Description
Despite its prevalence and impact, limited attention has been paid to domestic violence within the discipline and practice of IR and, in particularly, as it is experienced within queer relationships. However, within this context, the international human rights framework on gender-based violence has been instrumental in leading the narrative created and shaping the policy and programmatic responses at the regional and national levels to domestic violence. Though this has advanced the work on domestic violence, contestations in the international realm surrounding gender, sexuality and race have created a conceptualization of domestic violence which is narrow. This paper combines ethnographic research conducted in South Africa and the United Kingdom with queer people who have experienced domestic violence, with a poststructural policy analysis of the international policy framework centred on domestic violence. In doing so, it lays bare the silences and effects of the current conceptualization of domestic violence within the UN system – including the precedence given to heteronormative relationships and marriage, the dismissal of the interconnectivity of homophobia, transphobia and racism with how domestic violence is experienced, and the neglect of queer peoples’ needs in addressing the problem.
