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.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer
• emotion
• law
• LGBTI
• activism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributor

Dr Senthorun Raj is an academic lawyer/activist inspired by glitter, pop culture, and queer spaces. He is a Lecturer in Law at Keele University and Co-Director of the MA programme in Human Rights, Globalisation and Justice. Prior to this, he was a Scholar in Residence at New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Senior Policy Advisor at the New South Wales Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby. He also volunteers with various LGBTI advocacy and arts organisations.

Notes

1. This is a rich body of literature. I take inspiration from critical race and feminist scholarship, See Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law’, Harvard Law Review 101, no. 3 (1988): 1331–87; Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour’, Connecticut Law Review 43, no. 5 (1991): 1241–99; and Mari Matsuda, ‘Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations’, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 22 (1987): 323–99.

2. Frank Munger, ‘Inquiry and Activism in Law and Society’, Law & Society Review 35 (2001): 9.

3. Jane Schacter, ‘Sexual Orientation, Social Change, and the Courts’, Drake Law Review 54 (2005): 863.

4. Ibid.

5. Yvonne Zylan, States of Passion: Law, Identity and the Social Construction of Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5.

6. Chris Ashford, ‘Sexualities and the Law’, Sexualities 14, no. 3 (2000): 265.

7. Lisa Bower, ‘Queer Acts and the Politics of Direct Address: Rethinking Law, Culture and Community’, Law & Society Review 28, no. 5 (1994): 1010.

8. Ruthann Robson, ‘Judicial Review and Sexual Freedom’, University of Hawai’i Law Review 30 (2007): 46.

9. Darren Hutchinson, ‘The Majoritarian Difficulty: Affirmative Action, Sodomy, and Supreme Court Politics’, Law and Inequality 23 (2005): 29–30.

10. John Fisher, ‘Outlaws or In-laws? Successes and Challenges in the Struggle for LGBT Equality’, McGill Law Journal 49 (2003): 1190–2.

11. Ibid., 1993–4.

12. Leslie Moran, ‘What Kind of Field Is “Law, Gender and Sexuality”? Achievements, Concerns and Possible Futures’, Feminist Legal Studies 17 (2009): 309–13.

13. Marc Spindelman, ‘Sexuality’s Law’, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 24, no. 2 (2013): 87.

14. Ibid., 103.

15. Joey L. Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011), xviii.

16. Lauren G. Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, in Intimacy, ed. L. Berlant (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2000), 322.

17. Aleardo Zanghellini, ‘Queer, Antinormativity, Counter-Normativity and Abjection’, Griffith Law Review 18, no. 1 (2008): 4.

18. Robert Lecky, ‘Introduction: After Legal Equality’, in After Legal Equality: Family, Sex, Kinship (London: Routledge, 2015), 12.

19. Ryan Thoreson, Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights Worldwide (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2014).

20. Schacter, ‘Sexual Orientation, Social Change’, 861–93.

21. Judith Butler, ‘Against Proper Objects’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 (1994): 4.

22. Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 4.

23. Fleur Johns, ‘On Writing Dangerously’, Sydney Law Review 26 (2003): 473.

24. Ibid., 475.

25. Ibid., 479.

26. Kathryn Abrams, ‘Seeking Emotional Ends with Legal Means’, California Law Review 103 (2015): 1670.

27. Arlie R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University California Press, 1983); Terry Maroney, ‘Law and Emotion: A Proposed Taxonomy of an Emerging Field’, Law and Human Behaviour 30 (2006): 119–42; Eric Posner, ‘Law and the Emotions’, Georgetown Law Journal 89, no. 6 (2001): 1977–2012.

28. James B. White, Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison, WI: University Wisconsin Press, 1985), xi.

29. Duncan Kennedy, ‘Freedom and Constraint in Adjudication: A Critical Phenomenology’, Journal of Legal Education 36 (1986): 518–62. Kennedy provides a phenomenological account of judicial decision-making.

30. Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 135–6.

31. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 5.

32. Ibid., 5.

33. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 23. This approach dovetails with ‘frame analysis’ in social movement scholarship, which seeks to understand symbolic meanings generated through social justice claims. See David A. Snow and Catherine Corrigall-Brown, ‘Falling on Deaf Ears: Confronting the Prospect of Nonresonant Frames’, in Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship, ed. D. Croteau, W. Hoynes, and C. Ryan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 222–39.

