A Pluralist Approach to ‘the International’ and Human Rights for Sexual and Gender Minorities

Abstract

Queer theorists have considered the problems concerning the political strategy of using LGBT rights to justify racist xenophobia and using homo/transphobia to consolidate heterosexist nationalism. Their timely interventions are important in exposing state violence in the name of human rights and sovereign equality, but they have offered no alternative. They may also have reinforced the assumption of state science. This assumption is based on a trinity structure of the nation-state-sovereignty of ‘modern, self-determining men’, who are against each other and thereby co-built the so-called ‘international’. State-centric internationalism produces exclusionary effects that undermine the rights of sexual and gender minorities. To address this, I first consider the debate over ‘LGBT rights as human rights’, and identify two types of cultural relativism (epistemological and political) as the categories to formulate a decolonial response to the debate. In this article, queer political theorising is pushed forward to: 1) critically evaluate universalism, 2) differentiate cultural relativism (opposing the political version of it) and 3) revise the epistemological version with decolonial-queer praxis. I propose a pluralist approach to sovereignty and human rights; informed by this approach, the lack of international consensus is remedied by recognising the polyvocality within transnational queer activism beyond the monopoly of states’ representation of their own peoples. This proposal also aims to decentre modern statecraft from the political imagination of contemporary international studies scholarship.

Coloniality and Feminist Collusion: Breaking Free, Thinking Anew

“…Centring the lives and afterlives of Qandeel, Shroff rereads honour killing as a crime of property rather than one of culture, where honour is read as an economic metric of heteropatriarchy, imbued with discourses on religious nationalism, the ‘postcolonial’ nation, racialised ethnic difference, digital culture and sexual deviancy. This challenge of rethinking existing registers that qualify and recognise demands to live and for rights is mirrored in Po-Han Lee’s article, ‘A pluralist approach to “the international” and human rights for sexual and gender minorities’ (2021, this issue). Re-evaluating the applicability of universal rights discourses in advocating for sexual and gender minorities’ (SGM) rights, Lee presents a way to decolonise state-sponsored heteronormativity and pursue LGBT rights by decentring our political imagination from the imagined subject for rights, the ‘modern/sovereign man’, through a decolonial-queer praxis.…”