What is Sexualized Violence? Intersectional Readings uses an intersectional, queer, and subject-oriented approach to examine how societies constitute subjects as abilized and vulnerabilized with respect to sexualized violence.

Contributing to our thinking about the dynamic relationship between social structure, subject formation, intersubjectivity, and violence, this text deploys an intersectional reading to engage with the complex social topography that both offers and imposes violence as a socially mediated practice. Instead of discussing one particular group at the intersection of race and gender, this book discusses the constitution of positionalities through systems of oppression and includes racialization, gender, sexuality, disability, and age. Moreover, the text is also interested in explicitly engaging with how the history of disciplines, institutions, and organizations contributed to the current constitution of opportunities for violence. It gives us modes of thinking to confront sexualized violence as a social problem and challenge the discourses and social structures that uphold it.

This book is meant to offer questions and approaches for students and scholars, practitioners and policy makers, and survivors of sexualized violence who have an interest in an intersectional perspective on sexualized violence.

Jana Schäfer is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany. Her research interests include gender and queer studies, intersectionality, migration and mobility, post- and de-colonial theory, sociological theory, and the sociology of violence.