Abolitionist Human Rights: Queering LGBT Human Rights Advocacy and Law

Abstract

This paper aims to queer LGBT human rights advocacy by encouraging it to heed the calls of queer abolitionists to resist not only the policing and punishment of queer and trans sexualities and bodies but also the uses of criminal law to respond to homophobic and transphobic violence. Pursuing the uneasy relationship between LGBT human rights advocacy and queer abolitionist activism, the paper considers their radically divergent views about the promises and pitfalls of using criminal law to protect LGBT rights. It attributes these differences partly to the queer and racialized subjects and subjectivities on which each focuses as well as to a larger, generally unspoken, tension between human rights law and advocacy, on one hand, and prison and police abolition, on the other. The paper urges LGBT human rights advocates to channel the decriminalization and sexual liberation efforts of their predecessors, who aimed to be protected from, not by, the carceral state.

Keywords: queer, human rights advocacy, human rights law, prison abolition, police abolition