Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Over the past fifty years there has been a clear, albeit uneven international movement to deconstruct heteronormative legal and institutional norms. This has been ostensibly due to the evolution and influence of post-Second World War human rights discourse, which has championed the rights of individuals against the “tyranny of the majority.” Still, in certain national arenas, despite rhetorical allegiance to modern human rights precepts, heteronormative constructs remain deeply entrenched. In Jamaica, for instance, as in many other postcolonial states, not only are there no legal protections for LGBTQIA people, same-sex relations continue to be criminalized. Accordingly, this paper looks at Jamaica as a human rights case study, examining the tension between the contemporarily globalized human rights framework and the localized sociopolitical constructs that resist it. To understand this tension, Jamaica’s experience as a colonial and subsequently postcolonial state is analyzed, with particular emphasis on the ways Jamaican cultural artifacts and constructs have developed to intermediate between global and local human rights understandings. These findings are then interrogated by political utility theory as a way of more clearly illuminating the fault lines between human rights norms and human rights practice.