Human Rights Discourses and Subject Formations: Tainting Queer Theory with Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

International human rights law is a gendered discourse. This discursive terrain welcomes or (partially) rejects different subjects depending on their sex/gender identifications, manifestations and positioning. Queer theory is a piercing tool seeking to unearth the hidden hierarchies and attitudes behind the human rights talk. The queer method constantly questions the underlying intricacies of the sense we give to the world and the way we uncover our personal truth. As a contaminated method of enquiry, the analytical potential of a queer approach to human rights resides also in its openness to cross-pollination with other areas of knowledge. This paper explores the commonalities and tensions between psychoanalysis and queer theory applied to human rights law from the perspective of subject formation – a process which renders the subject of law and psychoanalysis constitutively dependent on external gendered legal norms. In both human rights and psychoanalysis, the individual is valued by virtue of being. Therefore, queer theory can benefit from theories of language and discourse, such as Lacanian psychoanalysis, to scrutinise the impact of the human rights vocabulary and grammar on subject formations. Psychoanalysis is a methodological partner of queer theory in understanding and valuing plural subject formations.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer theory
• human rights
• psychoanalysis
• subject formation
• feminist theory

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants of the International Law Dis/Oriented: Queer Legacies and Queer Futures Workshop (Graduate Institute Geneva, 27 September–1 October 2021) and those of the preparatory encounters for their reflections and reactions on thinking, working and interacting ‘queerly’ that have accompanied my work. A special thank you goes to Manon Beury, Lena Holzer, Bérénice Kafui Schramm and Juliana Santos De Carvalho, generous co-travellers and guest editors. The analysis would have been certainly less rigorous without the two anonymous reviewers’ helpful criticism. This paper draws partially on the thesis I submitted for the completion of the PhD in Law at the Department of Law of the European University Institute.

Notes

1 L Frank Baum, 15 Books in 1: L. Frank Baum’s Original ‘Oz’ Series (Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax 2005) 568.

2 On the different uses of the word ‘queer’ in relation to queer legal theory, see Brenda Cossman, ‘Queering Queer Legal Studies: An Unreconstructed Ode to Eve Sedgwick (and Others)’ (2019) 6(1) Critical Analysis of Law 23, 31–37.

3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Duke University Press 2008) 8.

4 See, inter alia, Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton University Press 2006); Aeyal Gross, ‘Queer Theory and International Human Rights Law: Does Each Person Have a Sexual Orientation?’ (2007) 101 Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law) 129; Vanja Hamzić, ‘The Case of “Queer Muslims”: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in International Human Rights Law and Muslim Legal and Social Ethos’ (2011) 11 Human Rights Law Review 237; Dianne Otto, ‘Introduction: Embracing Queer Curiosity’ in Dianne Otto (ed), Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge 2018); Damian A Gonzalez-Salzberg, Sexuality and Transsexuality under the European Convention on Human Rights: A Queer Reading of Human Rights Law (Hart 2019).

5 While also relying on postcolonial scholarship, this paper does not directly address gender in relation to race, nor, more generally, in relation to intersectionality.

6 Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Seuil 1997) 302.

7 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Interview with Julia Kristeva’ in Positions (Alan Bass tr, University of Chicago Press 1981) 21, 28–30.

8 ibid 143.

9 Rosemary Hennessy, ‘Queer Theory: A Review of the “Differences” Special Issue and Wittig’s “The Straight Mind”’ (1993) 18 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 964.

10 See, e.g. Javier Sáez, Teoría queer y psicoanálisis (Síntesis 2004).

11 See Jacques Lacan, Il Seminario. Libro II: L’io nella teoria di Freud e nella tecnica della psicoanalisi (1954–1955) (Antonio Di Ciaccia ed tr, Einaudi 2006); Jacques Lacan, Autres écrits (Editions du Seuil 2001); Jacques Lacan, ‘Proposta del 9 Ottobre 1967 sullo psicoanalista della scuola’ in Antonio Di Ciaccia (ed), Altri scritti (Einaudi 2013); Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les Formations de l’inconscient (Jacques-Alain Miller ed, Seuil 1998); Jacques Lacan, La psicoanalisi ed Il suo insegnamento (Einaudi 1976); Jacques Lacan, Il Seminario. Libro XI: I quattro concetti fondamentali della psicoanalisi (Jacques-Alain Miller and Antonio Di Ciaccia eds, Einaudi 2003).

