Sexual Violence, Female Masculinity, and the Interpretation of Harm
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. Large North American surveys consistently report high rates of sexual assault among transmen, yet these experiences are rarely examined as problems of interpretation, knowledge, and social pattern.
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. A central concern is what happens when existing categories do not fully explain the harm.
My MA research 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. In my socio-legal writing, I examine how courts must recognise the complainant and interpret the violence at the same time. The point is not to withdraw recognition, but to ask what fuller recognition requires when one interpretive frame is asked to do explanatory work it cannot do alone.
My PhD research will extend 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 into conversation. The larger aim is to understand how categories such as sex, gender identity, female masculinity, victimhood, and vulnerability shape whether sexual violence is recognised as socially patterned rather than only as 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)
