Reading Emotion: Queer Injury, Intimacy, and Identity in Pro-LGBTI Cases

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 LGBTI injuries, intimacies, and identities visible while also challenging the ways legal systems continue to marginalise queer minorities. My thesis contributes to these ongoing conversations by reading in a register of emotion to show the ways case law seeks to “progress” the intimacies and identities of LGBTI people from positions of injury. In doing so, I use queer affect theory to develop a reading in a register of 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 reading of those cases. Rather than organise my analysis around specific doctrines or jurisdictions, I create my own scholarly narrative by reading in a register of emotion through their enactments in pro-LGBTI cases that cross various sub-disciplines of law. I begin with passionate demands to limit state intervention by retracting criminal laws that injure LGBTI people in private spaces and conclude with inspired calls for greater state intervention through laws that accommodate the intimacy and identity of LGBTI people in public spheres. LGBTI people move from being abjected as sexualised “outlaws” to dignified as domesticated “in-laws.” I argue that while emotional enactments in pro-LGBTI cases enable new forms of recognition and visibility, they can also work, paradoxically, to cover over queer injuries, intimacies, and identities they seek to address. Reading in a register of emotion exposes the reach of pro-LGBTI cases and the insights gained from this reading make possible queer critiques of the disparate ideas of injury, intimacy, and identity generated within them.