Emotional accountabilities: Affective autoethnography and writing queer judgments

Queer encounters with legal accountability generate a range of tensions and paradoxes. In law, accountability materialises as a core feature of legal systems that seek to hold individuals and institutions responsible for their behaviour according to a set of predetermined state criteria. Queer scholars have approached legal logics of responsibility with scepticism as these logics are indexed by heteronormative state criteria. Queer legal work holds space for queer critique without necessarily abandoning normative criteria. It navigates queer scepticism through critiques, refusals, and calls for legal accountability across individual, interpersonal, and institutional contexts. This is emotional work. In this paper, I demonstrate narratively how emotions pervade how we (as queer legal scholars) imagine, conceptualise, and approach socio-legal questions of violence, discrimination, inequality, and exclusion facing LGBTQ + people and how we (as queer people, lawyers, and activists) work with or against legal institutions to seek accountability and realise our rights. This paper adopts an autoethnographic approach to invite scholars, lawyers, activists, and judges to explore the law’s capacity to both remedy and effect harm against LGBTQ + people by taking seriously how emotions mutually co-construct the normative dimensions of LGBTQ + rights alongside the critical forms of accountability rights claims generate. I do this through a close reading of R v Green, an Australian criminal law case that deals with “defences” for homophobic violence. Emotion offers an analytic lens to expose personal (queer person), scholarly (queer academic/lawyer), and political (queer activist) entanglements with various accountabilities generated by the case. I use affective autoethnography to draw together the normative and analytic dimensions of emotions across personal, scholarly, and political registrations of accountability by discussing the process of writing a “queer judgment” of R v Green . The queer judgment, as an exercise in accountability, is an affective object of law, method of critique, and space for ethico-political engagement. This creates space to pursue legal accountability in terms of care and imagination while also questioning or broadening the terms by which such accountability is delivered in law.