Social Justice – serie

Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender examines the impact of legislation premised upon the principle of ‘self-declaration’ of legal gender status. Existing doctrinal and comparative analyses have tended to come out strongly in favour of, or against, self-declaration. This book offers a socio-legal alternative which focuses on how self-declaration is experienced, on an embodied level, by trans and gender diverse people. It presents research conducted in Denmark, which became the first European state to adopt self-declaration in June 2014. By analysing Danish law through a Foucauldian framework which brings together socio-, feminist, and trans legal scholarship on embodiment and jurisdiction, the book offers the first empirically based and theoretically informed analysis of self-declaration. It draws upon legal consciousness, affect theory, vulnerability, and governmentality literatures to argue that the jurisdictional boundaries which existed between law and medicine were maintained throughout the reform process. This limited the impact of the legislation, enabling access to health care to be restricted in the same year in which amending legal gender status was liberalised. As the list of states that have adopted self-declaration increases, this intervention offers activists and policymakers insights which might shape how they respond to similar reform proposals in the future.A timely and important assessment, this book will appeal to researchers and practitioners working in trans, gender, feminist legal, and socio-legal studies.

Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime – for example by squatting – they enact what can be called ‘contested property claims’. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.

Through theoretical and empirical examination of legal frameworks for court diversion, this book interrogates law’s complicity in the debilitation of disabled people. In a post-deinstitutionalisation era, diverting disabled people from criminal justice systems and into mental health and disability services is considered therapeutic, humane and socially just. Yet, by drawing on Foucauldian theory of biopolitics, critical legal and political theory and critical disability theory, Steele argues that court diversion continues disability oppression. It can facilitate criminalisation, control and punishment of disabled people who are not sentenced and might not even be convicted of any criminal offences. On a broader level, court diversion contributes to the longstanding phenomenon of disability-specific coercive intervention, legitimates prison incarceration and shores up the boundaries of foundational legal concepts at the core of jurisdiction, legal personhood and sovereignty. Steele shows that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities cannot respond to the complexities of court diversion, suggesting the CRPD is of limited use in contesting carceral control and legal and settler colonial violence. The book not only offers new ways to understand relationships between disability, criminal justice and law; it also proposes theoretical and practical strategies that contribute to the development of a wider re-imagining of a more progressive and just socio-legal order.The book will be of interest to scholars and students of disability law, criminal law, medical law, socio-legal studies, disability studies, social work and criminology. It will also be of interest to disability, prisoner and social justice activists.

From the rise of far-right regimes to the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent years have brought global upheaval as well as the sedimentation of longstanding social inequalities. Analyzing the complexities of the current political moment in different geographic regions, this book addresses the paradoxical persistence of neoliberal policies and practices, in order to ground the pursuit of a more just world.Engaging theories of decoloniality, racial capitalism, queer materialism, and social reproduction, this book demonstrates the centrality of sexual politics to neoliberalism, including both social relations and statecraft. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, the authors show that gender and sexuality may be the site for policies like those pertaining to sex trafficking, which bundle together economics and changes to the structure of the state. In other instances, sexual politics are crucial components of policies on issues ranging from the growth of financial services to migration.Tracing the role of sexual politics across different localities and through different political domains, this book delineates the paradoxical assemblage that makes up contemporary neoliberal hegemony. In addition to exploring contemporary social relations of neoliberal governance, exploitation, domination, and exclusion, the authors also consider gender and sexuality as forces that have shaped myriad forms of community-based activism and resistance, including local efforts to pursue new forms of social change. By tracing neoliberal paradoxes across global sites, the book delineates the multiple dimensions of economic and cultural restructuring that have characterized neoliberal regimes and emergent activist responses to them.This innovative analysis of the relationship between gender justice and political economy will appeal to: interdisciplinary scholars in social and cultural studies; legal and political theorists; and the wide range of readers who are concerned with contemporary questions of social justice.

Analysing the strategies people use to resist, accept and respond to laws that attempt to shape not just their behaviour, but also their identity, this book pursues a critical engagement with legal gender transition. The Gender Recognition Act (GRA) has often been described as a groundbreaking and progressive legal framework for allowing people to legally change their gender. This book seeks to challenge this representation by drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with trans people about the GRA. Theoretically this book uses the concepts of legal consciousness, agency and emotion to highlight the normative underpinnings of the GRA. Overall, the book contends, the GRA does not accurately reflect many trans people's own understanding of their gender identity or their sexuality. It is designed to create subjects that govern their behaviour and self-expression in a way that aligns with a purely binary model of sex/gender and sexuality. Although a deviation from these norms does not incur any direct punishment, it indirectly leads to a denial of rights and legal protections. By reviewing relevant legislation and case law, and through qualitative research, the book establishes how, instead of uncritically accepting or completely rejecting the GRA, trans people enact their singular identities by engaging strategically with law. This book will be of interest across a range of disciplines, including socio-legal studies, family law, gender, sexuality and law as well as sociology courses on gender, identity and social policy.

