"The Sexual Subaltern and Law: Postcolonial Queer Imaginaries”
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Editors
Fischel, J
Cossman, B
Edition
1st
Pagination
59 - 84
Publisher
Location
Journal
Enticements: Queer Legal Imaginaries
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In this chapter I discuss the significance of Spivak’s notion of epistemic violence and the accompanying imperial formations of the subject for contemporary LGBT rights struggles and queer critique. Queer critique has exposed how rights struggles have secured recognition for marginalized communities, while also incorporating them into a heteronormative and reproductive framework and its assimilationist demands. At the same time, queer critique—or scholarship on the radical queer break with the sexed and gendered subject—remains embedded in the epistemic violence of the colonial encounter and its role in shaping the gender and sexuality of the native subject in law. The critiques continue to be partly produced through racist and colonial constructions of the “other” as homophobic, repressive, and primitive in its treatment of gender and sexuality. This chapter demonstrates how contemporary forms of sexual dissidence need to be understood alongside the epistemic violence of the colonial encounter in law.
Authors
Kapur, RCollections
- Department of Law [860]