CQL213 | Queerness & the Law

The present course is offered as an optional Elective and aims to study the intersections  of law and queer individuality/queer communities. It looks at how social conventions  and legal policy govern, regulate, and recognise queerness, and how the latter responds  to its socio-legal treatment.

The course will try to uncover how the image of the ‘Queer’ is constructed and  reinforced between social ideas, cultural identities, and the law. Queerness here refers to  forms of sexuality and gender expressions that fall outside accepted imaginations of  societal existence. This would include gender identities beyond the male-female binary,  inter- community expressions of intimacy, same sex intimacy, and chosen family  structures.

The course will also explore how queer individuals and communities have engaged with  the law to have forms of expression and existence recognised. The language of rights  now formally covers several aspects of queer existence. While it is crucial to study the  causative factors of the turnaround in legal treatment of queerness, the course will also  cover the effects of legal recognition on ideas of queerness itself. It is worth studying  whether identities are now being tailored to achieve aspirational homogeneity, which

seeks forms of recognition in the law that mirror conventionally non-queer social  structures. In this sense, we will look at whether legal recognition and the language of  rights works to limit the radical potential of queerness, to more palatable and socially  acceptable forms, that carry forward non-queer ideas of propriety and culture.

The course is designed to engage with inter-disciplinary literature. Students will be  expected to read sociological, literary, and legal texts. A part of the course material will  also be visual, in the form of excerpts from cinema and archival footage.  Classroom instruction will be based on discussion of pre-assigned materials, and also engagement with civil society activists.

COURSE OBJECTIVE(S): 

It is expected that, through this course, students will gain an understanding of the social  and political economy of the law in dealing with particular axes of marginalisation. They  should also be able to capture the ways in which the law may create and perpetuate  marginalisation, and how it may offer recourse to it.

It is hoped that the course will also open up ways of engaging with inter-disciplinary  material in the law, and further understanding of a legal and political movement which is  recent in origin and continuous in the present context.