Intro

In recent years, human rights have become one of the most important topics of a wide variety of discourses of the globalizing world. In different parts of the world, in cultures that would seem alien to the fundamental principles of human rights, there suddenly have arosen demands of those rights: in the form of social protest, social movements or individual actions of citizens in local and supranational courts. All around is becoming someone’s right, the sources of which are rarely questioned (Clapham 2007: 17-18). Rights are taken as granted, even in cases where their bearer feels a slightly perceptible sense of the wound that intervenes her/his commodity.

However, not every claim is immediately satisfied. Yet, the rights (given they sourced from the natural theory), in fact, remain subjected to the public debate and political bargaining, being rather not natural but socially constructed objects (Donnely 1999: 84). And after being constructed in the socio-political space, a right gets a chance to become significant in the framework of legal discourse, which explicitly establishes its own “truth” about the right (McGhee 2000: 34) and the specific rules of conduct with respect to this right, as well as its immediate subjects (barers). The legal discourse makes an important formal requirement for social experience: this experience should be personified to become a part of a legally recognized reality, and the personifying subject should be potentially vulnerable to have the right not to be vulnerable.

Identity claims are based on this basis. In these cases, a general experience of an imaginary group is used to justify its right. The group is alienated from an imaginary “majority” and vulnerable to these “majority”. This argument assumes the existence of an identity, and identity, in turn, presupposes the existence of the rights belonging to it (Kennedy 2002: 180). The formulation of the argument itself – or rather its power – depends on the depth of the legal wound: the proof of the lack of a right is based on the logic of comparison of the alienated group with the idealised “majority”, but the pain from this wound can be of varying degrees, and it might be caused by the presence of human rights in peer groups.

This project aims to uncover the legal wounds of gays and lesbians in St. Petersburg. It is in St. Petersburg where the first registered human rights organization dedicated to LGBT issues in the collapsing Soviet Union appeared. It is in St. Petersburg where lesby- gay- movement resumed  in the second half of the first decade of the new century. St. Petersburg was also the first city in Russia, which hosted the first officially sanctioned public action of LGBT activists last year. Moreover, the St. Petersburg courts have taken a number of decisions that treat the law in favor of homosexuals. If we take into account that “the particular list of rights that we take as authoritative today reflects a contingent response to historically specific conditions” (Donnely 1999: 84), the specific objective of the project will be to identify these conditions and this list of rights claimed by gays and lesbians here and now.

An important aspect of the work will be the determination of the depth of the legal wounds, appeared on the body of the articulated homosexual identity. Despite the relative success of activists, only about two dozen people, most of whom arrived in Petersburg from abroad and from Moscow, attended the gay pride in 2010. Perhaps the pain of the legal wounds is not strong enough to make the local gay men and lesbians to carry out their demands to the streets. Researcher will attempt to determine the limit of patience of the pain caused by the legal wounds, and the mechanisms by which these wounds are disturbed.

Bibliography

Clapham, A. (2007) Human Rights. A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Donnelly, J. (1999) “The Social Construction of International Human Rights”, in T. Dunne and N. J. Wheeler, eds., Human Rights in Global Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 71-102.

Kennedy, D. (2002) “The Critique of Rights in Critical Legal Studies”, in W. Brown and J. Halley, eds., Left Legalism/Left Critique. London: Duke University Press: 178-228.

McGhee, D. (2000) “Accessing Homosexuality: Truth, Evidence and the Legal Practices for Determining Refugee Status – the Case of Ioan Vraciu”. Body & Society, 6(1): 29-50.