2022 Enloe Award Essay

Haunting justice: queer bodies, ghosts, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

This article was named the winner of the 2022 Enloe Award.

The committee commented:

Using a queer hauntological approach to read queer bodies in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the seemingly innocuous language of judges, legal counsels, and witnesses, the author illuminates the ways in which queer lives are made absent in international law and in experiences of war, peace, and justice. By rendering queer lives as “ghosts,” the author shows how the “straight, binary, and cisgender subject,” be it victim or perpetrator, is maintained in international criminal justice. Going beyond critique by centering a queer archive created by queer people about their experiences of the war, the article stood out to the committee as an important contribution to international law and beyond. By rendering queer lives “intelligible and grievable and as lives that matter,” it continues Cynthia Enloe’s legacy of finding sex and gender where it has been hidden. Ultimately, the author does not call for the inclusion or assimilation of queer experiences into liberal international criminal justice discourses, which co-opt and empty radical politics. Successfully showing how “haunting” represents a radical call for “alternative worlds,” the article provides an original challenge to move beyond mere inclusion. The committee commends the author for their careful scholarship and deep theorization.

ABSTRACT

International criminal justice involves stories of war and violence. These stories establish survivors, perpetrators, and scenes of trauma, offering representations of embodied experiences of violation. All bodies are subject to violence, but not all bodies are seen – or heard – in international criminal justice. In this article, I argue that queer bodies – that is, those with non-normative sexual and gender practices and identities, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) people – are largely missing from international criminal justice discourses. While queer bodies are frequently targets of violence, their stories are excised from the findings and prosecution of crimes by these mechanisms. Embracing a queer hauntological approach, I focus on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and argue that queer bodies figure in ghostly ways. I explore how queer bodies haunt ICTY discourses and argue that queer ghosts can disrupt cisheteronormative representations of justice. The article deconstructs the juridical assumption that all violent and violated bodies are stable, straight, and cisgender and proposes that queer ghosts can challenge this legal subjectivity. I conclude that queer bodies and stories are written out of ICTY discourses, but in their ghostliness, in their haunting, there always already exists the possibility of disruption.