Violent Entanglements: Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTIQ + People’s Relationships

Abstract Purpose This article analyzes violence and abuse in LGBTIQ + people’s former relationships. Combining assemblage theory with intersectionality, it rethinks queer and feminist understandings by analyzing intimate partner violence as assemblages. This offers a nuanced approach that does not rely on simplistic causal models. Methods The article draws on a dataset of interviews with separated LGBTIQ + people, 30 in Finland and 28 in England. It focuses on 13 interviewees who gave accounts of mental, physical, and sexual violence within previous relationships. Following a Deleuze-inspired rhizomatic methodology, the analysis “enters in the middle” of complex abusive assemblages and identifies the most central elements and affective entanglements that helped to maintain and/or diminish the abuse. Results Assemblages that engender and maintain abuse are complex and multiple. Nevertheless, they are not random: the rhizomatic workings of heteronormativity, the social status of LGBTIQ + relationships, and gender-related elements entangle in assemblages that amplify the effects of abuse and constrain participants’ bodies. Conclusions Abuse in LGBTIQ + people’s relationships can be understood through the posthuman theoretical idea of distributed agency: abuse gains force in and through its entanglements with other elements within an assemblage. This does not absolve abusive persons of responsibility for their actions. Rather, it reveals that the efficacy of agency depends on the interactive forces and elements within an assemblage. Abuse and violence often accumulate, as the exposure of bodies to injurious conditions produces affective relations that can become patterned in LGBTIQ + people’s lives.