Once more with feeling: queer activist legal scholarship and jurisprudence

Abstract

Scholars and activists concerned with eliminating violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people have generated passionate conversations about pursuing law reform to make injuries, intimacies, and identities visible while challenging how legal systems continue to marginalise queers. My paper contributes to these conversations by using emotion as an analytic register to navigate the ways case law seeks to 'progress' the intimacies and identities of LGBTI people from positions of injury. In doing so, I introduce a new approach to queer activist legal scholarship by reading emotion in law on two levels: I target its enactment in what I call 'pro-LGBTI cases' and it forms the register in which I pursue my evaluation of those cases. Rather than develop this analysis around specific doctrines or jurisdictions, I create my own activist-scholarly narrative by reading emotions through their enactments in pro-LGBTI cases that cross various sub-disciplines of law. From hate crime laws to marriage equality cases, this paper navigates competing emotions, such as hate and love, which simultaneously structure legal progress. Reading emotion enables us to address how legal recognition and visibility can work, paradoxically, to cover the queer injuries, intimacies, and identities they seek to address.

Legally Affective: Mapping the Emotional Grammar of LGBT Rights in Law School

“…These differences in emotional orientation, however, are not static or mutually exclusive. They reflect varying emotional attachments, such as feminist scholarly aspirations that seek to understand and challenge how gender is socially conceptualised, structured, and hierarchised (MacKinnon 1989 ; Conaghan 2013 ), and queer theoretical desires to expose how social norms organise and marginalise bodies, relationships, and identities (Zanghellini 2014 ; Raj 2018a ). Unsurprisingly then, ‘women’ (gender) and ‘LGBT people’ (sexuality) are affective subjects of concern in feminist and queer research.…”

“…Queer engagements with sexuality have explored how desire is turned into an object of legal regulation (such as criminalisation of homosexuality) through political, historical, and national discourses (such as monogamy, nationalism, and reproduction) (Foucault 1978 ; Rubin 1984 ; Berlant 1997 ). Such objects of study emerge through scholarly desires to expose heteronormativity and make space for non-normative sexual communities (such as the decriminalisation of homosexuality or affirmation of non-monogamous relationships) (Love 2009 ; Muñoz 2009 ; Raj 2018a ).…”

A poisoned Chalice: homophobia and codes of conduct

“…The dogmatism of the occidental homophobia was one of the colonial exports to Africa, East Asia and the Americas as shown in Ávarez-Gayouand Jurgenson’s (1997), Haskins (2014), Fernandes’ (2014), Oloka-Onyango’s (2015), Lee’s (2016) and Hernández and PujolTarrés (2016) elaborations. It must therefore be questioned whether a continued enforcement of occidental law by colonial states and settler colonial states (Chase, 2012; Rahman, 2014; Raj, 2018), or a strengthening of indigenous nations and their conceptions of law (Hemmings, 2007; Lee, 2016) offers the more promising path forward when homophobia is addressed.…”