Queer(y)ing rights: Psychology, liberal individualism and colonisation

Abstract

Issues surrounding human rights occupy a particularly troubled location within colonial nations such as Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand as a result of their ongoing histories of dispossession and genocide. This is no less the case for queer rights campaigns within these countries, which have often failed to engage with the relationship between oppression based on sexuality, and oppression that results from racism. In this paper these issues are explored within the context of psychology, and it is argued that psychological advocacy, while representing an important intervention into human rights debates, must engage in an ongoing discussion over the particular constructions of subjectivity that are privileged both within psychology and within human rights discourse more broadly. In doing so the question of how queer white/pakeha people may be invested in colonising practices of ownership and belonging is elaborated upon, along with some of the ways in which rights activists and the discipline of psychology may engage more productively in examining the legacy of colonisation.