An Introduction to International Law Dis/oriented: Sparking Queer Futures in International Law

1. Introduction

This special issue arose out of a workshop held online from 27 September to 1 October 2021 under the auspices of the Geneva Graduate Institute (Switzerland). In a year when immobility re-defined academic encounters and exchange, our workshop entitled International Law Dis/Oriented: Queer Legacies and Queer Futures focused on the mobility of queer international legal research. By zooming in on the distinct paths, connections, and forms of dis/orientations through which queer methods have contributed to the practice and discipline of international law, our workshop aimed to provide a platform to take stock of and ponder on the workings of queer analytical sensibilities and queer methods in the study of international law.

Since their recent emergence of international law, queer approaches have often been studied from a destination-oriented perspective, with a focus on what they (aim to) achieve.¹ On the contrary, our objective with the workshop was to look at the journey itself and attempt to single out how scholars are using queer sensibilities in their work; in other words, what ‘doing queer’ means for international legal research.² The workshop explored how theories, methods, and knowledge can – or cannot – travel across regions, disciplines, institutions, and languages.³ The mapping out of queer scholarship is often limited to the Global North and/or to Western authors, institutions, and concepts, consequently invisibilising the works of writers and activists outside of these geographical and epistemological zones. The travelling of theories and concepts, as well as the borders that stop certain knowledge from moving across spaces, therefore became core concerns in our workshop. The workshop thus aimed to showcase a broad diversity of queer methods, highlighting how they relate to other disciplinary fields such as psychoanalysis and different epistemes such as Indigenous storytelling.

In this way, queer methods have in common to re-orientate not only the subjects and objects of scientific inquiry, but also their author(s) as well as the reader(s). We build here upon Sara Ahmed’s seminal conceptualisation of a queer phenomenology – which itself is a methodological blend – that foregrounds orientation as ‘a matter of how we reside in space.’⁴ As such, queer phenomenology productively ‘redirect[s] our attention toward different objects, those that are “less proximate” or even those that deviate or are deviant.’⁵ It therefore expands the first meaning of orientation from ‘how we reside in space’ to ‘how we feel at home in it’ (or not). Thus, queer phenomenology enables us to observe and question experiences of familiarity and strangeness, the former being in fact ‘an effect of inhabitance’⁶ in a space that accommodates some bodies and not others. Experiences of familiarity – our capacity to inhabit a space – are thus also shaped by othering processes, such as gendering and racialisation, which create the comfortable residing of certain people and the out-of-place experiences of others.⁷ In this perspective, scholarship utilising queer methods ventures outside the familiarly inhabited spaces of legal international research, into its strange shadows or corners, orientating us away from knowledge generated by hegemonic structures and centres of international law; such scholarship resists hierarchies we have become accustomed to.

Understood thus, ‘orientation’ refers to the denaturalised and re-politicised phenomenon of bodies residing in this world and in the space of international law.⁸ Relatedly, ‘dis-orientation’ is not necessarily its radical opposite, that is a queer re-politicisation of orientation. Instead, disorientation is first and foremost failed orientation. In Ahmed’s words, that is when ‘bodies inhabit spaces that do not extend their shapes, or use objects that do not extend their reach’,⁹ some bodies – including those of scholarship – experience it more than others.

For Ahmed, it is therefore key to avoid conflating queer politics with disorientation. In other words, disorientation is not the end goal. Rather, disorientation, however it is experienced by various bodies, is an opportunity to reassess how we shall orient ourselves:

[t]he point is what we do with such moments of disorientation, as well as what such moments can do – whether they can offer us the hope of new directions, and whether new directions are reason enough for hope.¹⁰

This is also what we mean when we submit that queer methods are not confined to a specific research project or discipline. As their transformative potential touches more broadly upon what we do and how we do it, we contend that they may also (re)shape academia in a way that could spark more equitable and inclusive futures for the whole profession. Building upon Davina Cooper’s conceptualisation of ‘everyday utopias’, we therefore envisaged the creation of this special issue – just like our workshop – as a way to re-orient everyday academic practices.¹¹

