Reimagining a Queer Human: the Social and Legal Production of Subjects in International Human Rights Law Discourse

Transnational civil society initiatives have played a fundamental role in the social rearticulation of what is recognized as “human” in the International Human Rights Law framework. This is especially true regarding sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) rights. The struggle for the recognition of the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI) persons is also an effort to expand the boundaries of what is understood as humanity, and to demonstrate that those are lives that deserve to be protected. The thesis explores the establishment of LGBTI rights as human rights, illustrating how subjects are produced within these dynamics. The study combines an ethnographic account of the advocacy strategies deployed by the transnational LGBTI movement with discourse analysis of legal documents regarding SOGIESC in the international legal system. The main concern is to provide a critical description of how this process occurred and to identify who are the different LGBTI subjects of rights produced by it.