Analysing the strategies people use to resist, accept and respond to laws that attempt to shape not just their behaviour, but also their identity, this book pursues a critical engagement with legal gender transition. The Gender Recognition Act (GRA) has often been described as a groundbreaking and progressive legal framework for allowing people to legally change their gender. This book seeks to challenge this representation by drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with trans people about the GRA. Theoretically this book uses the concepts of legal consciousness, agency and emotion to highlight the normative underpinnings of the GRA. Overall, the book contends, the GRA does not accurately reflect many trans people's own understanding of their gender identity or their sexuality. It is designed to create subjects that govern their behaviour and self-expression in a way that aligns with a purely binary model of sex/gender and sexuality. Although a deviation from these norms does not incur any direct punishment, it indirectly leads to a denial of rights and legal protections. By reviewing relevant legislation and case law, and through qualitative research, the book establishes how, instead of uncritically accepting or completely rejecting the GRA, trans people enact their singular identities by engaging strategically with law. This book will be of interest across a range of disciplines, including socio-legal studies, family law, gender, sexuality and law as well as sociology courses on gender, identity and social policy.

Offering an important addition to existing critiques of governance feminism and carceral expansion based mainly on experiences from the Global North, this book critically addresses feminist law reform on violence against women, from a decolonial perspective.Challenging the consensus that penal expansion is mainly associated with the co-option of feminist campaigns to counteract violence against women in the context of neoliberal globalisation, this book shows that long-standing colonial narratives underlie many of today’s dominant legal discourses justifying criminalisation, even in countries whose governments have called themselves "leftist" and "post-neoliberal". Mapping the history of law reform on violence against women in Ecuador, the book reveals how the conciliation between feminist campaigns and criminalisation strategies takes place through liberal legality, the language of human rights, and the discourse of constitutional guarantees, across the political spectrum. Whilst human rights make violence against women intelligible in mainstream legal terms, the book shows that the emergence of a "rights-based penality" produces a benign, formally innocuous criminal law, which can be presented as progressive, but in practice reproduces colonial and postcolonial paradigms that limit and reshape feminist demands. The book raises new questions on the complex social and political factors that impact on feminist law reform projects, as it demonstrates how colonial assumptions about gender, race, class, and the family remain embedded in liberal criminal law.This theoretically and empirically informed analysis makes an innovative contribution to feminist legal theory, post-colonial studies, and criminal law; and will be of interest to activists, scholars and policymakers working at the intersections between gender equality, law, and violence in Latin America and beyond.

Offering an important addition to existing critiques of governance feminism and carceral expansion based mainly on experiences from the Global North, this book critically addresses feminist law reform on violence against women, from a decolonial perspective.Challenging the consensus that penal expansion is mainly associated with the co-option of feminist campaigns to counteract violence against women in the context of neoliberal globalisation, this book shows that long-standing colonial narratives underlie many of today’s dominant legal discourses justifying criminalisation, even in countries whose governments have called themselves "leftist" and "post-neoliberal". Mapping the history of law reform on violence against women in Ecuador, the book reveals how the conciliation between feminist campaigns and criminalisation strategies takes place through liberal legality, the language of human rights, and the discourse of constitutional guarantees, across the political spectrum. Whilst human rights make violence against women intelligible in mainstream legal terms, the book shows that the emergence of a "rights-based penality" produces a benign, formally innocuous criminal law, which can be presented as progressive, but in practice reproduces colonial and postcolonial paradigms that limit and reshape feminist demands. The book raises new questions on the complex social and political factors that impact on feminist law reform projects, as it demonstrates how colonial assumptions about gender, race, class, and the family remain embedded in liberal criminal law.This theoretically and empirically informed analysis makes an innovative contribution to feminist legal theory, post-colonial studies, and criminal law; and will be of interest to activists, scholars and policymakers working at the intersections between gender equality, law, and violence in Latin America and beyond.

