Reclaiming power

Abstract

Intimate partner violence against women and children is a growing concern for feminist scholarship in the Anglophone Caribbean. This scholarship is significant 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 restructuring 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 community 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: first, to map out the traditional gendered framing of violence against heterosexual and women loving 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.