26/03/2019
CALL FOR PAPERS!!
Sexual Justice Conference 19-20 July 2019,
(Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, Haryana, India)
Convenors: Dipika Jain (JGLS) | Debanuj DasGupta (UConn) | Paul Boyce (USussex) | Danish Sheikh (JGLS) | Oishik Sircar (JGLS)
Feminist and q***r studies scholarship has long attended to the paradoxes of pursuing sexual justice by recourse to the law. A known limitation of activist engagements with state legal systems to safeguard the rights of marginalized groups is the rigid classification of people and identities that accompanies legal recognition of rights. For example, while the highest courts of several countries in South Asia have recognized the fundamental rights of trans* people, the use of an umbrella term such as ‘transgender’ itself may erase and further disenfranchise communities that have their own terminologies, customs, ways of living and laws.
Over the last decade, courts across South Asia have passed historic judgments upholding the rights of gender and sexually marginalized persons. Such measures do not only pertain to those who might be considered marginal in respect to their gender difference or non-heteronormative sexuality. In September 2018, the Supreme Court of India struck down a ban on the entry of menstruating women to the temple of Sabarimala. This ruling was followed by other judgments that decriminalized consensual so**my between adults, and the offense of adultery.
Nepal’s Supreme Court in 2007 delivered a groundbreaking judgment guaranteeing LGBT individuals the enjoyment of all rights under the Constitution (then to be ratified) as well as international law and directed the State to ensure that they could access rights without any discrimination. In Pakistan, the Supreme Court in 2009 legally recognized a third gender category thus deeming transgender people as full and equal citizens. India’s Supreme Court in 2014 issued a similar judgment that upheld the right of self-identification for transgender people. In May 2018, Pakistan’s Parliament passed a comprehensive Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act that, inter alia, allows for self-identification and prohibits discrimination against transgender people at schools, workplaces, and when receiving medical care. In November 2013, the government of Bangladesh officially recognized Hijra persons as third gender. However, such recognition came with intrusive medical examinations, and, erroneous ideas about sex/gender-based identities.
These judgments and legislations indicate an emerging set of shifts in sexual and gender mores in respect of legal status in the present moment of rising cultural and economic populism, engendering complex consequences for the way we perceive the relationship between law, sexuality and justice in South Asia. The capacity of the State to call sexual subjects into being as recognizable figurations may run counter to other formations whereby q***r folk exist predominantly outside of such authorities or visualizations.
The celebration of current landmark judgments must also be tempered with analyses that pay attention to the intersections of caste, class, religion, regional disparities, gender and sexuality.
Does entry into Sabarimala, for instance, signal freedom for all women or only upper-caste women? Does the State become a beacon of secularism when it advances women’s rights by declaring religious practices as unconstitutional? What does it mean to fight for love amidst the growing ‘saffronization’ of the LGBT movement in India? What makes activists repeatedly resort to the right to privacy to demand decriminalization of so**my when it carries the potential to reify the public-private divide? Whose narratives are represented in q***r activism and whose have been deliberately left out? How is ‘transgender’ being defined differently across diverse countries in South Asia, and how is the governmentality of recognition producing newer kinds of regulation of bodies? How do we think about law when it is simultaneously a site of constraint and liberation? How might legal reform in South Asia be foreshadowing the emergence of new areas of regional activism regarding same-sex marriage or civil partnership? How might incipient issues pertaining to inheritance between same-sex partners run with or against other means of codifying property in relation to kinship, lineage, socio-economic privilege and law? Against the background of such questions, the relation between law, history and nature is taking shape as an especially dense web of evolving meanings and actions in contemporary q***r praxis in South Asia.
We seek interdisciplinary works that explore such changes and challenges to reconsider how a politics of sexual justice can be auto-critical, intersectional, reparative and inclusive. In doing so, we want to further wonder how we might address the gaps in implementation that inevitably result after groundbreaking judgments are delivered. We also aim to reconsider the role of legal institutions and the State in regulating, controlling and conforming gender and sexuality.
Please send in your abstracts (no more than 500 words) by April 25, 2019. We also welcome innovative panel formats, incorporating alternative modes of engagement such as performances. These panel proposals must not be more than 1000 words.
This conference is being organized in collaboration with The Centre for Health Law, Ethics and Technology at Jindal Global Law School; the Departments of Geography and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Connecticut, and the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.
A more detailed call with submission guidelines is available here:http://chlet.jgu.edu.in/pdf/Sexual-Justice-Conference-2019.pdf
For any questions or concerns, please get in touch with the secretariat of the conference at [email protected] and [email protected].