2. On Care Against the Machine: Re-orienting Everyday Academia

Since the start of our queer collective adventure three years ago, we have tried adamantly to continuously reflect on our work practices with each other and with whomever we collaborated – including the contributors to this special issue. Contributing to re-/dis-orient international legal scholarship could not spare investigating how we – from our respective and collective positionalities – resided in the space of the discipline, how we did or did not feel at home in it, and how we could experiment with its (un-)hospitality rules from within. While ‘home’ can be a strange, if not unsafe space for queer bodies – as times of confinement during the pandemic sadly proved once again¹² – one can build queer homes elsewhere, or create queer-familiar pockets within strange homes. As we chose to build our own queer-familiar pocket, it became necessary to agree on what would truly feel familiar to us and our collaborators. We wondered how we could re-imagine inhabiting the everyday of academia through our micro-practices, creating our very own everyday utopia in the process.¹³

As the Roundtable Conversation¹⁴ in this special issue demonstrates, these micro-practices affect our understanding of hegemonic structures (including secondary methods of knowledge production) and how much we can re-/dis-orient them. In view of this, it is only fair – and necessary, epistemologically speaking – that we openly discuss these micro-practices here too, before we delve further into what ‘queer’ does to ‘method’ at an epistemic level. But first, a caveat: like all utopias, however hopeful, our very own everyday utopia and its instituting micro-practices are far from perfect as they are born out of the conditions at hand.¹⁵ In our case, we faced various limitations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, different time zones, lack of financial resources, queerphobia, colonial and Eurocentric heritage of international law, the neoliberal academic environment, and our personal well-being and (care) responsibilities. The latter two have been particularly pervasive and have forced us to reckon with the aporetic nature of our re-/dis-orienting endeavour. If our objective is to refamiliarise what was made strange (or unsafe) for us or others, how far can we go when the whole academic structure remains one that rewards certain forms of familiarity and punishes, and constantly de-familiarises, others?

Still, we can take a few steps, as we have done here. In guest-editing this special issue we reflected upon the productivist timelines imposed on us by the neoliberal academic market, which push us to disregard our own needs and capacities. We also tried to actively embed our communication with the contributors, peer reviewers, and the Journal’s editors in an ethics of care and openness that sought to show our own limitations while recognising the pressure that each one of us experiences in ‘the publish or perish’ culture.¹⁶ However imperfect or minute these utopia-based attempts at re-orientating our secondary methods of knowledge production may be, we believe they effectively contribute to ‘breaking the silence [and not completely reproduce, if perhaps start to heal] the hidden injuries of the neoliberal university’.¹⁷ That done, the neoliberal university still remains. With it, we are forced to go beyond the initial question of ‘how far we can go’ and face more dire ones – questions that might bring us to a state of genuine disorientation: can one actually queer from within the university, if not the university itself – including its various co-agents such as commercial publishing houses?

Similar to the questions raised by decolonial scholars with regard to the decolonisation of knowledge production, institutions, and processes, these do not have definitive or truly satisfying answers as long as settler futurity is still part and parcel of our presents.¹⁸ Yet, as Ahmed productively reminded us, what we do with these presents – these moments of disorientation – and what these presents can do is the only question that should continue to guide us, and possibly renew our hopes. In that spirit, we align ourselves with la paperson in the belief that a Third University is possible.¹⁹ By Third University, they mean a decolonising university which exists and resists as a ‘strategic reassemblage’ through the action of ‘scyborgs’. This University is informed by ‘Fourth worlding’ wisdoms, which are sovereign and therefore autonomous from the First, Second and Third worlds. The Third University then materialises in the midst of the contemporary university which is framed by First world thought and praxis (which bases itself on accumulation through dispossession) and Second world thought and praxis (grounded on liberation through ‘liberalism’).²⁰ It is our hope that the present re-/dis-orienting everyday utopia be another modest yet concrete step in this radical and queer direction.

3. Queer and Method: Re-orienting Methods in International Law

Our endeavour to re-orient ourselves and the discipline of international law through this special issue includes a commitment to embrace – and showcase – the plurality of the meanings of queer to study methods and methodologies in international law. Indeed, the word ‘queer’ has many contextual and shifting meanings. It has been used as a synonym of words like ‘odd’, ‘strange’ or ‘peculiar’, and as a politically reclaimed term that encompasses groups with non-normative sexualities and gender identities. While carrying a pejorative connotation in the past, queer now comprises an affirmative self-description by individuals outside of hetero- and cisnormative frames. Moreover, queer theory has emerged as an intellectual approach to deconstructing normativities and hierarchies since the 1980s.²¹

