{"id":25212,"date":"2025-06-18T08:00:57","date_gmt":"2025-06-18T06:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/?p=25212"},"modified":"2025-11-14T15:07:51","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T14:07:51","slug":"editorial-46-we-need-a-queerer-legal-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/editorial-46-we-need-a-queerer-legal-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"Editorial #46: We Need A Queerer Legal Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past winter, I went on something of a science fiction\/fantasy (SF\/F) binge, perhaps in the search for comfort during dark times in my tried and trusted favorite genre of fiction. This culminated in me, on a friend\u2019s recommendation, reading the Mistborn<\/em><\/a> trilogy by Brandon Sanderson<\/a> over the span of something like 1.5 months (there will be some major spoilers for the series in this text). The experience left me strangely dissatisfied. I appreciated the epic scale of Sanderson\u2019s saga, the themes of trust, hope, and rebellion, the genuinely innovative plotline about rebuilding a state and a society after the evil power is overthrown, and the breathtaking way in which the narrative\u2019s various strands are all joined together over more than 2000 pages. However, I realized one thing: I have been too spoilt in recent years to fully enjoy writing which (by Sanderson\u2019s own admission<\/a>) passes the Bechdel<\/a> test on a technicality only, and, much more importantly, offers little to no in-universe explanation for the presence of the same heteropatriarchy we know from the \u201creal world\u201d in a world where people can also \u201cburn\u201d ingested metals to achieve super human abilities. This began to bug me even more when, shortly after finishing the Mistborn <\/em>books, I read The Sapling Cage<\/em><\/a> by Margaret Killjoy<\/a>, a novel which, in contrast, shows how the high fantasy genre can (and perhaps should) be used to truly imagine worlds and societies that are by no means utopian but still differ from ours not just through the presence of rather more swords and magic.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I attended a lecture evening where a professor of literature was invited to talk about gender transgressions in literary works. I no longer recall the exact texts she used as examples, but I do remember that they centered around extremely painful experiences of intersex individuals written by cis authors. During the Q&A, I asked what had led the speaker to focus on stories in which the transgression of gender boundaries remained a traumatic and ultimately impossible journey and not on works such as, for example, Virginia Woolf<\/a>\u2019s Orlando<\/em><\/a> or Ursula K. LeGuin<\/a>\u2019s The Left Hand of Darkness<\/em><\/a>. If I remember correctly, the speaker\u2019s answer had something to do with what she thought was \u201crealistic\u201d in terms of gender, in literature and in the \u201creal\u201d world.<\/p>\n

Imagination is one of humanity\u2019s most powerful tools, and one we expect and admire especially in the authors of so-called speculative fiction. And yet, the author<\/a> behind the most successful fantasy series of the past decades recently gloated about having used the wealth she accumulated by writing about magic and the power of love to bankroll the successful<\/a> mobilization of UK courts in service to her and others\u2019 long-running persecution of trans women. It\u2019s frankly not hard to see why Ursula K. LeGuin had presciently found<\/a> this author\u2019s work \u201cimaginatively derivative\u201d (as well as \u201cstylistically ordinary \u2026 and ethically rather mean-spirited\u201d) as early as 2004.<\/p>\n

What does all of this have to do with international law? Well, to put it one way, aren\u2019t we all \u2013 writing about international law in the year of Audre Lorde 2025 \u2013 engaging in \u201cspeculative<\/a> fiction\u201d? In this sense, what we accept to be the limits to which we are willing<\/a> and able<\/a> to stretch our individual and collective imaginations<\/a> matters immensely.<\/p>\n

We do not need to go as far as talking about international law as utopia \u2013 I feel like somebody somewhere must have already done that? These days, even asking for basic respect for seemingly well-established basic rules of international law and the requisite academic<\/a> freedom<\/a> to discuss these can resemble an epic quest against the odds on par with dragon slaying missions.<\/p>\n

Yet we should not allow ourselves to be limited to fantasizing about a return to a slightly more rational status quo ante where, supposedly, most international law was observed by most states most of the time. Rather, not just during Pride month, we can look to our queer history for inspiration.<\/p>\n

Queers through time have only ever been able to survive by imagining<\/a> into being a world in which they are considered people. But beyond visualizing sheer survival, queerness involves dreaming states of being that currently do not exist outside of small, contested utopian pockets, of re-thinking and re-imaging, vulgo queering, established practices, and transforming conventional stories of gender, family, intimacy, and overall societal and political structures.<\/p>\n

The boundaries of \u201crealism\u201d are drawn by those with the most power, while the limits of the imagination cannot be contained. In speculative fiction, it is therefore usually the most unlikely \u201chero\u201d, the person with the least power \u2013 the hobbit, the female skaa<\/a> urchin, the goat-herding son<\/a> of a smith \u2013 who goes on to do the things no-one thought possible (and they do not manage these things on their own). Similarly, when protesting, in writing and on the streets<\/a>, genocide, autocratic backsliding, mass deportations, and the same shit Pride has rioted against since 1969, we are already not sticking to what\u2019s \u201crealistic\u201d. Contrary to calls for realism, the important lesson from our SF\/F favorites and<\/em> from decades of queer activism is that change does not come about by imagining transferring this power to us (or a Queen<\/a> instead of a Dark Lord, beautiful and terrible, etc.), but by finding ways to dismantle<\/a> it altogether.<\/p>\n

In times when even baselines such as the prohibitions on genocide and aggression, respect for international courts, habeas corpus, and the rights of trans people to access life-saving care are defied openly, queering our (legal) imaginations becomes more vital than ever. While our trusty comfort reads can provide a valid and oftentimes necessary form of escapism, it is clear that sticking to the old scripts is not working. Imagining other possibilities \u2013 especially from inside a subject like law with its inherently conserving tendencies \u2013 is intimidating and at the same time the most natural human instinct. If the human affinity for fairy tales, epic sagas, and SF\/F literature demonstrates anything, it\u2019s that we cannot help<\/em> imagining beyond the plausible or possible.<\/p>\n

The solutions may lie just at the far end of our wildest imagination. Even Sanderson\u2019s Mistborn<\/em> books catch on to this: In the series\u2019 culminating moment, it is revealed that the prophesized Hero of Ages has so far been misidentified because the prophecy was misread to refer to either a man or woman, when in reality the Hero is someone who exists outside the scope of binary gender. Thus, had the protagonists stuck to what the literature professor whose talk I was so confused by considered \u201crealistic\u201d, their world would not have survived.<\/p>\n

Queering our stories about international law in 2025 requires vast resources of courage and imagination. Sanderson\u2019s Hero of Ages also and importantly is a scholar and collector of stories banned by an oppressive regime. As the freedom to think<\/a> about different ways of doing law is increasingly coming under attack<\/a>, it is proven beyond a doubt that this is exactly the work that needs doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past winter, I went on something of a science fiction\/fantasy (SF\/F) binge, perhaps in the search for comfort during dark times in my tried and trusted favorite genre of fiction. This culminated in me, on a friend\u2019s recommendation, reading the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson over the span of something like 1.5 months (there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6639],"tags":[5464],"authors":[5621],"article-categories":[3577],"doi":[],"class_list":["post-25212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lgbt-rights","authors-isabel-lischewski","article-categories-our-own-news"],"acf":{"subline":""},"meta_box":{"doi":"10.17176\/20250627-083256-0"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25213,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25212\/revisions\/25213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25212"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=25212"},{"taxonomy":"article-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-categories?post=25212"},{"taxonomy":"doi","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doi?post=25212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}