Violence in the Name of Equality: The Postal Survey on Same-Sex Marriage, LGBTQIA+ Activism and Legal Redemption

Abstract

ABSTRACT Violence has underpinned many of the laws relating to LGBTQIA+ people in Australia since colonisation, demarcating them as deviant and criminal and denying them access to the same rights as others. Since the 1970s, legal reforms have, as Robert Cover might describe it, demonstrated the redemptive quality of law in its response to LGBTQIA+ peoples’ commitment and activism over time. More recently, the legal definition of marriage was amended to include two people regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or sex characteristics. Whilst this legal achievement was widely celebrated, the postal survey on same-sex marriage that was conducted as a pre-requisite for legislative change, brought to the fore the continuing violence that LGBTQIA+ people suffer as a result of law even in moments of redemption. In this empirical paper, I draw on Robert Cover’s jurisprudential practices and bring these into relationship with the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people to both expose the nature of the violence experienced by LGBTQIA+ people during the postal survey and in the name of legal equality, and to frame LGBTQIA+ peoples’ legal activism as queer jurisprudence — to show how LGBTQIA+ people do create law and legal meaning through community action.