptions preclude meaningful consideration of same-gender violence. Anti-violence
agencies established within the mainstream feminist framework are oriented primarily toward
heterosexual violence in part because they are based on hetero-normative social theories and
7
research agendas. The overwhelming majority of domestic violence literature, both feminist and
nonfeminist, focuses on heterosexual couples, which limits its relevance for lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) populations.
Same-sex domestic violence poses challenges to mainstream feminist theory on domestic
violence. Specifically, same-sex domestic violence challenges the oversimplification of
participants roles in domestic violence that characterizes dominant theories. Most mainstream
journalistic and scholarly accounts would have us imagine that each participant in a violent
scenario inhabits one of two polarized and mutually exclusive roles: the perpetrator and the
victim. The attribution of these roles to participants is usually genderedwomen are
victims; men are perpetrators. Studies of same-sex domestic violence disrupt this
polarization by showing that womens roles in violence can be complicated. Women can inhabit
a multiplicity of roles in same-sex violent situations, and these roles can extend beyond or even
rupture the traditional victim-perpetrator categories (Marrujo and Kreger 1996).
Insights generated by scholarship on domestic violence depend largely upon where
scholars locate such behavior in the spectrum of behaviors referred to as violence. Scholars
take a range of positions on how intimate violence relates to other forms of violence and how it
is influenced by situational dynamics of gender and sexuality. Research on the nature and
sources of intimate violence suggests that it is different in important ways from other forms of
violence, warranting separate consideration and treatment (Avakame 1998). This argument is
supported by empirical data on homicide rates. Although overall homicide rates increased
between the 1970s and the 1990s, domestic homicide rates decreased by roughly one third,
indicating that separate explanations are required to explain these contrasting trends (Dugan et al
1999). Some have questioned the unique character of domestic violence, arguing that women are
8
as physically aggressive as men in situations of marital violence (Straus and Gelles 1986).
However, studies promoting this sexual symmetry theory have been criticized for failing to
account adequately for the situationally specific features of family violence, especially as shaped
by inequitable gender relations (Dobash et al. 1992).
Existing frameworks for understanding both same-sex and opposite-sex domestic
violence leave several issues unresolved. Persistent attempts to root out causes and to identify
effective means of preventing and deterring domestic violence have had mixed results. After law
enforcement was widely criticized in the 1970s for failing to take domestic violence seriously,
the influential Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (Sherman and Berk 1984) led states
and police departments nationwide to establish mandatory arrest policies. The National
Institutes of Justice funded several replication studies on the effectiveness of arrest for reducing
recidivism among domestic violence offenders, resulting in contradictory findings (Gelles 1993;
Mignon and Holmes 1995; Schmidt and Sherman 1993). Subsequent studies suggest that arrest
decreases recidivism among domestic violence offenders with a high stake in conformity
those who are employed and marriedbut increases recidivism among those who are not
(Sherman et al. 1992). One study found that although police officers were unlikely to arrest men
who batter their female partners, they were equally unlikely to arrest perpetrators of other types
of violence (Klinger 1995). This finding fails to support the leniency thesis of policing with
regard to domestic violence. However, it does not follow that police should not arrest when
domestic violence occurs simply because they do not often arrest when other types of violence
occur.
The most common methods of responding to domestic violence are not necessarily the
most effective. Emphases on protecting privacy and employing criminal justice approaches have
9
promoted a limited view of both causes and potential interventions. Families, neighbors, police,
the legal system, medical institutions and service providers often treat domestic violence as a
private matter between individuals. Yet it is not clear that the treatment of domestic violence as
a private, case-by-case problem leads to successful outcomes. Protection of privacy has been
identified as the leading reason for not reporting domestic violence to the police (Felson et al.
2002). Even when violent incidents are reported to police, criminal justice interventions are not
necessarily successful in reducing violence. One study found that post-incident follow-up visits
by police and social workers increased rates of reporting for domestic violence, but did not
reduce the number or severity of violent incidents (Davis and Taylor 1997). Dugan et al. (1999)
found that domestic violence services such as hotlines and legal services appear to reduce rates at
which wives murder their husbands, but not the rates at which husbands murder wives.
