This paper argues that current iterations of LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) rights are limited by an overreliance on particular representations of sexuality, in which homosexuality is defined negatively through a binary of homosexual/heterosexual. The limits of these representations are explored in order to unpick the possibility of engaging in a form of sexuality politics that is grounded in difference rather than in sameness or opposition. The paper seeks to respond to Braidotti's call for an "affirmative politics" that is open to forms of creative, future-oriented action and that might serve to answer some of the more common criticisms of current LGBTI rights activism.
This reflection draws upon two recent 'moments' in British sexuality politics-a series of Parliamentary debates on Global LGBT rights and Brighton Pride's campaign to 'Highlight Global LGBT Communities'. It contrasts these two moments in order to demonstrate how, at a time when LGBT rights have ostensibly been 'won' in the UK, there is an increasing tendency to shift focus to the persecution of SOGI minorities elsewhere in the world. This shift in focus sets up a binary of here versus there that is politically persuasive but ultimately limited and limiting. By reflecting on the way that this growing trend of creating sexual politics elsewhere occurs in two very different locations in British politics and activism, we seek to begin a conversation about the relational affects of placing sexual politics 'elsewhere'.
This article considers the extent to which human rights mechanisms can ameliorate intersex rights at a sub-national, or medico-local, level. It engages with both intersex activism and the academy where the United Nations (UN) has become understood as a key mechanism through which to challenge day-to-day practices of healthcare practitioners and bring an end to nontherapeutic surgical and hormonal interventions on intersex infants and children. Using the UK as an example, this article examines how and why the UN’s engagement with intersex has had little effect on the medical regulation of intersex people. To do so, the article draws on legal geography to examine how scale prevents the UN from having a clear and lasting impact on domestic issues – particularly those in healthcare settings. The different ways in which intersex bodies are recognised and regulated at different scales, coupled with the UN’s inability to form dialogue with the institutions of the state, such as the healthcare profession, are problematic barriers to challenge practice at the medico-local scale.
Past and future coalesce in discussions of LGBTI rights, often embedded in narratives of progress, civilisation, colonisation and emancipation. An understanding of these dynamics can help to illuminate the complex power relations that currently striate international LGBTI rights discourses. This paper analyses how temporality operates in the context of international LGBTI rights through an examination of the World Bank's withdrawal of a $90 million loan to Uganda after the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014. To do this, the paper juxtaposes postcolonial critiques of the ongoing international legal reproduction of the colonial encounter, with a Deleuzian conception of law's 'virtual memory'. These two theoretical lenses are used to show how attempts to advance LGBTI rights can reproduce problematic civilisational binaries, through which the Global North seeks to manage the unruly or 'uncivilized' Global South. These civilisational and spatial dichotomies are often obscured by un-interrogated 'grand narratives' of progress and by the codification of specific, narrow forms of rights protections. As such, the paper argues that in order to better advance current and future frameworks for sexual orientation and gender identity justice, we must undertake a more attentive encounter with the past.
Please cite the published version https://e-space.mmu.ac.ukLGBTQIAA+ 5 community, nor is it simply a designation of non-normative identities or behaviours. Instead, following Colebrook, conditions of the queer are those which expose how 'the normal is achieved, produced, effected and also, therefore exposed as contingent, constituted and open to change'. 6 Queerness is not simply about disrupting norms or categories of identity. It requires the repetition of previously unquestioned categories, norms, 'doxa' and assumptions, in new forms that challenge the 'laziness of common sense' 7 and explore the unacknowledged potentialities contained within. Thus the queer, postcolonial and spatiotemporal analysis in this chapter seeks to expose how colonially produced hierarchies and inequalities exist in the present and limit possibilities for future action. This approach views 'inside' and 'outside' in space, time and law as unfixed, but structurally interdependent, and seeks to think how these structurally interdependent relations could configure new possibilities for action.The chapter first considers how the queer legacy of colonialism must necessarily contend with colonialityor its denialand the legal implications of this. It then traces one instance of how this manifests through a close analysis of a House of Commons backbench debate on 'GlobalLGBT Rights'. Spatio-temporal irregularities within the debate are used to identify the presence of paradox at the heart of UK approaches to LGBT rights. The final section of the chapter uses Deleuzian scholarship of paradox to analyse how dichotomies of space, time, identity and law, that developed from the colonial encounter continue to structure and limit UK approaches to Global LGBT rights. For Deleuze, paradoxes are simultaneously moments of impasse and moments when our assumptions and axioms are revealed as limited and lacking. This revelation demands a re-working of those assumptions, opening up creative and radical 5 A variety of abbreviations -LGBT, LGBTI, LGBTQI among othersare used in the literature. In this chapter, I use the formulation that is most appropriate to the point under discussion.
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