Abolitionist human rights: Queering LGBT human rights advocacy and law

The chapter aims to queer LGBT human rights advocacy by encouraging it to heed the calls of queer abolitionists to resist not only the policing and punishment of queer and trans sexualities and bodies but also the uses of criminal law to respond to homophobic and transphobic violence. Pursuing the uneasy relationship between LGBT human rights advocacy and queer abolitionist activism, it considers their radically divergent views about the promises and pitfalls of using criminal law to protect LGBT rights. It attributes these differences partly to the queer and racialised subjects and subjectivities on which each focuses as well as to a larger, generally unspoken, tension between human rights law and advocacy, on the one hand, and prison and police abolition, on the other. The chapter argues that LGBT human rights advocates should channel the decriminalisation and sexual liberation efforts of their predecessors, who aimed to be protected from, not by, the carceral state.