Treating domestic violence as a uniform problem without regard for its various social
contexts limits consideration of the full range of possible interventions. Mignon and Holmes
(1995), authors of a study on police response to mandatory arrest policies, make the following
criticism of the literature: Domestic violence situations are considered one phenomenon rather
than complex phenomena with differential motivations Deterrence studies typically do not
examine effects of such important factors as providing victims with shelter and financial
assistance (439). A comprehensive approach to rooting out the causes of domestic violence
must take into account the wide range of social factors that contribute to it and the needs and
perspectives of the individuals who experience and perpetrate violence.
Based on the failure rates of mandatory arrests, protection orders and diversion programs,
combined with the re-traumatizing characteristics of the criminal justice system, Koss (2000)
calls for wider adoption of communitarian justice approaches in the hope that dignity and
10
autonomy can be preserved for both perpetrators and victims. Community-based processes for
assessing and responding to violence may not only be more effective in reducing violent
incidents, but may also serve to break down the privacy, secrecy and isolation that often
surrounds domestic violence incidents.
This study asks whether different outcomes may be generated by involving the LBTIQ
womens community in developing strategies to address domestic violence than by treating it as
a private matter, or as one best handled with criminal justice resources. It may be easier for
marginalized groups such as LBTIQ women to develop innovations for addressing domestic
violence since they are not typically granted access to mainstream services and therefore are less
constrained by the traditions of mainstream approaches.
Researchers interested in informing public policy have often defined and conceptualized
violence in terms that make their scholarship both easier to incorporate into the existing criminal
justice system and more comfortable for funders to support (Jackman 2002). These factors shape
what forms of violence are studied and how violence is conceptualized. Considering the
influences of social policy, the criminal justice system and funding priorities, processes operating
outside the confines of traditional research may have greater potential to generate new
conceptions and formulate broader contextual understandings of domestic violence.
Community-based dialogue on violence against LBTIQ women, based in their own experiences
and self-defined social locations, is likely to generate different definitions and conceptions of
domestic violence, and violence in general, than has most scholarship on these topics. A
community organizing effort on the part of a marginalized group may constitute a site for
simultaneously challenging and informing mainstream theoretical and intervention models.

11
Same-sex domestic violence among women

Social dynamics of gender and sexuality, particularly of sexism and homophobia, are
significant contextual factors underlying lesbian domestic violence, same-sex domestic violence
services, and the scarcity of research on these topics. There are both similarities and important
differences between lesbian and heterosexual intimate abuse. While most agencies do not
currently document cases of same-sex abuse, feminist and lesbian researchers and activists, along
with their allies, have established that lesbian and gay battering are as problematic as is
heterosexual battering (Elliot 1996; Russo 1999). Although data vary on rates of same sex
domestic violence among women, it is probable that domestic violence occurs in 25 to 33 percent
of same-gender relationships; these percentages mirror estimates of domestic violence in
opposite-gender relationships (Renzetti 1992; Renzetti and Miley 1996; Ristock 2002). Same-
sex violence between LBTIQ women who are intimates has been called lesbian battering (Hart
1986; Lobel 1986; Russo 1999), same-sex domestic violence (Renzetti and Miley 1996), same-
gender abuse (McClennen and Gunther 1999), partner abuse (Renzetti 1992; Ristock 2002) and
sexual violence (Girshick 2002). Some of these labels highlight differences from opposite-sex
interpersonal violence and others highlight similarities to it.
Some of the important differences between the experiences of same-sex and heterosexual
intimate violence are due to the effects of social constructions of sexuality, particularly
homophobia. Social dynamics of gender, sexuality and homophobia play important roles both in
same-sex domestic violence and in efforts to address the problem. Same-sex domestic violence
occurs within a greater social context of homophobic physical and cultural violence against
LGBTIQ members of society (Balsam 2001). Violence toward LGBTIQ people includes but is
not limited to hate crime, gay-bashing, police brutality, sexual assault, and sexual abuse, as well
12
as same-sex domestic violence. The social marginalization of LGBTIQ people limits
institutional support for their intimate relationships, informal support from family and
coworkers, and access to service providers, the police, courts, and medical care. The laws in
many states do not protect victims of same-sex domestic violence (Fray-Witzer 1999).