The subsequent articles precisely show that ‘queer’ in relation to ‘methods’ in international law does not have a single static meaning. Instead, queer methods in international law can be those that seem odd – strange – by contrast with conventional – familiar – legal methods, notably doctrinal and positivist research. Moreover, queer methods in international law are part of a political project in the sense that they encapsulate a way of doing research and activism that contests and aims to subvert hierarchical global power inequalities based on intersecting structures such as heterosexism, transphobia, racism, colonialism and capitalism.²² Queer methods in international law are also part of an intellectual and academic project that seeks to provide ontological and epistemological instruments to theorise the construction of reality, as well as a utopian future free of inequality.²³ In all of these usages, the word queer, coupled with method, in international law is producing something – and this productive power of queering legal methods is what we want to explore in this special issue.

We, as guest editors, have an ambivalent relationship with combining queer and method. The plurality, fluidity and productivity of the term queer seem to contradict the conventional idea that prevails in legal sciences whereby method is understood as a scientific tool through which researchers can ‘discover’ a single ‘correct’ answer and/or reality. Yet, as the articles in this special issue show, queer methods provide alternatives to such canonical understandings. They inherently oppose the assumption that methods are pre-discursive apparatuses that allow access to universally true knowledge. Instead, queer methods challenge monological ways of seeing, grasping, interpreting, and inhabiting our realities and the law as part of broader critical social sciences.²⁴ To borrow from Leonam Lucas Nogueira Cunha’s article in this special issue, the application of queer theory in the study of law creates ‘chaos’²⁵ in a field where ‘certainty’ and ‘normalcy’ usually reign. Hence, the appeal of queer methods lies precisely in the fluidity that these methods present as a resistance against solidly established modes of international legal reasoning. In a discipline such as international law, where universality has had a historical tie to hegemony, embracing fluidity and plurality – or one might call it ‘messiness’ – can be instrumental for epistemological resistance and the embracing of subaltern knowledges.

Queer methods are not alone in their contestation of positivist research approaches in legal sciences that provide the guise of revealing a single and fixed truth. Among others, postcolonial and decolonial scholars have also critiqued the positivist social science model of treating methods as being able to reveal ‘objective truths’, while that model only reflects a ‘hegemony of European ideas about the Orient’²⁶ or the South. At the same time, postcolonial approaches have developed as a means to counter existing universalist ‘Western’ scientific paradigms,²⁷ similar to queer approaches countering notions of gender essentialism.²⁸ As such, queering methods in international law does not have a single endpoint; rather, it encapsulates a continuous contextual process that is generated in relation to existing hegemonies and normalities in international law. By (even if imperfectly) queering the meaning of methods in international law, this special issue advances the idea that there is not one international law out there that can be revealed through the ‘correct’ method, but that international law is plural.²⁹ As such, the special issue’s articles explore what queer can mean in relation to method in international legal scholarship while visibilising existing queer and other counter-hegemonic research in the discipline. Instead of functioning as ‘straightening devices’,³⁰ as Holzer holds in the Roundtable discussion in this special issue,³¹ queer methods pluralise and disorientate the story of international law away from a single linear trajectory signalling progress.

The articles in this special issue use queer also in its political meaning, that is: as a form of resistance against normative gender relations. Methods are political and so are queer legal methods. In this sense, the choice of method is not only one of scientific interest or affiliation, but also one of prioritising certain research questions and research agendas over others. The articles to follow belong to a scholarship that aims to fight the criminalisation, structural violence, economic deprivation, and general surveillance of queer people, using queer this time as a positive self-description reclaimed by the groups concerned. In this regard, the special issue also reflects a desire to re-orient current and future generations of scholars and practitioners by sparking inspiration to rely on queer methods for understanding and reshaping international law.

4. Dis/Orienting in Action: Introducing the Contributions

The possibility of re-orienting international law is tentatively explored through the contributions to this special issue. In them, the authors do not only use queer methods in their legal inquiry, but they also invite the reader to think about how queer methods can shift the compass of their analysis and lay a different gaze on a specific topic. The contributions are using a variety of methodological tools such as interviews, quantitative analysis, case studies, and storytelling. They also borrow from social sciences, discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and literature to inform their legal analysis. Even though the contributions focus on different issues and different branches of international law, they all illustrate the power of queer methods to dis/re-orientate international law.

