Gender-based violence as a worldwide phenomenon is deeply rooted in society’s social, political, and economic structures. Scholars studying gender-based violence tend to focus on women’s (heterosexual) and children’s experiences of violence within different contexts. Preity Kumar’s work adds to this transnational theorizing and discussion of violence by placing the experiences of women-loving-women (WLW) in Guyana into a larger context of coloniality, statecraft, cultural, and political discourses to illustrate how violence is enacted and experienced by WLW.

While Kumar’s work examines the state production of violence against women loving women, it focuses on how women embody and enact intimate partner violence against their partners. Ultimately, this work advocates for a more nuanced intersectional and multi-scalar approach involving community members, mental health advocates, academic institutions, and future researchers to tackle and eliminate violence in Guyana. This project will aid in creating and developing campaigns and LGBTQ human rights programs that seek to center grassroots activism to address the needs of the LBGTQ community in Guyana.