Starting with the first-wave feminists of the nineteenth century, activists have raised
violence against women as a national issue. However, national discussion of violence toward
lesbians did not begin until 1978 when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a hearing on
women abuse in Washington, D.C. Against resistance from heterosexual members of the
battered womens movement, lesbian members met during the hearing to discuss two issues:
homophobia in the battered womens movement and lesbian battering (Hart 1986). Due to fears
of homophobic and anti-feminist backlash, the group of forty women kept a low profile for the
next few years. Public silence about lesbian battering was finally broken in 1983 when the
Lesbian Task Force of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence met and agreed to
publish an anthology of writings about lesbian violence by survivors, service providers and
academicsthe groundbreaking edited volume Naming the Violence (Lobel 1986).
Feminist researchers have historically resisted examining womens same-sex violence
because they anticipate that it will draw attention away from male violence and exacerbate
backlash against feminism and lesbian communities (Ristock 2002). Queer women themselves
have been justifiably reluctant to face the problem of lesbian domestic violence. They share this
reluctance with many disempowered communities struggling against institutionalized racism,
police brutality and poverty in addition to homophobia. Critical race theorists and feminists of
color have illuminated the complexity of outing the problem of violence in marginalized
communities (Crenshaw 1991). In a homophobic and heterosexist context, queer women fear
13
that public acknowledgement of lesbian abuse will increase homophobia as well as sexism,
racism, and classism by building on stereotypes of lesbians as deviant, violent and aggressive
(Renzetti 1992; Russo 1999). Many also fear that addressing the problem will divide already
disempowered communities and contribute to lesbians internalized homophobia (Russo 1999).
As a result of the relative silence about lesbian battering, queer women themselves may know
less about domestic violence in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual ones (McLaughlin and
Rozee 2001). Creation of a new organization addressing lesbian intimate violence as its core
issue offers a unique opportunity to investigate womens personal experiences of and responses
to violence within the three concentric worlds of LBTIQ womens interpersonal relationships,
the queer womens community, and a greater society characterized by pervasive homophobia.

CASE STUDY: A NEW COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION

Following a series of violent hate crimes, discussions in the Albuquerque LBTIQ
womens community revealed conflicts shaped by race, ethnicity and class as well as gender and
sexuality. Violence affecting LBTIQ women emanates both from outside the community and
from within lesbian relationships. The community as a whole calls for visibility of, safety from,
and accountability for violence. However, while some groups call for hate crimes legislation,
others, mainly LBTIQ women of color, argue that legislation substitutes for the more
fundamental cultural, institutional and personal changes required to end violence against, and
within, the lesbian community. Laws leading to increased incarceration disproportionately affect
communities of color, and accessing legal and law enforcement systems has often jeopardized,
rather than secured, the well-being of lesbians, transgender people and people of color.
14
In response to a call for new organizational mechanisms and strategies, the Albuquerque
Rape Crisis Center (ARCC) initiated a new community-based organization of LBTIQ women in
Spring 2002 with two primary goals: 1) increasing safety for lesbian, bisexual, transgender,
intersex and queer women and 2) creating alternatives to incarceration for queer women who are
perpetrators of violence.
2
Given these goals, the new group represents an ideal case study for
exploring how community organizing affects experiences of violence among LBTIQ women. As
a founding member of the group, I have been attending meetings since the groups inception in
Spring 2002. The groups decision-making processes and operations are characteristic of
womens community organizing in general. Discussions among group members have touched
on the importance of widespread societal homophobia and heterosexism as formative elements of
the various forms of violence that LBTIQ women experience and participate in. Discussions
have also touched on the complexity and multiplicity of individual queer womens roles in
domestic violence and other forms of violencephysical, psychological, structural and
otherwise. I have discussed my research ideas with the group and have invited them to help
design and conduct the study. They are receptive and expect that the research will help assess
community needs and document the organizations history.

