School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses

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    A case of gender governance: the family court of Australia’s regulation of young people’s gender affirmation
    Mitchell, Matthew John ( 2020)
    Legal institutions govern gender: they shape and regulate how their subjects can be gendered and, in doing so, control how gender can manifest. This thesis interrogates how the Family Court of Australia governed gender through its regulation of young people’s gender-affirming hormone use. Between 2004-2017, in Australia, people younger than eighteen needed to obtain authorisation from the Family Court before they could use hormones manually—that is, before they could use hormones other than those that their bodies produced automatically—to affirm their gender. By analysing the 76 “reasons for judgment” that judges published in response to applications for this authorisation, this thesis explicates how the Court judged the legitimacy of its subjects’ manual hormone use. My analysis finds that the Court’s judgments were structured by three primary categories of discourse: discourses on the ontology of gender, the epistemology of gender, and the teleology of manual hormone use. Upon interrogating each discourse in turn, I argue that the Court’s judgments tethered the legitimacy of its subjects’ manual hormone use to the promise that this would help them to become normatively gendered. In this way, the Court’s regulation worked to ensure that subjects could only use hormones manually to avert, rather than affirm, manifestations of queerness. By launching a critique of the Court’s discourses on ontology, epistemology, and teleology and the mechanism of gender governance that they enacted, this thesis contributes to the broader scholarly project of documenting and challenging the means through which States curb the possibilities for queer modes of life.
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    Queering constructivist international relations: questioning identity-based human rights norms in sexual orientation-based refugee law
    Dawson, Jaz ( 2018)
    Since the late 1980s, many norms relating to the recognition of sexual orientation-based rights have come to be accepted and institutionalised at the international level. One of these, based on developments in multiple jurisdictions since the late 1980s, has been the institutionalisation of the norm of sexual orientation-based claims to asylum. This has been accompanied by an ever-growing series of procedural norms relating to assessing sexual orientation-based claims in the refugee status determination process. At the same time, constructivist international relations scholars have been developing theory on norm institutionalisation and implementation. Scholars such as Amitav Acharya have explored how norms can be adapted when they reach the regional level, developing the notion of ‘norm localisation’. More recently, constructivist scholars Alexander Betts and Phil Orchard have argued that the institutionalisation of international norms ‘ultimately only [has] significance insofar as they translate into practice’. They have, therefore, brought their analysis on norm institutionalisation and implementation processes down to the domestic level.