Jennifer Patterson - Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement

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Digital ISBN 978-1-62601-272-1

Print: ISBN 978-1-62601-273-8

Individual essays reprinted with permission from the author

First Edition April 2016

Queering Sexual Violence is the much-needed book that has been simmering within the "violence against women" movement for decades. These testimonies don't just break silence; they bust it wide open in order to redefine, resist, and reclaim the movement to end intimate violence. They dismantle the false binaries between genders, between consent and coercion, and even between survivor and perpetrator. Editor Jennifer Patterson has skillfully and lovingly assembled a stunning diversity of voices, centering trans and gender non-conforming people and folks of color. This book is essential for us all in finding the way toward a healthy sexuality movement and a post-sexual-violence future.

Minal Hajratwala, author & editor of Out! Stories from the New Queer India

"This book is a fierce tenderness. This book begins the hard work of not writing violence, but unwriting it, giving our bodies back to us, moving our voices from silence to song."

Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children, Dora and The Chronology of Water

"shame, silence, isolation, shame, silence, isolation again and again Ive witnessed this ternion of cyclical coercers hinder us from sharing our survivor wisdom and evolving a sustainable collective healing movement. On a bad day, I myself will surrender to the pervasive messages that tell me there is something desperately wrong the ways I love, heal, use my voice and come together with survivor communities. On a good day, I am handed a resource like Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti- Violence Movement. This remarkable anthology is a touchstone. It reminds us that both speaking up and hearing each other is an act of resistance; it is how we break shame, silence and isolation. This anthology is also a multi-voiced mentor, my understanding of healing from individual and systemic trauma evolved with each and every chapter."

Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

Queering Sexual Violence is the anthology I wish I'd had at 13, at 21, last week. When I was in an abusive relationship in my 20s, I searched through all the books in the library in vain looking for some book that showed my story- two queer, tattooed, non-binary people of color in a relationship full of love, freedom struggle, trauma and scary violence. Queering Sexual Violence gives voice to the stories of folks who know that queer sexual violence happens in youth lockup, immigration detention hold, our bedrooms and families, that the vision of the white, cis, straight, middle class non-sex working able-bodied "perfect victim" is killing us, and gives a space for our queer and trans brilliance and freedom dreams to breathe a future of true safety and justice into being."

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, Love Cake, co-editor, The Revolution Starts At Home

"One of the burdens of living in the margins of a culture is that recognition, if and when it finally comes, often comes in a voice not your own. It comes in the voice and language of the institutions and systems that have marginalized you. True visibility means self-representation and the most effective agents of social changebe they artists, activists, or editors of anthologiesunderstand this. This book brings a glorious chorus of voices from the queer community who are speaking for themselvesin story and ideology, poetry and polemicand it is as dazzling and devastating and various as I know such people to be. To simply call them survivors is reductive; they are warriors, artists, lovers, and intellectualsthey are my favorite kind of people: ones who have survived with grace and gumption, whose bodies and minds have suffered violence and who have responded by healing and speaking out, by opening their hearts and lives to show us that it is possible. This is not just survival; it is activism on the most intimate level. It is proof that we can live in a broken world without losing ourselves, and without giving up on it."

Melissa Febos, author of the memoir, Whip Smart, and the essay collection, Abandon Me

Violence disrupts. Out of fear, trauma, and a desire to clean up and re-package survivorship the anti-sexual violence movement/support industry has created categories, boundaries, and norms that erase the experiences of survivors of color, trans survivors, queer survivors, survivors with disabilities, and all marginalized survivors. Queering Sexual Violence is a refreshingly complex and ambitious anthology striving to make room for the full experiences of sexual violence. With an analysis of structural oppression and highlighting the explicit violence of the criminal legal system, this anthology is a powerful charge to the anti-sexual violence movement to address the harm and erasure that the professionalization of the movement has caused. As a black queer organizer I see this book as a powerful tool for movement building. As a black queer survivor I am so damn thankful.

Ejeris Dixon, Founding Director of Vision Change Win Consulting

"In a movement saturated by strictly heteronormative understandings of violence against women, Queering Sexual Violence is a watershed moment for those of us whose bodies have been pushed to the margins. This anthology urges us to build new and expansive ways to think about violence in our queer and trans lives - and each of the 35 contributors help lay the groundwork for moving that thinking forward. Reading this book as a survivor, I felt seenand as a longtime worker in the anti-violence against women non-profit world, I felt like Id finally been given the perspective Id been craving. This book records more than just a moment in our collective thoughts, it gives us the tools to think ourselves into a future in which we dismantle the systems that put us here in the first place.

Morgan M. Page, trans artist, activist, and cultural worker

"This is a dangerous, powerful anthology a new way of seeing and believing survivors without hiding our messy truths, our grief, and desires. Yes, this work queers sexual violence, but it also queers everything we know about healing. This book will change lives - I know it would have changed mine."

Leah Horlick, For Your Own Good

When our bodies and identities are sites of sexual violence and we have been denied the basic recognition of that which we have survived, Queering Sexual Violence is nothing short of life-saving testimony. To do the labor of truth telling, to weave the analysis born of the systemic erasure of ones survival, to tear down the binaries surrounding survivor-hood that we never consented to, these are the undeniable integrities we bear witness to in