Legality and Affect Left and Right – Queering Legal Orders’ Normative Force with Feeling

In her book From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect, Greta Olson argues for an expansive view of the legal, which encompasses both one’s Rechtsgefühl and the sociocultural normative settings one is surrounded by. Acknowledging the existence of “a variety of competing nomoi” (Olson, From Law and Literature, p.7), i.e., diverse normative environments within a given legal order, notions of law as legality, and affect as law’s new Other are conceptualized as projects fostering legal pluralism. Yet, is such a pluralistic, diversified notion of legality able to challenge those normative legal-cultural conditions which still privilege cis, male, heterosexual, White, able-bodied, propertied non-immigrants? Agreeing with Roger Cotterrell that “[l]aw’s interpretive communities now reflect the patterned differentiation of the social” ( Law, p.100), and Olson’s claim that “ideas about law are negotiated outside of the courtroom, the parliament, or even the governmental office where law and legal ordinances are directly translated into everyday life experience” ( From Law and Literature, p. 20), this article examines how legality may speak back to law, in its professionalized, dogmatic sense, and to legal orders, and analyzes in which ways an understanding of law as legality may affect LGBTQIAP* rights activism. This critical queer theoretical perspective thus challenges Olson’s nomoi by approaching the limitations of legal affects for trans and queer legal subjects. By analyzing the design and logic behind two recent cases of anti-trans bills in the U.S., Arkansas’ HB 1570 (‘Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act’) and Idaho’s HB 500 (‘Fairness in Women’s Sports Act’) from a cultural studies perspective, this article examines how an expanded understanding of law as legality may affect the gendered, cis-ed, and heteronormative nature of the U.S.’s dominant legal order(s).