As explained earlier, while re-/dis-orientation is originally a spatial phenomenon, it sheds light on the epistemological phenomenon of familiarity or strangeness when read through a queer phenomenological lens. It illuminates how certain objects and others are seen as either familiar or strange, and how from their points of view, the material and discursive space-times they inhabit may be re-appropriated through queering.³² The familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes a new compass sparking new paths ahead. This is the type of dis-/re-orientation we believe the contributions to the special issue as an assemblage offer, notably with regards to four key dimensions of international law as discipline and praxis: time, subjects, spaces, and norms.

4.1. Queering Time

If the special issue aims indeed at sparking queer futures in international law – as its title indicates, future times are therefore key in our understanding of the phenomena of re-orientation and dis-orientation of the discipline. And really, queer time can only be resolutely future-oriented (and therefore utopian) given how prevalently queerphobic our times and the structures we currently inhabit are.³³ More specifically, queer time, as conceptualised by queer theory, is the understanding that a different temporality exists for persons who live outside of the (gender and sexual) norm.³⁴ In ‘Search of a Queerer Law: Two People’s Tribunals in 1976’, Claerwen O’Hara follows a queer sensitivity towards time by looking at two people’s tribunals held in 1976: the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women and the Tribunal on Homosexuals and Discrimination, which took place in Brussels and Sydney, respectively.³⁵ In their analysis of these initiatives, O’Hara resists the conventional frame of understanding the tribunals as departure points from which subsequent legal developments on queer rights ‘improved’ or ‘progressed’. Instead, they focus on how the tribunals ‘diverged from the LGBTI human rights framework that would later come’.³⁶ With this approach, O’Hara not only provides a more plural, non-linear account of international law which helps to denaturalise the LGBTI rights framework as the ‘natural’ and final destination of articulating queer rights internationally, but also reveals alternative, queerer legal possibilities.

4.2. Queering Legal Subjects

This plural, non-linear account of analysis is also weaved through other contributions in our special issue, which focus on queer subjects in relation to international law. Similarly to O’Hara’s queering of progressive, linear narratives of time, Giovanna Gilleri dis/orients progressive and linear narratives – but for subject formation instead. Gilleri’s piece, ‘Human Rights Discourses and Subject Formations: Tainting Queer Theory with Psychoanalysis’ uses queer theory and psychoanalysis, as methodological partners, to unearth the instability of subjectivities and prefigure ways of rethinking human rights discourses in order to ‘do justice’ to such instabilities.³⁷ As Gilleri argues, psychoanalysis serves as a helpful lens to

explor[e] and interrogat[e] human multitudes, how the single subject becomes part of them, how each individual interacts with the other and transmits their lived experience through the language of their unconscious.³⁸

This, in its turn, serves as a potent site for rethinking human rights law through the pluralisation and destabilisation of its subjects: an empowering move that allows subjects to reinvent and remodel their gender freedom, even in the face of the limiting available categories within international human rights law.

This pluralisation of human rights subjects, despite the unitarian concepts of the field’s framework, is analysed further by Kseniya Kirichenko’s article ‘Queer intersectional perspective on LGBTI human rights discourses by United Nations treaty bodies’.³⁹ By looking at communications and concluding observations of the bodies that monitor the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Kirichenko argues that, despite their single-axis focus, they have advanced crucial intersectional perspectives that allow for the destabilisation of a monolithic ‘universal/Western gay’ subject in international law.⁴⁰ Notwithstanding these hopeful advancements, Kirichenko also highlights the importance of continued queer engagement with institutional spaces. This is necessary to curb ‘conservative forces within the committees and, perhaps more importantly, allow queer subjects to influence how the discourse around them is constructed in United Nations spaces.’⁴¹

Bringing this discussion into more concrete terms, the actuality of queer subjects’ engagement with institutional spaces finds a unique illustration in Odette Mazel’s ‘The Texture of ‘Lives Lived with Law:’ Methods for Queering International Law’.⁴² Coming back to queer sensitivities of the erratic, incomplete, and partial ways of living and doing, Mazel offers a reparative reading of the relationship between queer activism and the law, reflecting on the lives of two Australian queer activists: Rodney Croome and Dianne Otto. Through a set of conversations with Croome and Otto, she queers the normalisation of progressive narratives of activism, as well as the naturalisation of the resistance vs compliance binary when exploring activist projects and lives. She does that by zooming in on the radical potential contained within the ‘middle ranges of agency’,⁴³ that is, recognising that empowerment can come in relative terms. In this sense, while activism is limited by law’s disciplinary structures, it can also achieve meaningful changes for the empowerment of queer subjects and have an impact on law itself.