34. I share Richard O. Lempert’s view that scholarship can be a form of activism by generating new ideas to challenge injustice. See Richard O. Lempert’s, ‘Activist Scholarship’, Law & Society Review 35 (2001): 26.

35. Kenji Yoshino, ‘Covering’, Yale Law Journal 111, no. 4 (2002): 837.

36. Ely Aharonson, ‘“Pro-Minority” Criminalization and the Transformation of Visions of Citizenship in Contemporary Liberal Democracies: A Critique’, New Criminal Law Review 13, no. 2 (2010): 289.

37. Bernard Haggerty, ‘Hate Crimes: A View from Laramie, Wyoming’s First Bias Crime Law, the Fight against Discriminatory Crime, and a New Cooperative Federalism’, Howard Law Journal 45 (2001): 1–75. Matthew Shepard was a young gay man who was murdered by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. McKinney and Henderson tortured Shepard, tied him up, and then left him to die on a fence in a remote area near Laramie.

38. James Jacobs and Kimberley Potter, ‘Hate Crimes: A Critical Perspective’, Crime & Justice 22 (1997): 1–50.

39. 18 USC § 249.

40. White House Press Release, ‘Remarks by the President at Reception Commemorating the Enactment of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act’ (October 28, 2009), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-reception-commemorating-enactment-matthew-shepard-and-james-byrd- (accessed August 5, 2016).

41. Ibid.

42. Leslie Moran, ‘The Emotional Dimensions of Lesbian and Gay Demands for Hate Crime Reform’, McGill Law Journal 49 (2004): 928–9.

43. See note 32.

44. Ibid.

45. Bennett v Texas, 831 SW 2d 20 at 22 (1992), 22.

46. Morris Kaplan, ‘Hate Crime and the Privatization of Political Responsibility: Protecting Queer Citizens in the United States?’, Liverpool Law Review 29 (2008): 40.

47. See note 42.

48. Ibid.

49. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (London: Duke University Press, 2014), 42.

50. Glenn v Holder, 738 F Supp 2d 718 (2010), 21.

51. Glenn v Holder, 690 F 3d 417 (2012), 425.

52. Ibid., 427.

53. Glenn (2010), 24.

54. Jacobs and Potter, ‘Hate Crimes’, 2.

55. United States v Jenkins, 909 F Supp 2d 758 (2012), 773.

56. Ibid.

57. Gail Mason, ‘The Symbolic Purpose of Hate Crime Law: Ideal Victims and Emotion’, Theoretical Criminology 18, no. 1 (2014): 76.

58. Gail Mason, ‘Not Our Kind of Hate Crime’, Law and Critique 12 (2001): 255.

59. Ibid.

60. White House Press Release, ‘Remarks by the President’.

61. Mason, ‘The Symbolic Purpose of Hate Crime Law’, 80–2.

62. Stephen Tomsen, Violence, Prejudice & Sexuality (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 46.

63. See for example Nancy D. Polikoff, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008).

64. In Re Marriage Cases 49 Cal.Rptr.3d 675 (2006), 685.

65. Lockyer v City and County of San Francisco 33 Cal.4th 1055 (2004).

66. In Re Marriage Cases (2006), 687.

67. Ibid., 715.

68. Ibid., 719.

69. Ibid., 723.

70. Ibid., 730.

71. Ibid., 736.

72. Ibid., 744, 749.

73. In Re Marriage Cases 43 Cal.4th 757 (2008), 782.

74. Ibid., 814.

75. Ibid., 782.

76. Ibid., 818.

77. Ibid., 820.

78. Perry v Schwarzenegger 704 F.Supp.2d 921 (2010), 928.

79. Ibid., 930.

80. Strauss v Horton, 46 Cal 4th 364 (2009).

81. Perry (2010).

82. Ibid., 939.

83. Ibid., 992.

84. Ibid., 967.

85. Ibid.

86. Casey Charles, Critical Queer Studies: Law, Film, and Fiction in Contemporary American Culture (New York, NY: Ashgate, 2012), 154.

87. Lauren G. Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 209.

88. Perry (2010), 939.

89. David Richards, Why Love Leads to Justice: Love across the Boundaries (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2016), 2.

90. Ibid., 25.

91. Polikoff, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, 108.

92. Courtney M. Cahill, ‘“If Sex Offenders Can Marry, Then Why Not Gays and Lesbians?”: An Essay on the Progressive Comparative Argument’, Buffalo Law Review 55 (2007): 780.