The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law

A critical study of how emotions structure legal conflicts over LGBT rights.

• Uses emotion as a novel analytic lens to understand, analyse, and critique the relationship between individual, interpersonal, and institutional conflicts over LGBT rights
• Combines interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of Law and Emotion with Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Studies to theorise the concept of “emotional grammar” in law
• Contextualises disparate contemporary LGBT law reform debates that exemplify conflicts of rights – including religious exceptions to anti-discrimination laws, legal gender recognition, bans on “conversion therapy,” and sex and LGBT education in schools – to explore their emotional dynamics across different legal registers
• Explores the emotional connections between litigation, jurisprudence, statutory law-making, and regulatory responses related to rights and reforms aimed at repairing inequalities and harms experienced by LGBT people

Emotions are central to the pursuit, organisation, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in law. This book analyses emotions that shape conflicts of rights that emerge between different groups across law reforms aimed at better supporting LGBT people. It examines contemporary law reform debates about religious exceptions to anti-discrimination laws, legal gender recognition, bans on “conversion therapy,” and sex and LGBT education in schools from jurisdictions including the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States.

Drawing from critical legal theories, The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms cultivates the concept of “emotional grammar” to show how emotions structure law reform pursuits by threading together Hansard, legislation, case law, law reform consultations, and statutory guidance. By doing so, it explains why addressing this emotional grammar is important for scholars, lawyers, judges, legislators, and activists seeking to navigate conflicts over LGBT rights and reforms that aim to repair the inequalities faced by LGBT people.