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.