Sexual Violence Wrong(ed) Bodies and Global Politics

This book explores how sexual violence operates within and beyond the gender binary to produce hierarchies of harm, visibility, and humanity.

Building on insights from Sexual Violence Against Men in Global Politics (2018), it advances the concept of wrong(ed) bodies to capture how certain identities—queer, racialized, feminized, or otherwise non-normative—are simultaneously constructed as deviant and rendered vulnerable to violence. Scholars from international relations, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychology examine how sexual violence is narrated, counted, denied, and instrumentalized across a range of contexts: from prisons and warzones to medical institutions and refugee experiences. By foregrounding how heteronormativity, coloniality, and racial hierarchies shape these processes, the collection moves beyond victim typologies to ask how knowledge itself participates in the reproduction of violence. The book reframes sexual violence as a global political condition—a tragedy not only of bodily violation but of the epistemic and moral frameworks that dictate which bodies are seen, protected, or forgotten.

Accessible, informative, theoretically current, and innovative it will appeal to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, academics, researchers, practitioners, policy makers, activists and the wider community.