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Abstract
How do certain individuals, or groups of individuals with shared characteristics, move from a position of erasure and exclusion to being recognized as legitimate subjects and rights-bearers under international human rights law (IHRL) and within the broader social discourse on human rights? This is the central question addressed in this thesis, which focuses specifically on how this process has unfolded, and continues to unfold, for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans, intersex, and others who occupy the large spectrum of sexual and gender diversity (LGBTI+). The thesis offers an ethnographically informed account of how the multiple signifiers associated with the queer community since the 1970s were gradually inserted into the intelligibility of human rights discourse through the actions of transnational civil society actors and international activism. Framing it as a process of subject-making through IHRL, the thesis’s overarching argument demonstrates how sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) were discursively established as a human rights issue through strategic actions of international activism and how creative forms of activism enables queer civil society to temporarily overcome the pervasive state-centrism in defining the boundaries of IHRL. Based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis explores five distinct strategic dimensions of this subjectivation process, bringing together historical and contemporary elements of this struggle: the ambivalent relationship between queer and universality; the becoming of queer decolonial subjects; the appropriation of the legal form for the active inscription of new subjects of IHRL; civil society’s execution of state-reserved acts in global governance fora when advocating for a broader understanding of the subjects of human rights; and the leveraging of elements of individuals’ personal and social life in overcoming the state’s totalizing presence.