Scholars in Conversation: Lucas Lixinski with Siddharth Narrain

The ‘Scholars in Conversation’ series features interviews with academics across diverse disciplines and geographies. Anchored by faculty members of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, these conversations explore the work of leading voices in their fields in order to bring academic insights to bear on public discourse.

Lucas Lixinski is a Professor at the Faculty of Law and Justice, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. He researches and teaches across a range of fields in international law, primarily international cultural heritage law and international human rights law. His current research focuses on cultural heritage in contexts of massive social change and upheaval, bringing together insights from evacuation, forced migration law, and international human rights law. Professor Lixinski is a co-founder and editor of International Law Agendas, a blog of the Brazilian Branch of the International Law Association devoted to Global South engagements with international law. He is the Director of Studies globally for the International Law Association, the world’s oldest learned society in the field.

Professor Lixinski visited NLSIU on 23 February 2026. Siddharth Narrain, Assistant Professor at NLSIU and Director of the QAMRA Archival Project, sat down with Professor Lixinski to discuss his work at the intersection of cultural heritage law and LGBTIQ+ rights. Together, they explored the possibility of queering legal frameworks, cross-movement solidarity, and the vital role of archives in preserving community history. Professor Lixinski also reflected on his experience of navigating identity within academia as an educator.

Could you please share a little about yourself and how you came to be involved with LGBTIQ+ issues and the law?

It’s such a privilege to be able to speak about these issues, not just as a scholar, but also as a person. That combination is part of how I came to the issue. I identify as a gay man myself and my coming out process was very long and protracted. While I was coming up in academia, I had a very real concern, partly stemming from internalised homophobia, or just a sense of protection, that I would be just an informant about myself. This is why as a LatinX person, I don’t spend a lot of my time working on Latin American legal issues. I thought it was a bit self-indulgent and self-serving to spend a lot of my time on LGBTIQ+ rights issues. But one day, I just snapped out of it and asked, ‘Why do I need to reject myself?’.

A lot of who I am and how I see the world is defined by these issues. So, it made sense to embrace them, which led me to explore these issues further. Since I didn’t start straight away from LGBTIQ+ rights and LGBTIQ+ persons and the law, I perceive queer thinking as not just a means to explain my own identity but also of explaining the world at large and transforming it. For example, a lot of my work focuses on cultural heritage law, and I was also asked to be a part of the Queer Judgments Project.

QAMRA [Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism at NLSIU] co-organised a book event with the Queer Judgments Project last year. While preparing for it, I read your contribution in the book Queer Judgements . You were not talking directly about LGBTIQ+ issues but rather using a queer lens to talk about your work on cultural heritage. It’d be very interesting if you could speak about that.

I was invited to be a part of the Queer Judgments project by one of the editors. At the time I was told that I could choose any case I wanted. I picked two and kept tossing between them, both coming from what I thought could be unique about my positioning in the field. This ambivalence came from me not having spent my entire research time in the field, and so I felt I couldn’t speak about the central issues in the book without feeling like I was underinformed. So, I had to ask myself, ‘what can I bring from the outside to do that?’

One of the options was an It concerned whether being outed could be a violation of your right to dignity, because the person in that case insisted that he was not gay and that being called gay was an affront to his sense of honour and dignity. The court ruled in his favour and found it was a violation of his human right to honour (Article 11 of the American Convention on Human Rights). I wanted to engage more with this and the idea of a jurisprudence of shame.

But eventually what I did do was embrace the idea of queer thinking as a way of changing the world. I went with an International Criminal Court (ICC) judgment on reparations in the case Prosecutor v Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, which has to do with a conflict in Mali. It was the first case in the ICC about the destruction of cultural heritage. I began to explore what applying a queer lens to heritage and how the law treats heritage would reveal about heritage and the world. I ended up queering the ICC as a means of transcending binaries in heritage.

Heritage is viewed as either national or international, or either tangible or intangible. The queer perspective on how binaries can be unproductive and reductive helped me make my argument in the piece. The concept of queer kinship was also useful in thinking about the role of heritage, as it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. An archive matters because people connect to it, and that was kind of what I was doing.  More recently, I have been working on queering heritage studies, with some much better and more sophisticated thinkers at the Association of Critical Heritage Studies. So, I’ve been throwing it in a few different directions, but it’s always with this idea of queering as a verb and a mode of action—a way of seeing and eventually changing the world.

Your work has a lot to do with memory and intangible heritage. How do you think memory and your work intersect?

I am among those people who think that heritage doesn’t have an objective existence. It doesn’t have ‘intrinsic value’. It only has value because people value it and because it serves an agenda. This agenda can be of identity, tourism promotion, or national identity. It can be all of those or something else entirely, and often it is a layer of multiple different agendas. But we tend to pretend that heritage has an objective existence outside of its political context and can be protected against such politics. Except that we’ve learned from critical legal studies 101 that saying there isn’t any politics doesn’t mean the politics goes away. It just means that we end up protecting whatever politics was dominant when that claim was made.

