Dr Caitlin Biddolph1
1University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Caitlin Biddolph is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on queering international law and transitional justice.
Abstract:
Transitional justice (TJ) processes are increasingly recognising queer people as victims, including as targets of anti-queer violence. While queer activists have participated in, contributed to, and created their own TJ processes at the informal level, formal institutions like the United Nations have only recently recognised queer people as targeted victims within their TJ policies, and that they ought to be addressed and included in TJ processes. In this paper, I explore discourses of queer inclusion and agency in TJ. To do so, I focus on the Final Report of the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. By focusing on this mechanism, which explicitly includes queer Indigenous perspectives in its truth-telling practices, I explore possibilities of meaningfully including queer Indigenous people in TJ. I undertake a discourse analysis of the report to identify how queer (or 2SLGBTQQIA) people are positioned and represented as variously rights bearers, activists, and epistemic agents of TJ. Using a queer decolonial approach, I argue that the Final Report offers a more expansive approach to queer inclusion and agency, whereby Indigenous Elders, families, and 2SLGBTQQIA people are discursively situated (and situate themselves) as agents of TJ. Following the contributions of Indigenous feminist scholars, I argue that the Final Report centres Indigenous epistemologies that conceive of queer Indigenous agency as relational, resistant, and resurgent, offering an example of what TJ can look like when it meaningfully includes queer people as justice agents. However, given the settler colonial context within which the Final Report is situated, I argue that queer inclusion must also be problematised and decolonised when it occurs within settler colonial and statist agendas.