The Emotions of LGBT Rights and ReformsRepairing Law
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Published 30 November 2026
About this book
A critical study of how emotions structure legal conflicts over LGBT rights
- Uses emotion as a novel analytic lens to understand, analyse, and critique the relationship between individual, interpersonal, and institutional conflicts over LGBT rights
- Combines interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of Law and Emotion with Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Studies to theorise the concept of “emotional grammar” in law
- Contextualises disparate contemporary LGBT law reform debates that exemplify conflicts of rights – including religious exceptions to anti-discrimination laws, legal gender recognition, bans on “conversion therapy,” and sex and LGBT education in schools – to explore their emotional dynamics across different legal registers
- Explores the emotional connections between litigation, jurisprudence, statutory law-making, and regulatory responses related to rights and reforms aimed at repairing inequalities and harms experienced by LGBT people
Emotions are central to the pursuit, organisation, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in law. This book analyses emotions that shape conflicts of rights that emerge between different groups across law reforms aimed at better supporting LGBT people. It examines contemporary law reform debates about religious exceptions to anti-discrimination laws, legal gender recognition, bans on “conversion therapy,” and sex and LGBT education in schools from jurisdictions including the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States.
Drawing from critical legal theories, The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms cultivates the concept of “emotional grammar” to show how emotions structure law reform pursuits by threading together Hansard, legislation, case law, law reform consultations, and statutory guidance. By doing so, it explains why addressing this emotional grammar is important for scholars, lawyers, judges, legislators, and activists seeking to navigate conflicts over LGBT rights and reforms that aim to repair the inequalities faced by LGBT people.
Reviews
Conflicts over the recognition of LGBT rights feel intractable. Raj offers a desperately needed way forward. By scouring the emotions that drive these polarising conflicts and shape the legal reforms that emerge, he finds potential solidarities and reparative possibilities while staying attentive to law’s failures in repairing systemic harms.
One marker of the generosity of Raj’s work is the abundance of theoretical and writerly resources that it makes available to readers, often assembled in unlikely combination. This is one of the ways in which The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law showcases a strategy of flourishing.
Raj in his marvellous new book… return[s] to the politics of pleasure and freedom, to replace individual harm with community support, to look inwards as well as outwards, to not simply construct queer identities in relation to a heterosexual norm.
Emotions are not what we typically associate with the law, an apparatus cast as ‘objective,’ ‘rational,’ and ‘factual’ rather than emotional. Yet, in The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law, Senthorun Raj shows why it is precisely through emotion that law is enlivened.
Raj shows us the discursive power of legal judgment and also imagines an otherwise of what legal judgment might look like.
Senthorun Sunil Raj, in The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law, gives language to what we know in our bodies and powerfully models embodied writing and analysis, by centering the personal as political (individual, scholar and activist) and leans deeply into a reparative scholarly approach.
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
1. Reparative Conflicts: Desiring Rights and Feeling Reforms
2. Reckoning Resentments: Sexuality, Religion, and Conflicts in Equality Laws
3. Addressing Anxieties: Debates of Legal (Trans) Gender Recognition
4. Sensing Shame, Healing Pain: Tensions in Banning LGBT Conversion Practices
5. Confronting Concerns: Contests over Sex and LGBT Education in Schools
6. Affecting Repair: Futures and Forms of LGBT Rights
Bibliography
Index