ABSTRACT

If violence is crucial for producing and maintaining social order, then gender-based violence can be understood as crucial for the production and maintenance of gender. While the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (1992) defined gender-based violence as any kind of ‘violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately’ – including, but not limited to, sexual violence, domestic violence and intimate-partner violence – other understandings of gender-based violence consider it to be constitutive of regimes of gender. Gender-based violence effectively polices what are considered to be appropriate modes of femininity and masculinity, which means that such policing affects not only women, but everybody. In particular, trans people – those whose gender or sex identity or expression differs from normative expectations regarding assigned sex identity – face gender-based violence whose purpose is to ensure that everybody conforms to normative expectations about the distinctions between genders (see Doan, 2009, 2010; Merry, 2009).