I’ve been trying to fight that a little bit. I think an archive like QAMRA is so special precisely because it foregrounds activism, memory, reflection, and the use of the archive. The archive doesn’t exist just per se or as a historical curiosity. It exists as a living connection between the people who are there or the people who will eventually find themselves there and find their lineage, I suppose.

One of the wonderful things that heritage does is it creates a thread connecting the past to the present and the future. A very old-fashioned way of thinking about archives and heritage is the idea that it’s just something from the past, which we’re supposed to gaze upon, contemplate, and admire. While heritage is from the past, yes, it is what we choose in the present to make a future. Even the words you have in QAMRA—memory, reflection, activism—embody the past, present and future, where memory is the past, reflection is the present, and activism is the future. There’s something special about what QAMRA can do in terms of reminding the world that we’re not a modern invention. We have always been here, and there has been struggle. The gains of that struggle are not to be taken for granted, and they can be taken away.

The struggle for queer rights is a kind of inheritance, especially in the Indian context. For instance, we often talk to a younger generation who take things for granted, even though our struggle was not so long ago. It’s been 20–30 years at most. But there seems to be a gap. If they’re starting afresh, or in the language they’re using, at times there’s no reference to the past. And so, as a community, it is our heritage and we see it as our responsibility to protect that heritage and make sure that it’s not forgotten. Invisibility and erasure and how we can protect against that as a community are significant issues. And of course, it can also be instrumental as it can be used as evidence when fighting in court. But it has a larger purpose.

Absolutely, because heritage in general, and the archive in particular, invites the public in. It is believed that the archive is a discreet artifact or set of artifacts, which are of scholarly interest and for scholarly purposes. But the archive plays an important social function—not only by not letting history repeat itself, but also by letting people find themselves and think through who they are. This is especially so in a queer context, as our lineage in a biological sense is heterosexual or has engaged in heterosexual acts at some point for reproduction. So, we don’t have queer continuities, and our history is a lot more fragmented. Archives are important to show us that there are threads to be found here as well. A tapestry can be woven if we only pull these things together.

You wrote a piece in 2020 that talks about five things you learned as a gay man in academia. What made you write that? Was there a particular incident that happened or was it just something you were reflecting on?

The trigger for that piece was my attempt to figure out what it meant to step into a space in which I owned my queerness, not just as something that existed in my private life but an identity that I carried everywhere. It was cathartic to work through it and what it meant for my professional life. People say that all research is me search. I’m not claiming that this was a fully fleshed research piece. It was autobiographical and a very specific need for myself, while I was also trying to speak to a global audience.

It was deeply informed by where I was at the time—the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where I had been for about 10 years. I was trying to think if being queer makes me potentially more empathetic towards other students. I was trying to think through masking or covering—the way that queer people, more so than other people perhaps, but minorities in general, have a version of this. How much do I reveal about myself to a stranger? How do I adjust my behaviour to certain situations, so I don’t feel threatened or judged by my cover? Or does being adept at masking allow me to be a more effective communicator because I can then judge an audience better and that helps in the classroom? Does a bit of a highly cliched gay sass help me in the classroom as well because I have a particular approach to humour—which is a queer defence mechanism—as something that makes me more effective as an educator?

I was just trying to think through those questions to say that ultimately there’s a place for any queer person to be themselves in academia. Once certain things are catered to, such as safety or employment security, there’s room for us to be out. A lot of universities don’t count queer people in its censuses. It’s usually on the grounds of privacy. But I fundamentally think that privacy should be my power to choose whether to disclose or not, and not someone else’s assumption that they shouldn’t ask the question in the first place. Otherwise, we are not seen, and, if we are not seen, there is no policy or action by us or for us. So, it was also in a way trying to make the case that it’s okay to be queer in a higher education context, and universities should embrace and treasure queerness because it supports their mission in a fundamentally pedagogical way.

 You wrote a piece on LGBTIQ+ movement strategies in 2020, where you talk about piggybacking and borrowing. Could you talk about how you got to the movement and came to write about it?

A part of my coming out process as an old-fashioned nerd was to read queer history and about queer rights, as I was making sense of myself before I even said it out loud to anyone. This nerdy deep dive allowed me to develop a curiosity, and I began reading in the background for many, many years. This process picked up a bit of momentum, and one of the patterns that I started noticing in a lot of the literature (mostly accounts from history, sociology, etc) were these brief references to other social movements—of how they were talking to feminists or they went to a race rights rally and brought food. These little tangential remarks revealed the connections between social movements of historically disadvantaged groups, which no one was really picking up on because everyone tends to focus on their own lane.

