Senthorun Sunil Raj: Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity
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Senthorun Sunil Raj: Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity Routledge, London, 2020 Kay Lalor1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity is a nuanced and multi-layered text. Embedded in queer affect theory and law and emotion scholarship, the book offers a detailed blend of case analysis and theoretical work as it considers ‘how injury is emotionally rendered in acts that stigmatise, shame, or disavow nonheterosexual intimacies and identities because they disturb a social order that values matrimonial coupling and reproductive sexuality’ (Raj 2020, 3). The legal and juridical recognition of such injuries can be shaped by LGBTQ people’s emotional responses to the harms they have suffered, but as Raj reminds us, the space of judicial recognition of both emotion and injury is a ‘precarious terrain’ (Ibid, 140). Raj makes a compelling case for the analysis of emotion and emotional registers of law. Focusing on cases that have addressed the rights of LGBTQ individuals and groups from multiple jurisdictions, but most notably the US, Australia and the UK, the book argues that emotion has both political and analytic value (Raj 2020, 9). Raj shows how bodies and affects are differentially organised and oriented (Ahmed 2006) relative to each other in case law and how emotion shapes these affective arrangements, giving form and visibility to different types of injury or pain experienced by LGBTQ people, and making tangible particular aspects of LGBTQ lives. In so doing, emotion can both illuminate and hide the contours of LGBTQ intimacy and identity. This perspective allows Raj to navigate the different scales and structures through which LGBTQ individuals face injustices and suffer emotional harm. He notes that, ‘[s]hifts in an individual’s “bad feeling”, without changes to the structural or discursive conditions that give rise to such feeling, render the emotive appeal to pursue effective legal remedies fleeting and counterproductive for those who desperately seek such remedies’ (Raj 2020, 13). Emotion is powerful: it connects us, provokes a reaction, operates as a catalyst for change. In his close reading of LGBT cases * Kay Lalor [email protected] 1
Manchester Law School, Manchester Metropolitan University, Lower Ormond St, Manchester M15 6BH, UK
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however, Raj is able to show how legal remedies that recognise the emotions of individual litigants may reify these emotions in institutional structures in ways that may have unexpected consequences or facilitate forms of legal recognition that depoliticise the operation of long lasting structural violence. The conclusion that can be drawn from Raj’s analysis is thus that we should approach emotion not as a positive or negative presence in law, but as an inescapable aspect of jurisprudential writing and legal reasoning (Raj 2020, 12). The challenge is to account for how emotions open and close down space for the presence of queer identities and intimacies within law and legal spac
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