Refusing the present to affirm the unknown future: after LGBTIQ rights in global queer politics

Lalor, Kay ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3265-7264 (2023) Refusing the present to affirm the unknown future: after LGBTIQ rights in global queer politics. The International Journal of Human Rights. ISSN 1364-2987

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Abstract

This paper draws upon recent developments in international LGBTIQ rights law and activism to show how time and temporality are central to the growing international recognition of (and backlash to) sexual orientation and gender identity rights claims. Focusing on the manifestation of these temporal debates within the international backlash to the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014, the paper asks how we might think queer futures differently. It engages with Deleuzian temporal multiplicities to argue that simply countering linear narratives of LGBTIQ progress will not escape the logics of the present or account for injustices of the past. Instead, it is necessary to escape from those logics and conceive of the present as a dimension of the future even if we do not know what that future will be. This position of openness to the future makes clear how international institutions assume their own atemporality and shows how we might ‘affirmatively refuse’ structures of the present that are limiting, unjust or absurd. Using this framework, the paper identifies what elements might be required to think futures of LGBTIQ justice in a non-linear fashion, where the future is not tethered to the present or reliant upon a single path of progress.