Up Against the Property Logic of Equality Law: Conservative Christian Accommodation Claims and Gay Rights

This paper explores conservative Christian demands that religious-based objections to providing services to lesbians and gay men should be accommodated by employers and public bodies. Focusing on a series of court judgments, alongside commentators’ critical accounts, the paper explores the dominant interpretation of the conflict as one involving two groups with deeply held, competing interests, and suggests this interpretation can be understood through a social property framework. The paper explores how religious beliefs and sexual orientation are attachments whose power has been unsettled by equality law. But entangled with this property is another—that held in workers’ labour and public bodies’ resources. Arguing against the drive to balance competing interests, the paper uses social property to illuminate the agonistic character of the stakes. At the same time, it questions property as a normative framework for sexual orientation and religious beliefs.     

Plasticity and Post-Colonial Recognition: ‘Owning,Knowing and Being’*

In this article the author traces the limits of the philosophy and politics of recognition as manifest in colonial settler contexts. Forms of property ownership and ways of being, sutured by the racial body, are contained by a restricted economy of owning, knowing and being. Bringing the concept of plasticity to bear on the relationship between the body, property and the colonial, the author illuminates the ways in which practices of ownership that exceed the restricted economy of recognition exhibit a temporal and spatial plasticity in the context of the Palestinian struggles over land in the West Bank.     

If the State Decertified Gender,What Might Happen to its Meaning and Value?

As jurisdictions reform gender identity laws to accommodate transgender and intersex people, this article speculatively explores a more fundamental shift: eliminating state law's role in determining and assigning gender status altogether. Adopting a feminist perspective, we explore what the meaning and effects of comprehensively reforming legal gender might be upon gender's constitution as a socio‐legal property, differentially recognized and protected by diverse but unequal bodies. Our discussion proceeds along two intersecting paths. The first concerns the different classificatory methods which could enable state law, without assigning gender, to continue to regulate gender identity decisions, thereby allowing state law to remain involved in tackling gender discrimination. The second concerns the changing form gender might take in conditions where state law withdraws its allocative function. These paths converge in a final discussion which considers what legal and political effects might follow from gender becoming a property that is individually and collectively cultivated.     

Against the Current: Social Pathways and the Pursuit of Enduring Change

Radical innovations and practices frequentlyfind themselves in an inhospitable environment,struggling against the gravitational force ofdominant norms, practices and relations. Thispaper explores the problems radical changeconfronts in its attempts to become sustainable.Against the postmodern valorisation of thetransient and ephemeral, the paper argues forthe importance of routinisation and repetitionin the process of creating and sustainingchange. A metaphor of social pathways isdeveloped to explore how new routines arecreated through de jure (governance) andde facto (usage) means. The paper arguesthat, in contrast to governance, the emergentdurability generated by usage enables routinesto outlive their conditions of existence.At the same time, routines at odds with theirsocial and institutional environment tend overtime to disappear. The second half of the paperdraws on four British attempts to introduce newpathways: lesbian and gay local governmentinitiatives, Conservative education reforms,Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and LocalExchange Trading Systems (LETS). Through theseexamples, the paper reflects on attempts tocreate more conducive environments, and some ofthe difficulties this generates.     

Reading the State as a Multi-Identity Formation: The Touch and Feel of Equality Governance

How does a sense of touch, figuratively and practically, get deployed within equality governance, and to what questions and ways of thinking about the state does this direct us? Taking 2009–2010 as a snap-shot moment in the development of British equality reform—the year leading up to passage of the Equality Act 2010—this article explores the relationship between touch (the haptic) and equality governance from three angles. First, how have governmental bodies used touch language and imagery, including in geometrical representations of disadvantage? Second, what other, more challenging encounters and actions are imaginable; specifically, can touch mobilise the feeling state as a critical form of active citizenship? Third, what re-conceptualisations of the state does the touching, feeling state invoke, and with what effects? Specifically, does conceiving of the state as a multi-identity formation reframe the risks associated with a haptic state, thereby opening up new strategies for political action?     

Renormalizing citizenship and life in Fortress North America

The relation between the concepts of sovereignty and citizenship are being rearticulated through what is popularly referred to as ‘Fortress North America’. The ‘War on Terror’ has amplified previously emerging shifts in governance, control and surveillance. One significant consequence is the development of increasing border harmonization schemes between the United States of America and Canada. This development has led to newly emerging technologies of citizenship in both Canada and the USA. This paper pays particular attention to the shifts that are taking place with regards to the revocation of citizenship, the creation of new categories of citizenship through programs such as ‘Nexus’ and the proposed introduction of bio‐metric ID cards in Canada and the introduction of the discourse of the ‘new normal’. Through new border harmonization programs established in the ‘Smart Border Declaration’ citizens and non‐citizens in both Canada and America will be organized, controlled and subjected to new forms of state surveillance. The discourse of the ‘new normal’ is meant to signal a shift in our expectations of daily life. Whether we are experiencing the ‘new normal’ due to disease, fear, risk, loss of faith or security, we are being called into place as subjects of this discourse. The ‘new normal’ is used in reference to the need for greater control, the expectation of greater security and surveillance of cells, microbes, bodies and society. This paper will explore the logic that is embedded within the discourse of the ‘new normal’.     

Transformative state publics

Against the conventional assumption that publics, and particularly radical publics, are outside the state, this article explores their mutual combination and entanglement in order to consider how states might contribute to progressive politics. At the heart of this account is a concept of the state that incorporates the dissident and fleeting, and a conception of transformative publics based on four modalities: prefigurative, improper, liberatory, and unconditional. Transformative publics can be found within state formations; they also combine with them to produce new political governance relations. To develop this argument, the article focuses on two kinds of publics: those involving compelled state actors, such as school children and prisoners; and those, such as protest camps, taking shape through grass-roots political action.