ABSTRACT
Early in 1990 a fresh usage of the word “queer” entered scholarly and activist lexicons in the United States and traveled globally along the two vectors we are familiar with today: “queer” can stand in as a shorthand for an alphabet soup of gender and sexual identities such as LGBT or LGBTTIQ (Facchini 2005; Stein 2012); or it can contest the stability of identity categories by drawing attention to the socially constructed and contingent character of any social identity, be it sexual, gendered, transgendered, racial, national, religious, etc. In this regard, intersectional analyses and queer of color critique are particularly helpful (Somerville 2000; Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005; Ferguson 2003). In the former usage, queer rights as human rights follow the path blazed by the strand of global feminism that established women’s rights as human rights (Bunch 1990; Peters and Wolper 1995; Sunder Rajan 2003; Merry 2006). In the latter usage, “queer” challenges liberal notions of international human rights insofar as it invites deep skepticism about the coherence and stability of the liberal and neoliberal subject of human rights (Duggan 2003; Spade 2011). The title of this chapter is phrased as an interrogative to signal two sets of questions: which meaning of “queer” are we talking about when we talk about queer rights, and can (or should) we even think in terms of human rights given the searching critique of liberalism offered via queer theory and especially via queer theory invested in postcolonial and intersectional analyses?
