Developing the "Oppression-to-Incarceration Cycle" of Black American and First Nations Australian Trans Women: Applying the Intersectionality Research for Transgender Health Justice Framework

Trans women are disproportionately incarcerated in the United States and Australia relative to the general population. Stark racial and ethnic disparities in incarceration rates mean that Black American and First Nations Australian trans women are overrepresented in incarceration relative to White and non-Indigenous cisgender and trans people. Informed by the Intersectionality Research for Transgender Health Justice (IRTHJ) framework, the current study drew upon lived experiences of Black American and First Nations Australian trans women to develop a conceptual model demonstrating how interlocking forces of oppression inform, maintain, and exacerbate pathways to incarceration and postrelease experiences. Using a flexible, iterative, and reflexive thematic analytic approach, we analyzed qualitative data from 12 semistructured interviews with formerly incarcerated trans women who had been incarcerated in sex-segregated male facilities. Three primary domains-pathways to incarceration, experiences during incarceration, and postrelease experiences-were used to develop the "oppression-to-incarceration cycle." This study represents a novel application of the IRTHJ framework that seeks to name intersecting power relations, disrupt the status quo, and center embodied knowledge in the lived realities of formerly incarcerated Black American and First Nations Australian trans women.

The Cauxin-femme binary: Femme performativity as a response to violence in Guyana

The Caribbean region has a long history of violence and conflict due to colonization and contemporary neocolonial policies and structures. The region's political, economic, and social climate is overshadowed by activism that centers legal repeal of homophobic laws left intact by colonial powers. These movements have created a polarization between the mainstream groups seeking legal changes, and those who are denied and erased from these discourses. This article is an examination of lesbian, bisexual, queer and gay women of mixed-race middle-class status in the city of Georgetown, Guyana as they negotiate racialized heteropatriarchal violence, a space that offers a unique place in which to understand how different queer subjects experience violence within Guyana. This article examines a set of interrelated questions: In what ways do women who love women perceive their gender performances? In what ways is femme-ness embodied to resist violence and yet is a site of violence? The analysis reveals the ways in which women embody a strategic femme-ness in a political, racial, class, and gender hierarchical society. As the country becomes increasingly incorporated into a global queer culture, divisions within the queer community are further sharpened, with racial, class, sexual, gender, and regional boundaries shifting and forging new lived realities for queer subjects.