The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era, Brenda Cossman [NYU Press, 2021, 280pp, £25.99 (hardback)]

Book Review of The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era, Brenda Cossman [NYU Press, 2021, 280pp, £25.99 (hardback)

Contested feelings: Mapping emotional journeys of LGBTI rights and reforms

This reflection explores how emotion shapes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights and law reforms. Drawing on case studies from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the author maps how disgust regulates sexuality, hate manifests in hate crime penalties, anger arises in anti-discrimination measures, fear polices refugee law, anxiety shapes trans children’s access to medical transition, pity and compassion inhibit intersex autonomy, and love enables marriage equality. Legal scholars, activists, lawyers, and judges need to take emotion seriously to better address the pressing challenges facing LGBTI people

Once more with feeling: queer activist legal scholarship and jurisprudence

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

A/Effective Adjudications: Queer Refugees and the Law

Who is the ‘queer refugee’? How do we manage their feelings, emotions and experiences when assessing or supporting their claims for asylum? In contemporary refugee decision-making and litigation, numerous challenges arise when discerning what constitutes a ‘well-founded fear’ of persecution for a clearly defined ‘particular social group’. Specifically, fact-finding and credibility assessment in this area of law reinforces stereotypical assumptions about sexual citizenship, public persecution, fixed identity and immutable erotic desire. An inherent (functioning) sexuality or an essentialist gender identity must be causally related to serious incidents of state sanctioned harm. In doing so, the refugee status-determination process privileges the emotional attachments of decision-makers while occluding the emotional narratives and identities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer asylum seekers. Responding to these legal and administrative tensions, using case studies from Australia and contrasting them with developments in Europe, this paper uses emotion as a focal point to think about how adjudicators can accommodate disparate cultural differences and experiences in refugee law

Protecting the rights of LGBTIQ people around the world: Beyond marriage equality and the decriminalisation of homosexuality

Discussions about the human rights of LGBTIQ people tend to centre around two vastly different issues, namely, marriage equality and the criminalisation of same-sex sexual conduct. However, looking only at these two high-profile issues ignores the many pressing concerns facing LGBTIQ people around the world. This article identifies and analyses eight other human rights issues that urgently need addressing, in order to respect the rights of LGBTIQ people across the globe

Dialogue on the Impact of Coronavirus on Research and Publishing: Monday 22nd June 2020

This roundtable took place via Microsoft Teams on Monday 22nd June 2020 to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on Research and Publishing in the U

Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

This chapter begins by setting out the broader legal scholarly context in which Critical Race Theory emerged. The chapter then moves to define key concepts of CRT such as race, racism, whiteness, privilege, reparations, and intersectionality. The next section elaborates on those key concepts by looking at how they might be applied to address contemporary law reform debates, such as anti-LGBT hate crime laws and administrative interventions aimed at protecting LGBT people who seek asylum. The chapter concludes with a “queer judgment” that uses intersectionality as an analytical anchor to rewrite a leading case about the protection of gay and lesbian people who seek refuge from persecution in the UK. Throughout the chapter, you will find reflection questions and activities to help guide your understanding of the concepts discussed in the chapter

Queering Asylum Anxieties: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugee Claims

Over the last three decades, an increasing number of Anglophone courts have recognised asylum claims on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Such jurisprudence has been heralded for “progressing” LGBTI rights. Yet, the progressive promise of these “pro-LGBTI” decisions leaves much more to be desired. Often formulated under the rubric of a “particular social group,” the extent to which queer refugees have been granted protection has been contingent on whether they subscribe to normative ideas of intimacy, identity, and injury. Specifically, queer refugees must demonstrate they have a “well-founded fear of persecution” by subscribing to ethnocentric assumptions about sexual citizenship, gender expression, erotic relationships, and state violence. While the concept of fear has been central to the grant of asylum under international law, it has also been mobilised in legal, political, and academic responses to the adjudication of such claims. Specifically, the fear about having a refugee jurisprudence that is too queer has led to states attempting to curb opening the proverbial “floodgates.” This anxious attempt at control has been painfully fleshed out in the way courts navigate the nexus between “authenticating” immutable sexual or gender identities and “counting” what amounts to sustained state persecution. Drawing on appellate case law from Australia, UK, US, and the EU, this paper disturbs how fear stifles the recognition of queer identity, intimacy, and injury. By disrupting judicial gestures, it considers how “asylum anxieties” continue to undermine queer claims for protection