"What might it mean to read international law as queer, even as it (re)installs exclusionary gendered, sexualised, and racialised configurations of (il)legality? How might queering complicate international laws exclusionary and subversive discourse of gender, sexuality, and violence? This book engages queer, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to international law and international relations to address these questions and their implications for contemporary practices of international law. Through a case study of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the book traces how discourses of gender, sexuality, and violence constitute international law as a (queer) governance mechanism that is simultaneously violent and contains the seeds of queer potential and justice. It explores how international law is a site and agent of governance that (re)produces civilisational logics and cis-heteronormative discourses of gender, sexuality, and violence. This is evident in an analysis of the ICTY as an example of international law. The book argues that international law violates gendered and racialised populations through the designation of bodies and populations as feminised victims and hyper-heteromasculine, homophobic perpetrators, and that international law functions as the paternal intervener. However, the queer critique developed in this book also recognises how the violence of international law can be subverted, and how victims, survivors, and oppressed groups might find justice within and beyond international law. By queerly analysing these legal discourses and logics, this book shows how governance and international law reinforces gendered and racial hierarchies, but that through and against international law, these hierarchies might be queered and dismantled"--.
Queering Governance and International Law : The Case of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia