Sexual Violence, Female Masculinity, and Epistemic Substitution
I am an incoming PhD student in Sociology at McGill University.
My research examines the epistemology of sexual violence against transmen: how such violence becomes knowable, intelligible, believable, and institutionally recognisable. My MA work developed this question through feminist narrative inquiry and socio-legal analysis, examining survivor discourse and legal interpretation as sites where sexual violence is narrated, recognised, misread, or made difficult to explain.
A central concept in this work is epistemic substitution: a process in which one interpretive frame overextends itself and is asked to do explanatory work it cannot do alone. I developed this concept through an analysis of sexual-assault adjudication, where courts must recognise the complainant and interpret the harm at the same time. The point is not to withdraw recognition, but to ask what better recognition requires when available categories do not fully explain what happened.
Large North American surveys consistently report high rates of sexual assault among transmen, yet these experiences are rarely examined as problems of interpretation or knowledge. My work asks how transmen make sense of sexual violence in their own terms, and how social conditions such as family dependence, economic precarity, religious regulation, housing insecurity, gender nonconformity, and institutional non-recognition shape vulnerability across the life course.
My PhD research will extend and refine this framework through a larger qualitative study of sexual violence against transmen. It will bring social epistemology, sociology of knowledge, classification studies, feminist rape theory, and scholarship on female masculinity more fully into conversation, asking how categories such as sex, gender identity, female masculinity, victimhood, vulnerability, and institutional recognition shape the interpretation of sexual violence as socially patterned rather than only an individual event.
Professional Backround
Before becoming a graduate researcher, I worked as a Registered Nurse specializing in psychiatric care, with experience across acute, tertiary, community, and educational settings. My roles included psychiatric stabilization, tertiary eating-disorder treatment, youth mental health, clinical supervision, and psychiatric-nursing education.
This clinical background informs my research on trauma, narrative, and recognition. Psychiatric nursing requires close attention to how people make sense of overwhelming experiences: what can be said, what remains fragmented, and how the listener shapes what becomes speakable.
My academic work extends this clinical attention to listening, meaning-making, and interpretation. Across both nursing and scholarship, I am interested in how people give form to difficult experience, and how institutions respond when that experience does not fit familiar categories.
Profiles:
Public Statement (February 2025)