Methodology

This study explores how members of the larger LBTIQ womens community define and
experience various forms of violence, the means by which the smaller organizing group
incorporates these definitions and experiences, and the degree of effectiveness with which it does
so. It also investigates whether and how individual members definitions and experiences of
2
Startup funding for the new organization has been provided by the Ms. Foundation.
15
violence evolve through participation in community organizing, and how the new organization
responds to the problem.
In order to ascertain participants self-descriptions of their experiences and to understand
the socially embedded meanings of their engagement with the community organizing process, I
am employing an ethnographic research approach. The primary means of data collection are
participant observation, interviews and document review. Combining these data collection
techniques allows me to check the accuracy of observations, interviews, and documents against
one another (Maxwell 1996). In order to allow time for the groups identity, mission and
programs to unfold, I am conducting several months of data collection. I am doing intensive
field observation in meetings and public events and recording discussions in detailed field notes,
using quotes wherever possible, in order to capture the microdynamics of group interactions. At
the same time I am transcribing interviews, reviewing organizational documents and writing in-
process and integrating memos (Emerson, Fretz and Shaw 1995), refining data collection and
analysis procedures as I go. Because information collected in the study is integral to the
community organizing effort, group members have input in determining the categories of
information collected.
Semi-structured interviews are being conducted with the most active members of the
organization. Participants are interviewed in-depth to ascertain their perspectives on violence in
the context of queer identity and relationships and to assess changes in perspective and identity
pertaining to problems of violence that may have occurred through participation in community
organizing. Interviewees are selected in order to best represent the composition of the
organization with regard to levels of involvement, ethnicity, age, gender expression, sexual
identity and experiences of violence.
16
With participants permission, interviews are recorded on digital video, transcribed and
analyzed using HyperResearch qualitative data analysis software. The use of digital video along
with data analysis software allows more in-depth engagement with the interviews than would
audio recordings or written transcripts alone. Having the interviewees actual words and body
language, as well as my own words and actions as the interviewer, reproduced on video tape aids
me in staying close to the data as I analyze, code and build theory from it.
To complement the participant observation and interviews, I am constructing an
organizational profile based on the groups organizational documents and publicity materials. I
am investigating the organizational relationship between the new organizations nonprofit
home (ARCC) and the organization itself to address how the agency contributes to and
benefits from the work of the community organization. I also examine how the two
organizations influence one another, and compare how an approach to violence that is
accountable to the queer womens community differs from traditional anti-violence approaches.
If funding permits I plan to visit existing anti-same-sex violence organizations in San Francisco,
Seattle, Boston and New York for purposes of comparison with the Albuquerque group.
Regarding my standpoint as researcher, my self-identification as a queer woman and full
membership in the group under study allow me access to interactions and activities that would be
denied to other researchers. Further, my experience with and respect for Albuquerque queer
womens culture enhances my analysis. To maintain a balance between access and sociological
objectivity, my field notes address my own assumptions, point of view, and the potential impact
of my involvement. I believe that maintaining openness with the group increases my access to
their insights and ultimately leads to more accurate data and conclusions.
17
The study will help gather and disseminate information needed to assess and respond to
violence affecting women who live in New Mexico and elsewhere. Although the research will
focus on ARCCs four-county service area, research outcomes could directly benefit
communities throughout the state and indirectly benefit communities in other states as well.
Information produced in the study may be useful to the group itself and to other organizations in
their work to reduce violence against women.

Preliminary Findings and Implications
The population addressed in this study differs in many ways from those addressed in the
limited literature on same-sex domestic violence, especially with regard to ethnicity, gender,
sexual identities and experiences of violence. The group has stated a commitment to maintain an
ethnically representative balance among its members, while similar organizations in other cities
have struggled to diversify only after establishing themselves with predominantly white
memberships (Grant 1999; Mndez 1996). With regard to gender and sexual identity, the group
includes a broader segment of the queer womens population in its membership than have
previous groups. Other organizations have focused on women who identify primarily as
lesbian per se, sometimes later making room for women who identify as bisexual, transgender
or other queer identities. Queer theory explains how activists and researchers use the concept of
queerness as part of a movement to dismantle polarized categories of gender and sexual
orientation (Butler 1999; Gamson 1995; Sedgwick 1990). In part because many group members
are younger women who sympathize with queer politics, the group includes in its constituency
women with a wide array of gender identities who self-identify in any non-heterosexual way.