Mazel’s rich account of lives and activism lived with the law allows for an illustration of Gilleri’s conceptualisation of the self and the Other, as in the relationship between the self and the structure in which the individual is immersed.⁴⁴ It also complements Kirichenko’s account of queer activists’ navigation of structural limitations in the United Nations treaty bodies. Gilleri, Kirichenko and Mazel thus prompt a reflection on how law is done, reshaped, and lived in interaction with our environment’s temporal, material, and discursive limitations – without, however, effacing the (piecemeal) efforts that add up to revolutionary outcomes.

4.3. Queering Space

Taking this discussion on subjects and their environments further, other contributors to our special issue put a focus on the possibilities of queering space. Specifically, they highlight the possibility of space-making, whereby taken-for-granted boundaries or dwellings of specific environments are not seen as fixed. Rather, they are re-/dis-orientated as having porous limits and changing fixtures and customs, open to redefinition and construction.⁴⁵

In ‘Advancing Queer-Inclusive International Human Rights Law Education in Nigerian Classrooms Through Indigenous Storytelling: Stories from a Law Classroom at Eko (Lagos, Nigeria)’, David Ikpo invites a redefinition of the sites where international law is presumed to be constructed. Instead of focusing on international institutional fora of high-level diplomacy, Ikpo writes from the context of postcolonial Nigeria to remind us how international law, and its impact or lack thereof in certain communities, is also constructed within the space of classrooms.⁴⁶ For that, he analyses how queer indigenous storytelling can be used in legal education to raise awareness and foster respect for soft law norms regarding queer rights, such as Resolution 275 of the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights,⁴⁷ in complement to traditional and/or lacking legal advocacy. Ikpo’s project involved creating the story (and visuals) used in this research-based intervention, sharing it with the research participants in the classroom and exchanging with them about it. Beyond critically reflecting on the state of queer rights and queer legal advocacy in postcolonial Nigeria, his analysis thereby effectively contributes to re-/dis-orienting everyday practices of discussing and teaching international law.

Spaces of teaching and learning are the sites from which Shaimaa Abdelkarim, Farnush Ghadery, and Rohini Sen develop their critique and proposals for subversion of the academic-neoliberal complex. In ‘A Roundtable Conversation: Feminist Collaborative Ethos in International Law’,⁴⁸ they discuss with Lena Holzer what feminist collaborative praxis means to them and how it offers alternatives to individualistic and neoliberal approaches to international law academia. Their contribution comes in the shape of a conversation on the possibilities of resisting gendered, racialised and colonial hegemonies in international law by working and writing collaboratively as well as by teaching international law through diverse counter-hegemonic methods. The roundtable took place during the Queer Workshop from which this special issue emerged. The roundtable was subsequently transcribed and edited for the purpose of archiving the conversation on imagining and centring alternative futures in international law through the adoption of a feminist collaborative praxis. The contribution complements our – the guest editors’ – reflections on the praxis of ‘doing queer’ in the organisation of an academic workshop and the editing of a special issue.

Both Ikpo’s article and the Roundtable Conversation highlight that queer – and feminist – interventions bear the potential to re-orient the spaces in which subjects are embedded, such as postcolonial Nigeria and the university-industry complex. The method of storytelling and the praxis of a feminist collaborative ethos both centre on the power of relationality as they aim to create, for example, a relationship between the protagonists of stories and their listeners, or between different scholars in the discipline of international law. As a result, these spaces are always in motion and re-invention, instead of in static positions of living and being.⁴⁹

4.4. Queering Legal Norms

This in-motion perspective of queer perspectives is also seized by the contributions of this special issue focusing on norms. In ‘Four Challenges, Three Identities and a Double Movement in Asylum Law: Queering the “Particular Social Group” after Mx M’, Samuel Ballin draws from the Butlerian concept of ‘double movement’⁵⁰ to investigate how asylum seekers can use strategic flexibility in their queering of the category of ‘particular social group’ (PSG) under the 1951 Refugee Convention.⁵¹ This double movement, as explained by Ballin, consists in acknowledging that the project of queering the category of PSG requires the strategic, subversive movement of both invoking and warping the contours of (exclusionary) categories, in an effort to advance the interests of queer individuals.⁵² As Ballin argues, navigating between shorter/longer-term and more individual/collective goals is thus the central challenge of queering asylum law. As a result, rather than taking a single approach to this specific norm, Ballin’s suggestion for a double movement when queering the category of PSG is not about finding the ‘right’ or perfect answer. Rather, it is about harnessing the imperfections and inconsistencies of normative systems to ‘put forward alternate (even contradictory) arguments in different circumstances to achieve the desired outcomes for asylum claimants.’⁵³

