Domestic violence and companion animals in the context of LGBT people’s relationships

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publications in Sexualities, available online: http:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/ full/10.1177/1363460716681476 This manuscript version is made available under the CCBY- NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The link between domestic violence and animal abuse has now been well established, indicating that where there is one form of abuse, there is often the other. Research on this link, however, has almost exclusively focused on heterosexual cisgender people’s relationships. Lacking, then, is an exploration of the possibly unique links between domestic violence and animal abuse in the context of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people’s relationships. In this article we adopt a feminist intersectional approach informed by Critical Animal Studies to advocate for a non-pathologising approach to understanding LGBT people’s relationships with regard to the link between domestic violence and animal abuse