The Texture of ‘Lives Lived with Law:’ Methods for Queering International Law

Abstract

ABSTRACT Queer theory’s obligations to critique and problematise the mechanisms of power and discourse, especially law, remain important for revealing, unsettling and destabilising established sexual and gender norms. However, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, the emphasis on paranoid or critical practices in queer theorising must be counterbalanced by recognising the queer methods of repair evident in the way LGBTQIA+ people engage with systems of oppression in empowering and transformative ways. 1 , 2 In this paper, I draw on the methodological tools that Sedgwick provides to examine LGBTQIA+ engagements with international law in terms of their creative, generative and sustaining capacities. Focusing on the experiences of two Australian LGBTQIA+ activists, Rodney Croome and Dianne Otto and the objects they brought to the interviews I did with them, I highlight the queer sensibilities, or queer reparative practices, operating in and through their commitments to law. In doing so, I expand the registers through which to conceptualise queer theory in relation to law and instantiate the queer jurisprudential work occurring in international law.