Review of “Violent Differences: The Importance of Race in Sexual Assault Against Queer Men”

Abstract

Whose experiences of sexual violence guide our theories? Whose voices shape our visions for social transformation? These are the political and theoretical questions at the center of Doug Meyer’s important book, Violent Differences: The Importance of Race in Sexual Assault Against Queer Men. Throughout the book, Meyer builds an intersectional analysis of sexual violence grounded in queer male survivors’ experiences of assault, with a focus on the complex nexus of race and sexuality. The goal of the book is to decenter whiteness and heterosexuality in research and policy related to sexual violence, and Meyer is successful in showing the audience how this should be done. Woven throughout the text are survivors’ empathetically presented stories, which manage to stand on their own as theoretical statements. But Meyer’s own intersectional analytic is also strong throughout, showing that we cannot understand sexual violence without careful attention of victims’ structural vulnerabilities. Meyer builds on feminist intersectional scholarship to show that experiences of violence are not evenly distributed across social groups; rather, the harms of intimate violence are concentrated in particular social locations, with devastating consequences for the reproduction of racial and sexual inequality.