Queer Legal Theory

Routledge Handbook of Law and Society, 2021

This chapter provides an overview of queer theory and its relevance for socio-legal studies.

2019

This introduction to the Critical Analysis of Law special issue on queer legal studies excavates three conjugal artifacts: an academic manuscript delineating interracial and same-sex marriages as loci of state surveillance and unfreedom; a TED Talk on same-sex marriage as irrefutably queer; and the United States Supreme Court decision holding same-sex marriage a constitutional right. These artifacts, along with their singular referent (state-sanctioned marriage), point to what is or should be critical about the interdiscipline of queer legal studies: theorization not only of the subjectification of subjects of gender and sexual regulation (spouses, singles, you and me), but also theorization of the subjectification of power (here, state power and state formation). What kind of state, and what kind of power, materialize through the governance of sex, intimacy, and coupledom? This methodological imperative complements and productively conflicts with the contributions of this issue, al...

Direito & Praxis, 2021

The article proposes a mapping of feminisms and queer positionalities, demonstrating how gender and sexuality are useful categories of legal analysis and critique. It articulates the main discussions and dilemmas of feminist and queer struggles and theories, seeking to identify how their categories, methods and strategies offer a privileged and powerful position for legal criticism.

Pace Law Review, 2019

This Article argues for the application of phenomenology to legal understanding, specifically as a way to think about and through queer people’s interactions with law as well as queer theory in law. There are both pragmatic and theoretical justifications for this project. The pragmatic justifications include the need to better address the legal issues and experiences of queer people, recent political and legal decisions and debates that affect queer people specifically, the need to better provide epistemological resources for queer lawyers, law scholars, law students, and their allies, and the need to better understand how law affects minoritarian populations regardless of specific identity characteristics. The theoretical justifications include the relative under-theorization of queer theory in law, the improvement of legal theory’s interaction with related theories in the humanities and social sciences, and the development of a more robust theory of everyday interactions with law consistent with individuals’ diverse experiences and identities. These justifications counsel for further study and attempts to account for diversity in law.

2024

In the realm of transitional justice, legal mechanisms wield significant influence. The aim of this chapter is to explore ways to integrate queer legal perspectives into the theory and practice of transitional justice. The chapter begins with an overview of key tenets of queer theory, examining how queer perspectives can enhance transitional justice efforts. It then examines queer legal theoretical perspectives, revealing how they unveil the heteronormative underpinnings of legal systems. Through this deconstruction of binary notions of sexuality and gender in legal texts, queer legal theory aids in reshaping legal frameworks within transitional contexts. Finally, the chapter scrutinizes how queer legal theory intersects with transitional justice through legal texts. The analysis posits that despite the absence of explicit references to sexual orientation and gender identity in key transitional justice documents like the Rome Statute, a queer interpretative approach can bolster the protection of the rights of individuals with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, expressions, and sex characteristics. This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

AJIL Unbound, 2022

Queer theory's commitments are radical and disruptive. They have operated to interrogate the definition and reinforcement of sexuality and gender categories, and to expose and problematize normalized relations of power and privilege in the institutional structures and systems in which we live and operate. Queer's deconstructive and anti-normative (or non-conformist) tendencies, however, can be antithetical to international LGBTQIAþ law reform projects. 1 In much of queer scholarship, human rights activism is framed as reinforcing heteronormative structures of knowledge and power and promoting fixed ideas of monogamy, social reproductivity, and gender identity. 2 In this essay, I work with the tension between queer theory and the law to frame the continued pursuit of human rights by LGBTQIAþ people as queer jurisprudence. I do so by drawing on the methodological tools provided by Eve Sedgwick's technique of reparative reading 3 and Michel Foucault's ethics of care of the self 4 to focus on the lived experience of LGBTQIAþ people. What emerges through the stories of LGBTQIAþ commitments to human rights and legal activism are not themes of naivety, compliance, or assimilation, as often charged, but ongoing efforts toward disruption, creativity, and hope.

This course encouraged a slant-wise approach to thinking about the topic of queer jurisprudence: not, as a first parsing of the phrase might suggest, a course about the legal regulation of non-heterosexual relations. Instead, we approached queerness as the open mesh of possibilities that become available to us when we transgress the normal, and jurisprudence as a training in lawful conduct that we might acquire from a diversity of sources which may or may not be conventionally considered “legal. Bringing these terms in relation to each other allowed us to explore a range of expressions of law that are playful and subversive.

Millennium, 2018

Three recent books are discussed which offer queer analyses of attempts to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people from violence and discrimination using the international human rights regime. A common theme is the way in which equal rights are invoked and institutionalised to address prejudice, discrimination and violence. The take, however, is critical: while it may be a remarkable turn of events that the United Nations (UN) and similar institutions have become LGBTI advocates, such Damascene conversions generate their own dilemmas and rarely resolve structural and conceptual paradoxes. This article foregrounds the curiosity of queer scholars engaged with the application of human rights to matters of sexuality and gender, observes how they articulate the paradoxes and dissatisfactions that are produced in this normatively and politically charged field, and draws out the limitations and complexities of rights politics in combating systemic exclusion. Résumé La discussion porte sur trois ouvrages récents, qui utilisent la théorie queer pour analyser des tentatives de protection de membres de la communauté LGBTI contre la violence et la discrimination par le biais du régime international des droits humains. Un thème commun est la manière dont l'égalité des droits est convoquée et institutionnalisée afin de répondre au préjudice, à la discrimination et à la violence. Ce point de vue est toutefois crucial: les Nations Unies et d'autres institutions similaires, il est vrai, ont changé la donne de manière remarquable en devenant porte-paroles des groupes LGBTI, mais les conversions si éclatantes génèrent souvent leurs propres dilemmes, et manquent généralement de résoudre les paradoxes structurels et

2020

The past three decades have seen a proliferation in international activist and advocacy networks surrounding the global politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. Although the domain of sexuality has long been the “focus of fierce ethical and moral debate” (Weeks, 2009: 2), it is only recently that sexual politics have become increasingly prominent on political agendas in both global and domestic realms. The appropriation of the human rights framework as a central vehicle for political claims has allowed LGBT rights to move into the “mainstream” (Wilson, 2008: 73), signifying a considerable shift in the political agendas of social movements concerned with LGBT politics. The drafting and signing of the Declaration of Montreal (International Conference on LGBT Human Rights, 2006) and the Yogyakarta Principles of the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (Correa and Muntarbhorn, 2007; hereafter Yogyaka...

The dissertation explores the specific forms of subjectivity that are attributed to LGBTI individuals in international human rights law. It takes into consideration 8 rulings by the Human Rights Committee, the UN body charged with monitoring the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and advances a deconstructive reading of the specific articulation of homosexual and transgender subjects contained in them. It suggests that the three representations found, the legitimate gay, the gay activist and the gay outlaw can be understood as an attempt to depoliticize deviant sexualities, subsuming them under neoliberal, heterosexist hegemonic normative arrangements. In view of this argument, it proposes a queer psychoanalytic reading of subjective and bodily constitutions, emphasizing Jacques Lacan’s, Judith Butler’s and Jacques Derrida’s works. In highlighting the contingency and violence inherent to libidinal organization, it paves the way to a radical understanding of the co-implication of subjectivity and community. In light of this co-implication, Jacques Rancière’s notion of politics is presented and reworked in light of Lacan’s concept of Sinthome, in a way that appears to allow for an aesthetic political engagement based on the quasi-substance of the Sinthome as a contingent, continuous grafting of Lacan’s three metaphysical orders, the real, the imaginary and the symbolic.