Reclaiming power

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0006
• Published date: 22 December 2022
• Date: 22 December 2022
• Pages: 6-32
• Author: Preity Kumar
• Subject Matter: Women loving women,violence,Guyana,intimate partner violence,Caribbean,heteronormativity

Journal of Indentureship 2.2 December 2022

Reclaiming power

Women loving women and intimate

partner violence in Guyana

PreityKumar

PreityKumaris anassistant professor in the Department of

Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island, USA.

ABSTRACT

Intimate partner violence against women and children is a growing

concern for feminist scholarship in the Anglophone Caribbean. This

scholarship is signicant in challenging patriarchal gender ideologies

at the intersections of race, class and sexuality. This body of work

reveals how violence is embedded in the state and governmental

bodies, and highlights the overall disparities in the implementation

of laws. Furthermore, this work demonstrates how neoliberal re-

structuring policies implicate and affect women differently based on

their positionality. While this work is critical in addressing intimate

partner violence against women and children, the LGBTQ commu-

nity in the region has remained vulnerable to violence at multiple

levels of society. This article contributes to this work by focusing

on same-sex intimate partner violence between women in Guyana.

The aim of this article is twofold: rst, to map out the traditional

gendered framing of violence against heterosexual and women lov-

ing women; second, to argue that in Guyana’s context of persistent

social, political and economic inequalities, women loving women use

violence as a resource of resolution to reclaim and secure power.

KEYWORDS

Women loving women, violence, Guyana, intimate partner violence,

Caribbean, heteronormativity

DOI:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0006

RECLAIMING POWER 7

Journal of Indentureship 2.2 December 2022

INTRODUCTION

Despite more than fifty years of independence, colonial violence

is a significant feature in post-colonial Guyana’s political and cul-

tural fabric. The history of slavery and indentured servitude has

created racial, gender, class and sexual hierarchies maintained by

violence. Gender and sexual-based violence, violence against chil-

dren, and ethnopolitical violence that currently shape Guyanese

society are remnants of its colonial past. For example, Guyana’s

cross-dressing and buggery laws, relics of British colonialism, not

only prohibit same-sex relationships between consenting persons

but serve to legitimize various forms of discrimination against

LGBTQ people. Media accounts have highlighted Guyana’s cross-

dressing law as the country’s primary driver of homophobia and

transphobia.1 In 2018, the Caribbean Court of Justice ordered

that Guyana’s cross-dressing law be removed as unconstitutional.

This moment represented a legal and political gain for the local

LGBTQ community, yet intimate personal violence within the

community remains invisible.

While there are a few glimpses of women loving women’s

(WLW)2 experiences of violence from heteropatriarchal state

structures and men, intimate partner violence between women is

not part of the public discourse. This results in a lack of an under-

standing of how historical, social, political and geographical

conditions shape LGBTQ women’s experiences of violence in the

country. This article aims to map out these complex dimensions

that shape contemporary forms of violence experienced by WLW

in Guyana. Taking an intersectional approach,3 this article consid-

ers multiple power structures and how they interact with the social

categories of race, gender, class and sexuality. This approach shows

how women desiring women experience and perpetrate intimate

partner violence (WLWIPV). This article argues that situated