Abstract
With a particular focus on sexual rights in Ireland, this article theorises how queer world-making might function as a critical lens to challenge the normative and disciplinary logics that often underpin human rights law. Unlike the narrow liberal formulations of human rights that are advanced by many LGBT rights organisations and litigants, queer world-making offers a radical reframing of the politics of shame, identity, desire, failure and kinship that so often subtend normative discourses of sex and sexuality. The article begins by exploring the triumphalism that accompanied the Irish marriage equality referendum in 2015, a triumphalism that concealed a broader cast of sexual others who remained excluded by the exuberant embrace of narrow liberal notions of equality in law. Drawing on case law and political reportage, the article then traces the shift from privacy to patronising as the governing registers in which sexual rights have historically been framed. Finally, using John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies as a case study, the article teases out not only the tensions between queer world-making and human rights but also the underlying ideologies that structure each of these different political visions.