In ‘Queer Methodologies in the Study of Law: Notes about Queering Methods’, Nogueira Cunha also considers the mobility of identities but this time for sketching a methodological roadmap to research legal-normative frameworks on trans rights in Spain and Brazil. For that endeavour, Nogueira Cunha observes the necessity ‘to rely on methodologies fond of chaos … [namely] mixed research methods, which are open to reconfiguring the research along its way and to embrace unpredictability’.⁵⁴ More specifically, he draws a specific politico-methodological project of analysing legislation and public policies from ‘a dissident point of view’, one that ‘can re-open a transformative political potential.’⁵⁵ As such, Nogueira Cunha brings us full circle when it comes to exploring the dis/orientating potential of queer methods: ‘[t]o penetrate diversity, chaos and non-fixity of identities’,⁵⁶ Nogueira Cunha argues, ‘methodologies need to be delusional. Only in a state of delirium can we fully accept the instability, contradictions and unpredictability of research.’⁵⁷

5. On Sparking Queer Futures for International Legal Methods

We were reluctant to provide ‘concluding thoughts’ to this special issue. After so many reflections on the queer sensitivities towards re-/dis-orientation, erratic approaches, plural perspectives, nonlinear and unstable ways of living and seeing the world, to provide a conclusion or final ‘findings’ distilled from the articles of this special issue seems an un-queer exercise at best. Indeed, to take such an approach appears as an incongruent move of imposing a final destination or stop on reflections that, as defined by their own contributors, challenge a narrative of progress, recognise the inherent and productive incompleteness of subjects and perspectives, as well as resist the impulse to come up with definitive answers.

With this in mind, and drawing from O’Hara’s approach of looking at and providing queer ‘past futures’, our aim with this special issue is precisely to appreciate and celebrate the imperfect, erratic, and ever-transforming imaginary of queer methods. More concretely, by acknowledging the potential of queer approaches to the study of international law, we hope this collection can serve as unique sparks – ever disorderly, erratic, and on-the-move – for re-/dis-orientation towards queerer futures in international law, already in the making. Hence our resistance – or escape? – to provide a full stop to such reflections: we now pass it on to you, reader, to re-/dis-orientate yourself away

Acknowledgments

We thank the International Law Department and the Gender Centre of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva for their generous support in putting together this special issue and the workshop from which it derives. We further express our gratitude to the editors of the Australian Feminist Law Journal, especially Odette Mazel, Claerwen O'Hara, Valeria Vázquez Guevara and Angela Kintominas, for their patience and assistance in this publishing journey. Our thanks also go to our co-travellers, namely the participants of the workshop, who shaped the many different paths of this special issue. These paths have been further developed by the contributors of this special issue, whom we like to thank for their hard work and the inspiration - one might call it ‘sparks' - that their contributions provide for the queering of methods in international law. Moreover, this issue would not have been possible without the many peer reviewers that have dedicated their time and expertise by providing sensitive, constructive and self-reflexive feedback. We further give thanks to Andrea Furger for providing invaluable support with the editing and proof-reading of the special issue. The issue’s cover was beautifully created by Juliana Santos de Carvalho. Lastly, we thank all the queer scholars, activists, and living beings that sparked in us the dream of having this special issue, and whose existence/resistance created the conditions that made it possible.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lena Holzer

Lena Holzer (she/her) is currently a Lecturer in Law at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research lies in the area of queer-feminist interpretations of international law and sports law.

Bérénice K. Schramm

Bérénice K. Schramm is currently assistant professor of law at Bahçeşehir University where she founded the first Gender Law Clinic in Turkey. Embedded in post/de-colonial feminist and queer approaches, her research spans various fields of (international) law, disciplines and languages.

Juliana Santos de Carvalho

Juliana Santos de Carvalho (she/her) is currently a PhD candidate in International Law with a minor in International Relations/Political Science at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research interests include feminist and decolonial approaches to international law, international legal theory, and international justice systems.

