Through Judith Butler’s concept of ‘cultural translation’, this dissertation seeks to provide a less imperialistic law-making mechanism as it relates to the lesbian, gay and bisexual rights concept (hereinafter ‘the LGB rights concept’) in Turkey, which currently relies heavily on legal transplantation. In search of a new law-making method, this thesis first deconstructs ‘legal transplantation’ as that which creates various asymmetrical relations that amount to consolidating Western imperialism. Critical legal scholars have shown great interest in revealing the imperialistic consequences of the law-maker West and the law-taker non-West. This thesis aims to add another dimension to these discussions by placing ‘imitation’, as advanced by Judith Butler, at the heart of its analyses. It scrutinises legal transplantation through the various imitations/repetitions it embodies and explores the role of imitation in law-making as law-taking. It does so by evaluating legal change by means of legal transplantation through the example of the Turkish experience with the LGB rights concept, and uses Judith Butler’s understanding of imitation/repetition, as advanced in her gender performativity concept, to achieve this evaluation This thesis attempts to expand our understanding of law-making as law-taking by unveiling their performative force, which humanises the subject in a way that is similar to the processes of gendering it. In doing so, this thesis aims to transfer the analyses that postulate the gendered body as performative to the rubric of human rights law, and argues that humanisation of the body through granting rights is performative as well. Though the occasion arises for subversion from these various imitations, it introduces a new law-making method, cultural translation, transforming the realm of limited possibilities for human rights into the realm of the possible.

This thesis aims to generate a model to answer why there is a notable gap in legislative action with regards to expanding and modernizing LGBTQIA+ rights between Sweden and Denmark and the other Nordic countries, groups described by Jens Rydström as the Progressive Core and Conservative Periphery respectively. In order to do so, there is an analysis of the applicability of Rydström’s model to legislative history. This legal review is then applied to the shared colonial experiences of Norway, Iceland, Finland, and the Faroe Islands to generate the beginnings of an explanatory model. The model is then complexified by using the shared colonialist past as an exemplar of lost state capacity before and after independence. This model of lost state capacity is then applied not only to the above gap, but also to the even larger legislative gap between action in the above groups and in a new category consisting of Finland and the Faroe Islands. The last step is an in-depth application of this model to the Finnish case in comparison to the Progressive Core and the Conservative Periphery. This is accomplished in two ways: first through a content analysis of party platforms from five separate eras of Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian politics, and, secondly, through a qualitative analysis of the legislative action data.

In this thesis, I explore how specific films and television shows use the preexisting structure and mechanics of narrative film in order to create queer characters and stories that defy their otherness and stereotypes, thus creating a profound cinematic experience. Not only does the manipulation of these structures and mechanics heighten the realism and depth of the narrative at hand, it also enhances audience identification by allowing queer viewers to find themselves and straight viewers to understand the “other.” In this manner, the New New Queer Cinema and television have had lasting effects on the modern gay rights movement, changing perceptions and attitudes of society on an extremely personal level and making way for incredible strides in public policy changes.