12 Sedgwick, Tendencies (n 3) 206–11.

13 Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (Dead Letter Office 2012) 19–45.

14 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (ed), Novel Gazing (Duke University Press 1997) 6.

15 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987) 43 October 197.

16 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press 2004).

17 On the notion of ‘Other’ in the psychoanalytical jargon, see below Section 4.1.

18 Lacan, Il Seminario. Libro II (n 11).

19 See, inter alia, Carol Smart, ‘The Woman of Legal Discourse’ (1992) 1 Social and Legal Studies 29; Katharine Bartlett, ‘Feminist Legal Methods’ (1990) 103 Harvard Law Review 829; Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin and Shelley Wright, ‘Feminist Approaches to International Law’ (1991) 85 American Journal of International Law 613.

20 Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, ‘Interview: Sexual Traffic’ (1994) 6 Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 83, 79.

21 Dianne Otto, ‘Rethinking the “Universality” of Human Rights Law’ (1997) 29 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 2, 28–29.

22 Mimi Marinucci, Feminism Is Queer: The Intimate Connection between Queer and Feminist Theory (2nd edn, Zed Books 2016) 7.

23 Lacan, Autres écrits (n 11) 531.

24 See Lacan, ‘Proposta del 9 Ottobre 1967 sullo psicoanalista della scuola’ (n 11) 246.

25 See Massimo Recalcati, Elogio dell’inconscio: Dodici argomenti in difesa della psicoanalisi (Bruno Mondadori 2007) 34. Accordingly, there is nothing left for the subject but to accept that the unconscious is something that happens: see Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V (n 11) 198.

26 ‘Faire de lui-même quelque chose à partir de ce que les autres ont fait de lui.’ Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Gallimard 1960) 54.

27 On the different declinations of the concept of otherness, see below, Section 4.1.

28 Lacan, La psicoanalisi ed Il suo Insegnamento (n 11) 429.

29 See Massimo Recalcati, Jacques Lacan: Desiderio, godimento e soggettivazione (Raffaello Cortina 2012) 92–93, 120.

30 Nigel Purvis, ‘Critical Legal Studies in Public International Law’ (1991) 32(1) Harvard International Law Journal 81, 54.

31 On the wasted potential of queer theories applied to law which have lost their original prescriptive intent, see Aleardo Zanghellini, ‘Queer, Antinormativity, Counter-Normativity and Abjection’ (2009) 18(1) Griffith Law Review 1.

32 Ratna Kapur, ‘The (Im)Possibility of Queering International Human Rights Law’ in Dianne Otto (ed), Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge 2018) 141.

33 Processes of social standardisation define what counts as the norm, and thereby who is included in the group mirroring the norm (majority) and who is excluded from that norm (minority); the concept of ‘sexual minority’ therefore incorporates individuals who are excluded from the majoritarian norm. In Foucauldian terms, this process of measuring against the sexed/gendered norm is an example of the disciplinary model of normation: the normal can conform to the norm, the abnormal is incapable of conforming to the norm: see Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (Palgrave Macmillan 2007) 85.

34 See Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’ in Raina Reiter (ed), Toward an Anthropology of Women (Monthly Review Press 1975) 204.

35 Baum (n 1).

36 In the 1990s, activists reclaimed the word ‘queer’ which had been used to harm sexual minorities by incorporating it in their vocabulary: see, for example, the Queer Nation Manifesto, the text of which was originally handed out by people marching with the ACT UP contingent in the New York Gay Pride Day parade in 1990: ‘The Queer Nation Manifesto’ (History Is a Weapon, 1990) <www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/queernation.html> accessed 28 June 2022; Bina Fernandez, ‘Queer Border Crossers: Pragmatic Complicities, Indiscretions and Subversions’ in Dianne Otto (ed), Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge 2018) 194.

37 Marinucci (n 22) 162.

38 ibid 163.

39 Doris E Buss, ‘Queering International Legal Authority’ (2007) 101 Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law) 122, 123.