Manon Beury

Manon Beury (she/her) is currently a PhD candidate in International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute and Human Rights Officer at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her research focuses on feminist and queer approaches to international norms regarding gender and sexuality.

Notes

1 Sam Bourcier, Queer zones: la trilogie (Éditions Amsterdam 2018) 177–78.

2 For more information about our efforts to ‘queer’ the organisation of the workshop, see Bérénice K Schramm and others, ‘Doing Queer in the Everyday of Academia: Reflections on Queering a Conference in International Law’ (2022) 116 American Journal of International Law 16.

3 There is a vast tradition of works that explore the issue of ‘travelling theories’, which has arguably been launched by Edward Said’s essays on the theme. See: Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Harvard University Press 1983) 226; Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Harvard University Press 2000) 436. For an overview of works exploring the notion of theories travelling, see: Sue-Ann Harding, ‘Travelling Theory’ in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (3rd edn, Routledge 2019).

4 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press 2006) 5, 1.

5 ibid 3.

6 ibid 7.

7 Sara Ahmed, ‘Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology’ (2006) 12 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 543, 561. See also: Manon Beury and Lena Holzer, ‘Orientations as a 3-Dimensional Tool for Practising Positionality in International Law’ (2022) 4 Working Paper, EUI LAW, <https://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/74503> accessed 23 March 2023.

8 Ahmed (n 4) 8.

9 ibid 160.

10 ibid 158–59.

11 Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Duke University Press 2014).

12 Grewal, Kiran and others, ‘Confronting “The Household”’ (Feminist Review, 26 May 2020) <https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/confronting-the-household/> accessed 21 April 2023.

13 Cooper (n 11).

14 Shaimaa Abdelkarim and others, ‘A Roundtable Conversation: Feminist Collaborative Ethos in International Law’ (2023) 49(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal (this issue).

15 Cooper (n 11) 4.

16 Throughout the editorial process, we tried to keep contributors informed of the different stages and tentative timeline. In the critical stage of receiving peer review reports, we tried to support our contributors by acknowledging how emotionally intense receiving feedback is, and shared the following scholarly and literary resources that can assist in the process. These materials were: Katelyn Knox, ‘What’s It like to Receive Peer Reviews of an Academic Book?’ (Katelyn Knox, 1 June 2021) <https://katelynknox.com/writing-first-humanities-book/receiving-peer-reviews/> accessed 23 March 2023; Siobhan O’Dwyer, Sarah Pinto and Sharon McDonough, ‘Self-Care for Academics: A Poetic Invitation to Reflect and Resist’ (2018) 19 Reflective Practice 243; ‘DEAR SENTHURAN’ (Akwaeke Emezi) <https://www.akwaeke.com/dear-senthuran> accessed 23 March 2023.

17 Rosalind Gill, ‘Breaking the Silence: The Hidden Injuries of the Neoliberal University’ in Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill (eds), Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections (Routledge 2010).

18 Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’ (2012) 1 Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, 3.

19 la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (University of Minnesota Press 2017).

20 ibid 44, 46–47, 52, 60.

21 Bérénice K Schramm, ‘Traductions et Translations: Du et/Ou Des Queer(s) En Droit International’ in Bérénice K Schramm (ed), Queer(s) Et Droit International: Études Du Réseau Olympe (Société de Législation Comparée 2021) [Queer(s) and International Law: Studies by the Olympe Network] 22–33; Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (NYU Press 1997) 1–3.

22 Dianne Otto (ed), Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge 2018); Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira, Queer in the Tropics: Gender and Sexuality in the Global South (Springer 2019) ch 4.

23 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge 1999); Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (Edward Elgar 2018). On a recent application of this theoretical/political project but in the context of international adjudication, see: Tamsin Phillipa Paige and Joanne Stagg, ‘Queer Approaches to International Adjudication’ in Hélène Ruiz Fabri (ed), Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law (Oxford University Press 2021) 1–34.

24 These and similar questions are discussed in: Kate Browne and Catherine J Nash, ‘Queer Methods and Methodologies: An Introduction’ in Catherine J Nash and Kath Browne (eds), Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research (Routledge 2016) 4.

25 Leonam Lucas Nogueira Cunha, ‘Queer Methodologies in the Study of Law: Notes about Queering Methods’ (2023) 49(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 2 (this issue).

26 Edward Said cited by Uday Chandra, ‘The Case for a Postcolonial Approach to the Study of Politics’ (2013) 35 New Political Science 479, 481.

