Heteronormativity and as violence.pdf (121.8 kB)
Download fileHeteronormativity and/as violence: the "sexing" of Gwen Araujo
journal contribution
posted on 2014-08-18, 15:37 authored by Moya LloydThis paper will examine the violence of heteronormativity: the violence that constitutes and
regulates bodies according to normative notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. This violence,
I will argue, requires more than a focus on gendered or sexualized physical harms of the
kinds normally examined when studying violence against sexual minorities or women.
Rather, it necessitates focusing on the multiple modalities through which heteronormativity
performs its violence on, through, and against bodies and persons, including through the
production of certain bodies and persons as inciting violence in their very being. To establish
my argument, I explore the killing in 2002 of trans woman Gwen Araujo and the violence of
the legal strategy (the trans panic defense) used in the legal trials that followed her killing.
Both forms of violence, I suggest, operate in a similar way, albeit through different
mechanisms, to maintain and extend the system of binary morphology that itself entails the
perpetual violent materialization of sexed bodies.
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