This paper argues that current iterations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex rights are limited by an overreliance on particular representations of sexuality, in which homosexuality is defined negatively through a binary of homosexual/heterosexual. The limits of these representations are explored in order to unpick the possibility of engaging in a form of sexuality politics that is grounded in difference rather than in sameness or opposition. The paper seeks to respond to Braidotti’s call for an “affirmative politics” that is (...) open to forms of creative, future-oriented action and that might serve to answer some of the more common criticisms of current LGBTI rights activism. (shrink)

Past and future coalesce in discussions of LGBTI rights, often embedded in narratives of progress, civilisation, colonisation and emancipation. An understanding of these dynamics can help to illuminate the complex power relations that currently striate international LGBTI rights discourses. This paper analyses how temporality operates in the context of international LGBTI rights through an examination of the World Bank’s withdrawal of a $90 million loan to Uganda after the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014. To do this, the paper juxtaposes (...) postcolonial critiques of the ongoing international legal reproduction of the colonial encounter, with a Deleuzian conception of law’s ‘virtual memory’. These two theoretical lenses are used to show how attempts to advance LGBTI rights can reproduce problematic civilisational binaries, through which the Global North seeks to manage the unruly or ‘uncivilized’ Global South. These civilisational and spatial dichotomies are often obscured by un-interrogated ‘grand narratives’ of progress and by the codification of specific, narrow forms of rights protections. As such, the paper argues that in order to better advance current and future frameworks for sexual orientation and gender identity justice, we must undertake a more attentive encounter with the past. (shrink)

This reflection draws upon two recent ‘moments’ in British sexuality politics—a series of Parliamentary debates on Global LGBT rights and Brighton Pride’s campaign to ‘Highlight Global LGBT Communities’. It contrasts these two moments in order to demonstrate how, at a time when LGBT rights have ostensibly been ‘won’ in the UK, there is an increasing tendency to shift focus to the persecution of SOGI minorities elsewhere in the world. This shift in focus sets up a binary of here versus there (...) that is politically persuasive but ultimately limited and limiting. By reflecting on the way that this growing trend of creating sexual politics elsewhere occurs in two very different locations in British politics and activism, we seek to begin a conversation about the relational affects of placing sexual politics ‘elsewhere’. (shrink)