27 Chandra Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ (1988) 30 Feminist review 61; Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (eds), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (Routledge 2003); Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’ (2007) 21 Cultural Studies 168; María Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’ (2010) 25 Hypatia 742.

28 By ‘gender essentialism’ we mean notions of gender that rely on a supposedly ‘biological’ foundation of sex to argue that there are fixed and immutable differences between ‘males’ and ‘females’. On a critique of how gender essentialism is translated into (international) law, see, among others: Brenda Cossman, ‘Gender Performance, Sexual Subjects and International Law’ (2002) 15 Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 281; Dianne Otto, ‘Queering Gender [Identity] in International Law’ (2015) 33 Nordic Journal of Human Rights 299; Lena Holzer, ‘Sexually Dimorphic Bodies: A Production of Birth Certificates’ (2019) 45 Australian Feminist Law Journal 91.

29 In this regard, feminists have been particularly attuned to seeing international law through a pluralist lens – for that, see, among others: Zoe Pearson, ‘Feminist Project(s): The Spaces of International Law’ in Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary International Law Between Resistance and Compliance? (Hart Publishing 2011); Yoriko Otomo, ‘Searching for Virtue in International Law’ in Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary International Law Between Resistance and Compliance? (Hart Publishing 2011); Gina Heathcote, Feminist Dialogues on International Law: Success, Tensions, Futures (Oxford University Press 2019). On the plurality of methods in international law, see Rossana Deplano and Nicholas Tsagourias (eds), Research Methods in International Law Research Methods in International Law: a Handbook (Edward Elgar 2021). More specifically, see Sundhya Pahuja’s contribution to that volume: Sundhya Pahuja, ‘Methodology: Writing about How We Do Research’ in Rossana Deplano and Nikolaos K Tsagourias (eds), Research Methods in International Law: A Handbook (Edward Elgar 2021).

30 Ahmed (n 7) 563.

31 Abdelkarim and others (n 14).

32 Ahmed (n 4) 1–8.

33 Critical social theorists Barbara Adam and Chris Groves have argued for the necessity of doing away with reductionism as it applies to futurity. Instead, future is both lived and living, as in part and parcel of our present reality; B Adam and C Groves, Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics (Brill 2007).

34 Kathryn McNeilly, ‘Queer Temporalities and Human Rights’ in Ben Warwick (ed), The Times and Temporalities of International Human Rights Law (Hart Publishing 2022).

35 Claerwen O’Hara, ‘In Search of a Queerer Law: Two People’s Tribunals in 1976’ (2023) 49(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal (this issue).

36 ibid 8.

37 Giovanna Gilleri, ‘Human Rights Discourses and Subject Formations: Tainting Queer Theory with Psychoanalysis’ (2023) 49(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal (this issue).

38 ibid 15.

39 Kseniya A Kirichenko, ‘Queer Intersectional Perspective on LGBTI Human Rights Discourses by United Nations Treaty Bodies’ (2023) 49(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal (this issue).

40 ibid 6.

41 ibid 15.

42 Odette Mazel, ‘The Texture of “Lives Lived with Law:” Methods for Queering International Law’ (2023) 49(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal (this issue).

43 ibid 11.

44 Gilleri (n 37) 12–14.

45 Zoe Pearson, ‘Spaces of International Law’ (2008) 17 Griffith Law Review 489.

46 David Ikpo, ‘Advancing Queer-Inclusive International Human Rights Law Education in Nigerian Classrooms Through Indigenous Storytelling: Stories from a Law Classroom at Eko (Lagos, Nigeria)’ (2023) 49(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal (this issue).

47 African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, ‘Resolution on Protection against Violence and other Human Rights Violations against Persons on the basis of their real or imputed Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity’ ACHPR/Res.275(LV)2014.

48 Abdelkarim (n 14).

49 Larry Knopp, ‘From Lesbian and Gay to Queer Geographies: Pasts, Prospects and Possibilities’, in Kath Browne, Jason Lim and Gavin Brown (eds), Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics (Ashgate 2007) 22–23.

50 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Routledge 1993) 221.

51 Samuel Ballin, ‘Four Challenges, Three Identities and a Double Movement in Asylum Law: Queering the “Particular Social Group” after Mx M’ (2023) 49(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal (this issue).

52 ibid 7.

53 ibid 17.

54 Nogueira Cunha (n 25).

55 ibid.

56 ibid 3.

57 ibid.