Queering International Law

Abstract

Queer scholarship in international law can broadly be understood as questioning or destabilizing the normative—that which has been “taken for granted” or “naturalized.” However, defining queer theory is made harder by the fact that much of queer theory seeks to avoid definition. Queering is a continuous process, a conversation on many levels as opposed to a blueprint that can be clearly defined. Queer theory in international law can therefore perhaps be best defined by looking at what it has sought to resist. Key focal points have included thinking about sex and gender [identity] in alternative and non-hegemonic ways, challenging fixed categories of identity and binary thinking, calling for alternative forms of kinship to be fostered outside and beyond the formal ties deemed recognizable by the state (such as hetero-marriage), and, reaching well beyond what one might think of as its “proper objects,” revealing the exclusionary and hierarchical conceptual architectures of international law emanating from its heteronormative underpinnings. We include a wide array of queer scholarship, including works that focus more on challenging global power relations as well as those that focus on queer lives. The latter were selected, however, due to their counter-normative/counter-binary focus. Therefore, this entry does not cover the wide spectrum of LGBTI+ rights scholarship, but rather seeks to identify what we consider to be some of the queerer pieces from that field. Queer analyses often draw upon and complement feminist theories of intersectionality and postcolonial/TWAIL theories of imperial power and narratives of so-called progress. Like other strands of critical international legal research and activism, queer interventions seek to understand and challenge the multiple ways in which unequal power and oppression are naturalized and normalized through law. What queer scholarship brings to this field is a broader array of key analytical vectors of oppression, centering tropes of gender [identity] and sexuality in new ways, a keener awareness of the exclusionary effects of binary and hierarchized ways of thinking, a commitment to radically rethinking what has been assumed to be “normal,” and an activism that takes all life seriously, including nonhuman life. We have sought to introduce some queer terminologies into this entry by the headings we use, which pair conventional international law nomenclature with queer alternatives. In this way we hope to convey, in a small way, the questioning of the normative that queer theory encourages. Where we use the acronym LGBTI+ and its other variations in our abstracts, we have followed the choice of the author.