Queer Rights Talk: The Rhetoric of Equality Rights for LGBTQ Peoples

Rebecca J. Cook ed., Frontiers of Gender Equality: Transnational Legal Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

42 Pages Posted: 28 Apr 2023

See all articles by Daniel Del Gobbo

Daniel Del Gobbo

University of Windsor Faculty of Law

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: 2023

Abstract

Equality rights for LGBTQ+ peoples have a politically vexed relationship with substantive equality around the world. Critiques of the structural limitations and harmful, unintended consequences of rights claims have abounded in critical legal theory for decades. This chapter intervenes in these debates by mapping the structure and rhetoric of equality rights for LGBTQ+ peoples. Applying a legal analytical framework that originates in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing, the chapter focuses on the text of the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, released in 2007 and supplemented in 2017. The rhetoric of the Yogyakarta Principles is trapped in what Sedgwick calls a “radical and irreducible incoherence” between conflicting conceptions of gender and sexuality that has constrained the mission of substantive equality worldwide, yet which may be fundamental to the praxis of rights claiming in the international human rights system. Equality rights talk is “queer” in this sense – irresolvable in theory, powerfully productive for LGBTQ+ peoples in certain legal contexts, and profoundly harmful to LGBTQ+ peoples and other equality-seeking groups in other legal contexts. Considering this fact, the chapter concludes by arguing that LGBTQ+ activists should think about how we might negotiate the conflicts of equality rights rhetoric more strategically and responsibly by operating, paradoxically, both within and without the constraints of international human rights system to promote gender and sexual diversity on the global stage.

Suggested Citation

Del Gobbo, Daniel, Queer Rights Talk: The Rhetoric of Equality Rights for LGBTQ Peoples ( 2023). Rebecca J. Cook ed., Frontiers of Gender Equality: Transnational Legal Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4406307

Daniel Del Gobbo (Contact Author)

University of Windsor Faculty of Law ( email )

401 Sunset Ave, Windsor
Windsor, ON N9B 3P4
Canada

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