Emotions of LGBT Rights

Apr 6, 2026

Senthorun Raj, an academic human rights lawyer at Manchester Metropolitan University, studies race, gender, sexuality and LGBTIQ+ rights. He explores how emotions like disgust, fear, love and joy shape law and reform. Conversations cover Stonewall, conversion therapy, inclusive sex education, and the idea of an emotional grammar that weaves feelings into legal change.

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INSIGHT

Emotions Operate As Legal Enactments

Emotions operate as communicative, legal, and political enactments rather than just private states.
Senthorun Raj follows Sara Ahmed’s approach to show how emotions like disgust translate into laws that criminalize homosexuality as an "offence against the order of nature."

ANECDOTE

Stonewall Example Of Emotions Fueling Reform

The Stonewall riots show how anger and resistance generated political momentum for gay rights law reform.
Raj points to Stonewall as an origin story where emotional outrage catalyzed anti-discrimination laws and later marriage equality.

INSIGHT

Joy Can Legitimize Yet Exclude

Positive emotions like joy and love are politically powerful but can also be exclusionary.
Raj notes marriage equality's focus on love/happiness legitimizes certain relationships while sidelining nonconforming ones.

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In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks to Senthorun Raj about the Emotions of LGBT Rights. Emotions from disgust and fear to love and joy shape the legal frameworks that attempt to govern human sexual behavior around the world. Sen cautions against dividing emotions into good and bad, but instead asks us to take a critical stance on all emotions, to understand how they shape our policies.

In the episode, we talk about Sara Ahmed, the Stonewall Riots, conversion therapy, and efforts to mandate for and against inclusive sex education. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF.

Sen’s book, The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law (Edinburgh University Press 2025) uses emotion as a novel analytic lens to understand, analyse, and critique the relationship between individual, interpersonal, and institutional conflicts over LGBT rights. Emotions are central to the pursuit, organisation, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in law. Drawing from critical legal theories, this book cultivates the concept of “emotional grammar” to show how emotions structure law reform pursuits by threading together Hansard, legislation, case law, law reform consultations, and statutory guidance. By doing so, it explains why addressing this emotional grammar is important for scholars, lawyers, judges, legislators, and activists seeking to navigate conflicts over LGBT rights and reforms that aim to repair the inequalities faced by LGBT people.

Senthorun Raj is an academic human rights lawyer with expertise in issues of race, gender, sexuality, and culture. He works as a Reader in Human Rights Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. Sen’s research and teaching interests include LGBTIQ+ rights, emotion, culture, equalities and human rights law, legal education, and critical legal theory. His latest monograph, builds on his previous book, Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity (Routledge, 2020), which explored the ways emotions shape legal judgments that enable progress for LGBT people. He is also the co-editor of The Queer Outside in Law: Recognising LGBTIQ People in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2020) and Queer Judgments (Counterpress, 2025).

The image for this episode is a coloured lithograph, from 1868, depicting a double rainbow, by René Henri Digeon after Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat. It was sourced by Lili Epstein for High Theory from the Wellcome Collection.

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