Beyond Legalism: How can the LGBT+ Movement Be Expanded Outside of the Courtroom?

The LGBT+ movement has largely depended on gaining minority rights within the currently existing frameworks of international human rights discourses and fundamental rights granted through constitutions. However, Francis Kuriakose and Deepa Kylasam Iyer argue that this approach has overshadowed the need to revise and rethink the more radical possibilities of resistance. That is, there has been a loss of focus on the need to disrupt and reimagine social, cultural and national meanings of sexuality, family, intimacies, and personhood. This has then been counterproductive to the identities and experiences of other communities, such as the transgender communities in India, which though accepted in traditional narratives, continue to face discrimination and exclusion.

This has persisted despite the abolition of Section 377 which decriminalised only a certain act of sex for the lesbian and gay communities, but spoke little of trans bodies or the gender fluid identities that the law was held to be symbolic of.

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