Lawyers, legal mobilisation and LGBTI populations: explorations in Chile

This thesis explores the role of human rights and reformist lawyers in incipient legal mobilisation strategies, as members of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) communities seek to advance and/or uphold their rights through the Chilean judicial system. Given the inaccessibility of the legislative arena for securing legal change, legal mobilisation strategies are increasingly being deployed by civil society actors promoting rights pertaining to sexual diversity. Drawing on legal ethnographic research, I examine the difficulties for members of these populations in securing legal representation and articulating their voice. I examine how individuals overcome barriers, such as mitigating the ‘stigma contagion’, in a highly hetero-normative socio-cultural and political context, and access the necessary legal resources to mount a legal challenge. Scholarship on stigma, deviancy and identity, and social justice serves as the point of departure for studying the interaction between lawyers and claimants. In Chile in the late 2000s, legal mobilisation is emerging and consolidating as a strategy to achieve social and legal change. I analyse the social processes occurring in tandem with aforementioned legal processes. I focus specifically on the role of activist lawyers in ‘brokering’ these cases and how, as a consequence, LGBTI identities are becoming more visible in multiple public domains