Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks

Abstract

Skilfully assembled and edited by Dianne Otto, Queering International Law is a collection of papers that exemplifies what Anne Orford and Florian Hoffman have recently described as one of the most exciting aspects of new research in international legal scholarship: 'thinking in innovative ways about the relation between the theory, history, and practice of international law'. 1 The collection is the product of a legal theory workshop inspired and organized by Otto in 2015 at the Melbourne Law School to 'promote a better understanding of the complicities and compromises that engagement with power, in the form of international law, may extract' (at 9). Traces of Otto's rich body of scholarship and her infectious commitment to international law as a project that has the potential to deliver 'a more egalitarian, inclusive, peaceful, just and redistributive international order' are discernible in each of the contributions, which, nonetheless, maintain their own distinct voice and perspective. Otto is a master of fostering intellectual exchange and, thus, Queering International Law can also be read as a densely packed conversation between and among legal scholars who share Otto's ability to work across different methodological and theoretical traditions and who do not cower from engaging with extra-legal material.The title of the collection immediately provokes a number of questions: What does queering international law entail; what can it contribute to the discipline; how, if at all, can international law be queered? Otto does not keep us in suspense for long and, in her lucid introduction, begins to answer our questions while preparing us for what is to follow conceptually and methodologically. Queer theory, she emphasizes, is more than simply about normative inclusion (at 1); rather (and to paraphrase Otto), it is an alternative critical method that, in reframing legal problems through the analytic prism of sexuality, sheds further light on the conceptual and analytic underpinnings of international law, thereby introducing the possibility to craft new solutions.Otto is at her best when grappling with what critical engagement entails. She does so with a rich foray into the genealogy of curiosity, a human trait that is feared, maligned, disciplined and celebrated. We are urged to engage with curiosity transgressively (at 6), which is precisely what queer theory seeks to do, in common with other critical traditions including, most notably, feminist methods (at 5). For Otto, it is the transgressive engagement with curiosity that opens up the space to interrogate and reveal the particular ways in which dominant ideologies consolidate and enhance existing inequalities, including through international law. As the contributions to this collection demonstrate, queer engagement is concerned with exposing international law's complicity in those practices of inequality, with elucidating how sexuality and sexual and gender norms are constituted and deployed by the law as organizing principles, and, by making apparent what is emb...

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“…See Å. Gunnarsson et al, Genusrättsvetenskap,Tidigare utgåva av Åsa Gunnarsson, Eva-Maria Svensson 2009(2018. For new materialist insights to Nordic feminist perspectives on law see Käll, supra note 19.…”