Feeling Like a State

Davina Cooper is Research Professor in Law and Political Theory at King's College London and the author of several books, most recently Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces, also published by Duke University Press.

“This is a dream of a book. Feeling Like a State explores a daring possibility: Might legal dramas over Christian refusals (to bake cakes, provide contraception coverage with health care, issue marriage licenses, allow for gay Scout leaders, subscribe to secularist tolerance demands, and so on) offer progressives instructive lessons about withdrawal, attachment, desire, membership, commoning, care, and play? Drawing on law, sociology, and philosophy as well as political, feminist, affect, and queer theory, Davina Cooper's work is broad, brilliant, audacious, careful, and, importantly, prefigurative, marking the ways in which we already ‘inhabit, repurpose, resist the still and mobile parts of institutional life.’” - Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science, Brown University “With its checkered history of unmatched power, the state has been both a vehicle of oppression as well as justice. Feeling Like A State imagines transformative progressive ways the state can be, inspiring movement toward a more responsible, ecologically collaborative world. A beautifully written, brilliant contribution beyond utopian fictions that explores practical real-life experiments in governing as a way of rethinking government and states. This book must be read if we are to move past the current crises in any durable and just manner.” - Susan S. Silbey, coauthor of (The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life) “Feeling Like a State makes a strong argument for why states don’t function the way that we imagine them to.... [It is] rich in details, not just about what is wrong with the world but also about what can be done." - James Martel (Political Theory) “At a time when neoliberal states are relocating governmental responsibilities onto individuals or to their chums in private companies to make profits, [Feeling Like a State] asks us to look forwards, to a concept of the state, even if provisional, which is relational, caring, and feeling and has social justice at its heart.” - Morag McDermont (Review of Politics) “In Feeling Like a State, Cooper forges a strong case for the continuing conceptual (and even material) value of the state.... Although Cooper stops short of offering an alternative vision of public governance, her optimistic account of state potentiality for a progressive politics is one of the most cogent of those available.” - Rebecca Peach (Representation) “Feeling Like a State asks us to exercise our own capacity for imagination, challenging us to envision a state that not only acts but is otherwise.” - Méadhbh McIvor (Journal of Contemporary Religion)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. Reimagining the State  11. Legal Dramas of Refusal  282. Retrieving Dissident State Parts  523. Pluralizing a Concept  754. State Play and Possessive Beliefs  1055. The Erotic Life of States  1306. Feeling Like a Different Kind of State  153Notes  177References  225Index  253