Violence against LGBTQ individuals takes a similar shape to the targeted violence against women the WPS architecture has long worked to address. Of the utmost importance to recognizing gendered vulnerabilities is understanding how an individual's multiple social identities compound the risk of violence against them. For example, the UN Human Rights Council report regarding violence against individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity explains: 'Lesbians and transgender women are at a particular risk because of gender inequality and power relations within families and wider society.' 5 Carol Cohn notes that 'gender is, at its heart, a structural power relation'. 6 Gendered power relations drive homophobic and transphobic violence in similar ways to the now well-documented systemic use of rape as a weapon of war in some conflict-related environments.Queer theory, a term coined in the early 1990s, draws from the fields of literary criticism and post-structuralist philosophy 'to emphasize deviance and unstable sexualities and question established norms, categories, and orders'. 7 Using a queer lens to understand global SGBV remains a fringe approach within international relations. Cynthia Weber describes how scholars outside the traditional International Relations discipline have been made into 'intellectual immigrants', explaining:The poorest neighborhoods of IR have always been those populated by new intellectual immigrants to IR. These include Marxists, poststructuralists, feminists, critical race scholars, postcolonial scholars, critical studies scholars and queer scholars. These scholars are poor because they wield the least disciplinary capital in IR. This is because their analyses deviate from an exclusive focus on 'the states-system, the diplomatic community itself ' and because they refuse Disciplinary IR's epistemological and methodological claims about knowledge collection and accumulation. 8 6 Carol Cohn, 'Women and wars: toward a conceptual framework', in Carol Cohn, ed., Women and wars
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.