18
The new group conceptualizes violence more broadly than have previous groups. As a
result its constituency is broader as well. Other organizations responding to same-sex violence
have incorporated primarily battered lesbians, or have intentionally excluded batterers
altogether from their memberships (Grant 1999). In contrast, the Albuquerque group seeks to
address violence as a community problem within a social context, and not as an individual,
pathological one. The group takes the position that because of the way we are all socialized with
respect to use of violence in exercising power and control, the abused and the abuser often
dwell within the same individual. As such, they intend to address simultaneously the needs and
accountability of abused women, abusers, and the larger community. The group plans to draw
upon the expertise and training resources of experienced anti-violence organizations such as the
Albuquerque Rape Crisis Center and the Esperanza family shelter in Santa Fe. Instead of
merely incorporating the insights and lessons shared by these organizations into its work, the
group is adapting them to its own context-based approach, incorporating pieces that are useful
while setting others aside as unnecessarily limiting. Rather than designing a new service agency,
the group intends to focus on conducting trainings for established agencies and holding them
accountable for delivering competent services to LBTIQ women dealing with violence.
Group members have explicitly adopted a comprehensive anti-oppression approach to
community organizing, devoting attention to dynamics of race, class, gender, age and physical
access, as well as internalized sexism and homophobia. The organization takes the position that
recognizing all oppressions and privileges increases the chance that problems such as violence
can be understood and challenged in their full complexity. Based on similar beliefs, a growing
number of organizations throughout the U.S. are attempting to adopt comprehensive anti-
oppression organizing models that deal with sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, ageism and
19
other dynamics simultaneously. This study allows exploration of an ambitious attempt to put
anti-oppression ideology into practice in an organization formed based on shared identities of
gender and sexual orientation.
Participants in the new community organization individually and collectively aim to
generate new responses to the distinct challenges posed by violence against queer women. The
group takes a contextual approach to same-sex violence, viewing the problem as as embedded in
intersecting racism, classism, ableism, sexism and homophobia. This intersectional approach
differentiates the group both from traditional feminist anti-violence institutions and from newer
organizations focused exclusively on lesbian violence. The anti-oppression community
organizing stance of the group reframes the question of what to do about same-sex domestic
violence. The new group explicitly rejects the route of attempting to adapt existing domestic
violence and rape crisis organizations designed to serve straight women who are recipients of
violence perpetrated by men. Instead, members of the group are attempting to use community
organizing strategies to draw definitions of the problem and potential resolutions, as well as
accountability, from members of the queer womens community itself. The community
organizing process aims to uncover, or perhaps more aptly to generate, new collective insights
about the realities of sexuality, relationships and violence in the lives of LBTIQ women, and to
formulate anti-violence measures that respond effectively to these distinctive realities.
This research contributes to a more complete picture of the construction of queer
womens sexualities and challenges the heterosexist bias in existing theories of domestic
violence. Some theories narrow our conceptions of womens sexualities by portraying womens
role in violence solely as that of the victim or survivor. As is true of other women, queer
womens genders and sexualities are indeed shaped by experiences of and resistance to violence
20
in the context of a patriarchal social system. However, queer womens sexualities are
constructed in the context of pervasive social homophobia, manifested directly in homophobic
violence toward queer women, and indirectly in the internalized sexism, misogyny, transphobia
and homophobia against which queer women must struggle to survive. These internalized
oppressions are sometimes turned outward in the form of queer womens violence, physical and
otherwise, toward one another. As this study proceeds, it will provide an analysis of how queer
women define their own sexualities in the context of homophobia as it intersects with sexism,
racism, classism and ableism, and how they respond individually and collectively to violence
both from outside and from within the community.
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