Collective healing within queer paradoxes: deconstructing emotional abuse in LGBTQ2SIA* communities to cultivate more accountable and compassionate worlds

Emotional abuses within LGBTQ2SIA* communities are rarely acknowledged as existing or often normalized. Through care and anti-oppression works, transformative justice models such as community and self-accountability have helped carve out ways of addressing harm directly and breaking cycles of violence. The research in this thesis has been through mixed qualitative methodologies including semi-structured interviews and surveys. The participants' along with other authors, artists, activists and scholars’ narratives draws upon the experiences of emotional abuse lived within structural and social surveillance. The settler colonial state sanctioned projects have responded to harm by perpetuating violence upon those most marginalized. Deconstructing emotional abuse demands the abolishment of such structures and a recentering of self and community accountability processes within transformative justice utilizing concepts of critically queering to frame care and anti-oppression work. While this research paper addresses how emotional abuses in LGBTQ2SIA* communities are lived and can be addressed, the reader is also given information on how this research can be made more accessible and transformed into what participants have shared for future and current care work.