Current anti-violence efforts work to reduce violence against identity groups, such as people of color, women, and LGBT people. However, what if mainstream approaches have unintended consequences that run counter to the goal of making lives more livable? In this talk, Dr. Laurel Westbrook draws on the findings from their book on the transgender rights movement in the United States to explore this very question. Westbrook finds that the most common ways of trying to reduce violence against transgender people in the United States can be unintentionally damaging to the very group they aim to protect. This talk details these pitfalls and explores alternative ways of reducing violence against transgender people and making more lives livable, with a focus on highlighting and nurturing transgender joy.
About Dr. Laurel Westbrook:
Laurel Westbrook is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research focuses on gender, sexuality, race, violence, and social movements. They are the author of Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism (University of California Press), and co-editor of Introducing the New Sexuality Studies: Original Essays (Routledge). Their scholarship has also been published in Social Problems, Gender & Society, and Sexualities, among other journals, and has been recognized with multiple awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. They are co-founder and former co-chair of Sociologists for Trans Justice.
Can you tell us about your current position?
Starting in Fall of 2025, I will be a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am very excited to be joining the excellent faculty at UCSB, a department long known for excellent scholarship on gender, sexuality, and race. I earned my PhD in Sociology in 2009 from the University of California, Berkeley. I then joined the faculty in the Sociology Department at Grand Valley State University, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It has been an honor to work with my wonderful colleagues and teach our fantastic students for the last 16 years.
What is your current research?
I study the inner workings of the sex/gender/sexuality system, which means I study gender, sexuality, and the ways that these systems are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. I believe that one cannot truly understand those systems without also attending to race, so I also focus on how race as a system intersects with gender and sexuality. In my first book, I examined identity-based anti-violence activism, including anti-violence activism done on behalf of lesbians, gay men, bisexual people, women, and people of color, with a particular focus on transgender anti- violence activism.
The analysis in my first book revealed two major pitfalls in work to address violence against transgender people:
1) A failure to attend to patterns of violence which can be used to construct effective violence prevention policies and practices;
2) tendency to only focus on violence against, and the misery of, transgender people, ignoring the joys of being transgender.
Only telling a pain narrative about transgender people, as well as other historically marginalized groups, runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and ends up harming the very groups we are working to protect. My most recent work focuses on redressing those pitfalls, including a collaborative project on transgender joy, with stef shuster (Michigan State University) and a solo project examining patterns in fatal violence against transgender people in the United States from 1990 to the present. This is the topic of my next book, titled The Matrix of Violence: Violence Against Transgender People in the United States. Findings from all of these projects will be presented in my talk.
The Trans Studies lecture was established in 2021, growing out of a Trans Summit hosted by the Division of Diversity and the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies in 2019. This year’s lecturer is Dr. Laurel Westbrook. Dr. Laurel Westbrook is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research focuses on gender, sexuality, race, violence, and social movements. They are the author of Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism (University of California Press), and co-editor of Introducing the New Sexuality Studies: Original Essays (Routledge). Their scholarship has also been published in Social Problems, Gender & Society, and Sexualities, among other journals, and has been recognized with multiple awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. They are co-founder and former co-chair of Sociologists for Trans Justice. ((In this talk, Dr. Westbrook draws on the findings from their book on the transgender rights movement in the United States and their research on trans joy to examine unintended consequences of anti-violence activism. This talk will explore alternative ways of reducing violence against transgender people and making more lives livable, with a focus on highlighting and nurturing transgender joy.))