40 Graeme Austin, ‘Queering Family Law’ (1999) 8 Australasian Gay and Lesbian Law Journal 39, 51.

41 See Halley (n 4) 17–18; Dianne Otto, ‘International Human Rights Law: Towards Rethinking Sex/Gender Dualism and Asymmetry’ in Margaret Davies and Vanessa E Munro (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Feminist Legal Theory (Ashgate 2013); for an analysis as to how the international women’s rights movement reinforced the image of the woman-victim, see Ratna Kapur, ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics’ (2002) 15 Harvard Human Rights Journal 1.

42 See, inter alia, Catharine A MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard University Press 1991).

43 Otto, ‘Introduction: Embracing Queer Curiosity’ (n 4).

44 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (University of California Press 1990) 35; Halley (n 4) 24, 134.

45 Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and their Vicessitudes (1915)’ in James Strachey (tr), Papers on Metapsychology, vol XIV (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis 1964) 122–23.

46 ‘Drive’ is used to translate ‘Trieb’ in the habit of American literature. English literature translates ‘Trieb’ with ‘instinct' instead. I prefer ‘drive’ over ‘instinct,’ embracing Juliet Mitchell’s argument that there are no ‘drives’ – and no unconscious, I add – in animals, while Freud was referring to something human; I only use ‘instinct’ in quotes from the English Standard Edition of Freud’s Works; see Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Allen Lane 1974) 21, fn 4.

47 Freud (n 45) 122–23.

48 See Edward W Said, ‘Foreword’ in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ranajit Guha (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford University Press 1988) vi.

49 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois Press 1988) 285.

50 The subject of human rights law differs from the subject of psychoanalysis: the former is a rational being, moved by willingness – consider the centrality of the notion of consent in law. The subject of psychoanalysis is ‘not master in its own house,’ moved by no rational logic, but the logic of the unconscious (Sigmund Freud, ‘Una difficoltà della psicanalisi’ in Sigmund Freud, Opere – Vol VIII (Cesare Musatti tr, Boringhieri 1976) 663. Nevertheless, the different conceptions of the subject in human rights law and in psychoanalysis do not prevent this study from exploring the relationship between the individual and the external societal systems, looking at the process through which the individual is subject to and moulded by both gender and human rights normativity.

51 Recalcati, Jacques Lacan (n 29) 68, 352.

52 See Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V (n 11) 189.

53 Recalcati, Jacques Lacan (n 29) 108–09.

54 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Routledge 1993) 37–38.

55 Recalcati, Jacques Lacan (n 29) 185.

56 Gayle Rubin and Rostom Mesli, Surveiller et jouir: Anthropologie politique du sexe (Epel 2010) 53.

57 The subordinate role for women might be true only with reference to early Freudian works. Freud himself self-critically acknowledged that his first sexual models treated the boy as the norm and the girl as a deviation from it – which became a source of increasing concern throughout his studies: Mitchell (n 46) 303, 308.

58 ibid 304; for an illustration of a study of Freud’s writings on femininity outside the context of psychoanalysis, see Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (Doubleday 1970) 180–84.

59 Mitchell (n 46) xv.

60 For example, Wilhelm Reich, an eclectic, unorthodox Freud’s disciple, theorised the absence of the Oedipus complex in matriarchal societies, making this discovery the basis for his attack on the patriarchal family: cf Wilhelm Reich, The Imposition of Sexual Morality (Sex-Pol 1932) 94.

61 Mitchell (n 46) 72–73.

62 Lacan, Il Seminario. Libro XI (n 11) 269.

63 See Leo Bersani, Homos (Harvard University Press 1996) 3; Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (The University of Chicago Press 2009) 1.

64 Christie V McDonald and Jacques Derrida, ‘Interview: Choreographies: Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald’ (1982) 12 Diacritics 66, 76.

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Giovanna Gilleri

Giovanna Gilleri is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Departmental Centre for Law and Pluralism, University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy). She holds a PhD in international human rights law (EUI), an LLM in comparative, European and international laws (EUI), an LLM in human rights, conflict and justice (SOAS), and a combined LLB+LLM (University of Trieste). She was a land rights intern at UN FAO; legal intern at the European Court of Human Rights; and research fellow at the University of Trieste. She researches in the theory and practice of gender and human rights law from critical legal feminist, queer and psychoanalytical perspectives. Other areas of interest include legal pluralism, human rights indicators and comparative human rights law.