Description
Intimate partner and domestic violence is not sufficiently interrogated and, when it is discussed, queer people’s experiences remain sidelined. To address this gap, this article focuses on queer people’s experiences to examine the productive and destructive capacity of intimate partner and domestic violence through the lens of thingification. In particular, the article centres the relationship between violence and thingification in the context of Black studies and queer theory. Drawing on Hortense Spillers (1987), Mel Y. Chen (2012) and José Esteban Muñoz’s (2015) work, I examine the practices and discourses used to dehumanise people through an emphasis and attack on their (body) parts. The article explores how people are made into objects, the implications of this for conceptions of humanity and violence, and, particularly, the place and role of different body parts within thingification. I foreground how body parts – such as orifices and hair – are racialised, sexualised, gendered and queered through racialised heteropatriarchal imaginaries and how this serves to objectify or thingify people. To do so, the article centres racialised and queer people and their experiences of violence. I draw on in-depth interviews and ethnography conducted in 2024 with queer people who were unhoused as a result of experiences of intimate partner and domestic violence in Cape Town, South Africa. The article is grounded in queer people’s retellings of their experiences of intimate partner and domestic violence, its relation to other forms of exclusion and violence, and, crucially, the way in which such violence targeted and emphasised specific body parts. I contribute to the literature on practices of dehumanisation and thingification by foregrounding how people are broken down into pieces, made into (partial) objects through a fixation on certain (body) parts, and crucially, how such objecthood is performed to imagine new conceptions of humanness and objecthood.
