ABSTRACT
This chapter claims that queer engagement with human rights has taken the radicality out of queer rather than resulting in the queering of international human rights. While there are undoubtedly temporal moments when the radicalism of the project emerges, these are quickly quenched by the lure of normativity and glitter of respectability. The chapter argues that the potential for queer radicality remains on the outskirts of human rights, rather than within its embrace, and that these possibilities are abundant outside of the parameters of the liberal imaginary within which human rights remain immersed. During the course of the past decade, queer advocacy has acquired considerable prominence in international human rights advocacy. The anti-normativity impulse of queer theory, which has brought a radical brand of politics to the understanding of sexuality and gender, seems to have lost steam in its engagements with human rights. The chapter discusses the radical and imaginary possibilities that lie outside the limited circumference of human rights.
