Queering Human Rights: The Yogyakarta Principles and the Norm That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, regional and international efforts to secure formal protections for sexual minorities in the human rights framework have met with limited success. The prospects of these campaigns changed significantly in November 2006, when a group of activists, intellectuals, and policymakers met in Yogyakarta, Indonesia to draft a document that would outline the rights that sexual minorities enjoy as human persons under the protection of international law. Since then, activists and policymakers in local, national, and international forums have consistently invoked the Yogyakarta Principles as an authoritative document on the rights of sexual minorities worldwide, despite the fact that the document itself is not legally binding for any state or governing body. In this paper, I explore the entrenchment of sexual minorities as an at-risk group protected by human rights and the importance of the Yogyakarta Principles in advancing this “norm that dare not speak its name” on the global stage. I identify three reasons why the Principles have been quickly assimilated into policymaking: the modesty of their demands, the stability of their foundations, and the strategic, inventive ways that activists have framed and deployed them from multiple points of entry in the global system. In doing so, they have fostered a growing consensus that sexual minorities deserve protection, without necessarily creating or promoting the rights or formal protections that typically accompany such claims.

Ryan Richard Thoreson is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology at Oxford University, focusing on transnational organizing around gender, sexuality, and queerness. His research interests include queer theory, identity politics, legal anthropology, the anthropology of social movements, and comparative studies of queer activism, especially in South Africa, the Philippines, and the United States.

The author would like to thank John Fisher, Kimberly Theidon, Olivia Armenta, Lee Strock, Milos Martinov and the activists at Below the Belt, participants at the Queer Studies Easter Symposium in Mexico City in 2008, and two anonymous readers for their insights on various incarnations of this piece.

Notes

1. The Yogyakarta Principles make recommendations about the legal treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity based on 29 rights that currently exist in international law. For additional information on the content of the Principles, see the Yogyakarta Principles, available at http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org.