Lawful Repair (Reimagining Law Through Queer Dissent)

In Lawful Repair, Danish Sheikh asks what happens when queer people, confronted by a law that criminalizes their intimate lives, work creatively within its own forms to enact the law they need in the here and now. Drawing on queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's account of reparative reading and on the work of legal humanists Patricia Williams, Robert Cover, and James Boyd White, Sheikh examines the work of dissenters against Section 377, India’s colonial-era sodomy law. Through playful and generative experiments with contracts, affidavits, and rewritten judgments, these dissenters turn the law’s constraints into resources for hopeful legal futures. Combining memoir, critical theory, and theater, Sheikh interweaves practices of dissent with his own lived experience of repair work, showing how queer people extract sustenance from a culture whose avowed desire has often been to harm them. Sheikh demonstrates that law remains too vital a resource to cede and that the creative forces of queer dissent can keep law's imaginative possibilities alive.