I understand there are many reasons for that in terms of volume of material, but also one wouldn’t want to be speaking for others, such as for women in my case as a cis man. I thought if I zero in on something that I actually know and work on, which is international human rights adjudication, and focus on the strategies different groups have deployed over time, maybe I can find similarities. That is piggybacking—the idea that queer movements don’t exist in a vacuum. They never have. Lawyers tend to think that they do, but we’ve been borrowing from feminists, race rights movements, and disability rights movements. Not connecting those threads is a disservice to intersectionality and coalition building.

The fundamental idea that none of us are free until we’re all free should apply here. White cis gay men have so often thrown any other group—usually trans people, lesbians, or people of colour—under the proverbial bus if it benefitted them. I was trying to think through those issues and erase some of those conveniences by saying, ‘look, sure, there may be a tactical gain here, but ultimately you’re doing yourself a disservice by forgetting from where you got to this point in the first place and how you learned to do human rights litigation’. I was trying to bring those stories together and make a case for us to think, rather than compete, with other people, because rights are not zero-sum games. There’s room for everyone.

This resonates with the material we have at QAMRA and the queer movement here in Bangalore. Especially because a lot of the early cases, even the ones used to argue for the decriminalisation of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, involved trans persons who had faced police violence. Many activists out on the streets working for organisations such as Sangama were trans-identified. They were the ones facing the brunt of laws such as Section 377, as well as working class LGBTIQ+ people who were initially at the forefront. Now that we have had some wins and things are more open, middle- and upper-class gay men have come out into the open. But at first, like you said, women’s rights organisations and other human rights organisations were the progressive groups who were fighting with us.

What I’ve also noticed now is that the conversation has splintered and we’re trying to figure out how to proceed from here. There are much more diverse sets of people, and everybody is not on the same page. Sometimes there are queer groups who are not progressive in their views and maybe conservative. There are also queer groups that are aligned to religious groups. So, the contemporary scene is very interesting now. But you’re right. The archive is a repository of these kinds of alliance.

There’s always been a tension between the politics of respectability and the queer movements’ goal of equality. One view has been that we need to assimilate as opposed to people who see queerness as a radical act and a way to reimagine all of society. There’s a revolutionary element to that approach. There is a spectrum of approaches within the queer movement, and these are its two poles. The answers are probably somewhere in the middle. The full equality approach has engendered the politics of respectability and assimilation. One of the key things that we tend to forget about this kind of politics is that for you to be respectable, someone else needs to be beneath you.

So as more conservative LGBTIQ+ identifying people come to the fore, try to occupy space, and fight for rights, we tend to end up seeing more of them saying things such as LGB without the T or that ‘Q is a crazy woke thing’, and none of that is okay.

The Inter-American Court, or generally human rights in Latin America, has its own history, and based on my understanding of teaching human rights law, it’s quite advanced. Is there something, perhaps to do with LGBTIQ+ and human rights movements and their relationship to courts, or certain victories or struggles, that is interesting or could be learned from?

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is a fascinating beast for being so progressive and willing to do better. This is partly because it is inherently suspicious of the state. It doesn’t work with the state, but against it. It also sees itself as indebted to a bigger idea of humanity, which is very liberal and progressive in many ways. Its opens with what’s essentially a mini masterclass on queer theory for human rights lawyers. This is remarkable if one observes other human rights institutions and how they operate. But at the same time, there’s also a lot of backlash against the court from states. The advisory opinion I mentioned, for instance, was requested by Costa Rica, which is the country where the Court sits and has its permanent base. It was received so poorly by certain segments of Costa Rican society that a politician from a fringe social conservative group nearly won the next presidential election by campaigning on the basis of how wrong the Court was on that specific case. He claimed that he was going to walk away from the Inter-American system and let Costa Rican society be as conservative as it could be.

There’s an important case, Atala Riffo and Daughters v Chile, about a woman judge who was married and had two children. She divorced her husband, came out as lesbian, and entered a same-sex relationship with her partner. Her former partner, out of sheer spite, outed her to the Chilean judicial profession. This led to disciplinary proceedings being initiated against her to determine if she was fit to be a judge and to keep custody of her daughters. Ultimately, the court adjudicated in her favour. Everything that the Chilean state did to her was beyond the pale. The daughters were also seen as victims in the case because of what they went through. Part of the rights that were argued in the case was the right to protection of a family and to live in a family (recognised by Article 17 of the American Convention), which provides for the right to a stable and happy family. There was one partial dissent in the case that said, ‘I agree with the outcome of the case, but we didn’t need to find that they were a family to reach this outcome.’

Two women who have been in a stable relationship and are raising children together are a family. It shouldn’t even have been a question to begin with. I think the broader lesson that we can take away from these cases is that there’s a lot of progressiveness to be found in human rights law. Many people are willing to listen and give us a boost if we know how to leverage those tools. But we can’t forget allyship. We owe a lot of our rights to women, specifically lesbian women, trans people, and people of colour and their activism. We cannot take those victories for granted.

Transcriber: Teja Basireddy