| Summary: | Despite an increase in the attention paid to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) which occurs within Queer relationships, men who encounter relationship violence from their male romantic partners remain an under-research minority in wider victimological scholarship. My thesis aims to address this dearth in extant scholarship through a qualitative investigation of the experiences of Queer male victims of IPV violence within the United Kingdom. More specifically, my work examines how these men make sense of their experiences of victimhood and forge new social identities in the aftermath of their victimisation. In this way, my work aims to address the gap in existing victimological scholarship which has so far failed to address Queer male IPV victimisation from a phenomenological perspective and to consider the role that narrative may play in their experiences of victimisation. In exploring this topic, my thesis draws on the findings of a large-scale online qualitative survey and in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with Queer men who have experienced IPV from their current and former romantic partners. My findings suggest that these men initially understood their experiences of victimisation through a narrative of committed intimate romance and that this narrative eventually broke down as the men grappled with the stigma of victimisation which calls both their masculinity and their ability to find romantic companionship into question. This eventually resulted in an assault on their sense of self which shattered their understanding of their world and created a sense of narrative collapse, which required the men to generate new narratives of incorporation which integrated the victimising event into a newly forged sense of self. In this way, my thesis addresses a clear gap in current victimological scholarship and provides a much-needed contribution to the growing field of narrative victimology.
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