Law, Judges and Visual Culture analyses how pictures have been used to make, manage and circulate ideas about the judiciary through a variety of media from the sixteenth century to the present. This book offers a new approach to thinking about and making sense of the important social institution that is the judiciary. In an age in which visual images and celebrity play key roles in the way we produce, communicate and consume ideas about society and its key institutions, this book provides the first in-depth study of visual images of judges in these contexts. It not only examines what appears within the frame of these images; it also explores the impact technologies and the media industries that produce them have upon the way we engage with them, and the experiences and meanings they generate. Drawing upon a wide range of scholarship – including art history, film and television studies, and social and cultural studies, as well as law – and interviews with a variety of practitioners, painters, photographers, television script writers and producers, as well as court communication staff and judges, the book generates new and unique insights into making, managing and viewing pictures of judges. Original and insightful, Law, Judges and Visual Culture will appeal to scholars, postgraduates and undergraduates from a variety of disciplines that hold an interest in the role of visual culture in the production of social justice and its institutions.

Research on law's relationship with time has flourished over the past decade. This edited collection aims to put law and time scholarship into wider context, advancing conversations on time and temporalities between socio-legal scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers and historians. Through a diverse range of contributions, the collection explores how legal modalities of time emerge and have effects within wider clusters of social and political action. Themes include: law’s diverse roles in maintaining linear historicist models of time; law’s participation in the materialisation of times; and the unsteady effects of temporal pluralism and polytemporalities in law. De-naturalising the ‘time’ in law and time scholarship, this collection positions time as something that can be enacted and materialised as well as experienced, with distinct implications for questions of social justice.Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780415792219_oachapter6.pdfThe Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780415792219_oaintroduction.pdf

This collection addresses the present and the future of the concept of intersectionality within socio-legal studies. Intersectionality provides a metaphorical schema for understanding the interaction of different forms of disadvantage, including race, sexuality, and gender. But it also goes further to provide a particular model of how these aspects of social identity and location converge – whether at the level of subjectivity, everyday life, in culture or in the institutional practices of state and other bodies. Including contributions from a range of international scholars, this book interrogates what has become a key organizing concept across a range of disciplines, most particularly law, political theory, and cultural studies.

This collection addresses the present and the future of the concept of intersectionality within socio-legal studies. Intersectionality provides a metaphorical schema for understanding the interaction of different forms of disadvantage, including race, sexuality, and gender. But it also goes further to provide a particular model of how these aspects of social identity and location converge – whether at the level of subjectivity, everyday life, in culture or in the institutional practices of state and other bodies. Including contributions from a range of international scholars, this book interrogates what has become a key organizing concept across a range of disciplines, most particularly law, political theory, and cultural studies.

Winner of the 2011 SLSA-Hart Socio-Legal Book PrizeRegulating Sexuality: Legal Consciousness in Lesbian and Gay Lives explores the impact that recent seismic shifts in the legal landscape have had for lesbians and gay men. The last decade has been a time of extensive change in the legal regulation of lesbian and gay lives in Britain, Canada and the US. Almost every area that the law impacts on sexuality has been reformed or modified. These legal developments combine to create a new, uncharted terrain for lesbians and gay men. And, through an analysis of their attitudes, views and experiences, this book explores the effects of these developments. Drawing on—as well as developing—the concept of ‘legal consciousness’, Regulating Sexuality focuses on four different ‘texts’: qualitative responses to a large-scale online survey of lesbians’ and gay men’s views about the legal recognition of same sex relationships; published auto/biographical narratives about being and becoming a lesbian or gay parent; semi-structured, in-depth, interviews with lesbians and gay men about relationship recognition, parenting, discrimination and equality; and fictional utopian texts. In this study of the interaction between law and society in social justice movements, Rosie Harding interweaves insights from the new legal pluralism with legal consciousness studies to present a rich and nuanced exploration of the contemporary regulation of sexuality.

How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters? Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.

Winner of the 2011 SLSA-Hart Socio-Legal Book PrizeRegulating Sexuality: Legal Consciousness in Lesbian and Gay Lives explores the impact that recent seismic shifts in the legal landscape have had for lesbians and gay men. The last decade has been a time of extensive change in the legal regulation of lesbian and gay lives in Britain, Canada and the US. Almost every area that the law impacts on sexuality has been reformed or modified. These legal developments combine to create a new, uncharted terrain for lesbians and gay men. And, through an analysis of their attitudes, views and experiences, this book explores the effects of these developments. Drawing on—as well as developing—the concept of ‘legal consciousness’, Regulating Sexuality focuses on four different ‘texts’: qualitative responses to a large-scale online survey of lesbians’ and gay men’s views about the legal recognition of same sex relationships; published auto/biographical narratives about being and becoming a lesbian or gay parent; semi-structured, in-depth, interviews with lesbians and gay men about relationship recognition, parenting, discrimination and equality; and fictional utopian texts. In this study of the interaction between law and society in social justice movements, Rosie Harding interweaves insights from the new legal pluralism with legal consciousness studies to present a rich and nuanced exploration of the contemporary regulation of sexuality.

Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow documents a powerful and under-researched form of urban governance that focuses on pedestrian flow. This logic, which Nicholas Blomley terms 'pedestrianism', values public space not in terms of its aesthetic merits, or its success in promoting public citizenship and democracy. Rather, the function of the sidewalk is understood to be the promotion and facilitation of pedestrian flow and circulation, predicated on the appropriate arrangement of people and objects. This remarkably pervasive yet overlooked logic shapes the ways in which public space is regulated, conceived of, and argued about. Rights of Passage shows how the sidewalk is literally produced, encoded, rendered legible and operational with reference to a dense array of codes, diagrams, specifications, academic and professional networks, engineering rubrics, regulation and case law – all in the name of unfettered circulation. Although a powerful form of governance, pedestrianism tends to be obscured by grander and more visible forms of urban regulation. The rationality at work here may appear commonplace; but, precisely because it is uncontroversial, pedestrianism is able to operate below the academic and political radar. Complicating the prevailing tendency to focus on the socially directive nature of public space regulation, Blomley reveals the particular ways in which pedestrianism deactivates rights-based claims to public space.

Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow documents a powerful and under-researched form of urban governance that focuses on pedestrian flow. This logic, which Nicholas Blomley terms 'pedestrianism', values public space not in terms of its aesthetic merits, or its success in promoting public citizenship and democracy. Rather, the function of the sidewalk is understood to be the promotion and facilitation of pedestrian flow and circulation, predicated on the appropriate arrangement of people and objects. This remarkably pervasive yet overlooked logic shapes the ways in which public space is regulated, conceived of, and argued about. Rights of Passage shows how the sidewalk is literally produced, encoded, rendered legible and operational with reference to a dense array of codes, diagrams, specifications, academic and professional networks, engineering rubrics, regulation and case law – all in the name of unfettered circulation. Although a powerful form of governance, pedestrianism tends to be obscured by grander and more visible forms of urban regulation. The rationality at work here may appear commonplace; but, precisely because it is uncontroversial, pedestrianism is able to operate below the academic and political radar. Complicating the prevailing tendency to focus on the socially directive nature of public space regulation, Blomley reveals the particular ways in which pedestrianism deactivates rights-based claims to public space.

Anarchism & Sexuality aims to bring the rich and diverse traditions of anarchist thought and practice into contact with contemporary questions about the politics and lived experience of sexuality. Both in style and in content, it is conceived as a book that aims to question, subvert and overflow authoritarian divisions between the personal and political; between sexual desires categorised as heterosexual or homosexual; between seemingly mutually exclusive activism and scholarship; between forms of expression such as poetry and prose; and between disciplinary categories of knowledge. Anarchism & Sexuality seeks to achieve this by suggesting connections between ethics, relationships and power, three themes that run throughout. The key objectives of the book are: to bring fresh anarchist perspectives to debates around sexuality; to make a queer and feminist intervention within the most recent wave of anarchist scholarship; and to make a queerly anarchist contribution to social justice literature, policy and practice. By mingling prose and poetry, theory and autobiography, it constitutes a gathering place to explore the interplay between sexual and social transformation.This book will be of use to those interested in anarchist movements, cultural studies, critical legal theory, gender studies, and queer and sexuality studies.

This book comes at a time when the intrinsic and self-evident value of queer rights and protections, from gay marriage to hate crimes, is increasingly put in question. It assembles writings that explore the new queer vitalities within their wider context of structural violence and neglect. Moving between diverse geopolitical contexts – the US and the UK, Guatemala and Palestine, the Philippines, Iran and Israel – the chapters in this volume interrogate claims to queerness in the face(s) of death, both spectacular and everyday.Queer Necropolitics mobilises the concept of ‘necropolitics’ in order to illuminate everyday death worlds, from more expected sites such as war, torture or imperial invasion to the mundane and normalised violence of racism and gender normativity, the market, and the prison-industrial complex. Contributors here interrogate the distinction between valuable and pathological lives by attending to the symbiotic co-constitution of queer subjects folded into life, and queerly abjected racialised populations marked for death. Drawing on diverse yet complementary methodologies, including textual and visual analysis, ethnography and historiography, the authors argue that the distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ dissolves in the face of the banality of death in the zones of abandonment that regularly accompany contemporary democratic regimes.The book will appeal to activist scholars and students from various social sciences and humanities, particularly those across the fields of law, cultural and media studies, gender, sexuality and intersectionality studies, race, and conflict studies, as well as those studying nationalism, colonialism, prisons and war. It should be read by all those trying to make sense of the contradictions inherent in regimes of rights, citizenship and diversity.

Anarchism & Sexuality aims to bring the rich and diverse traditions of anarchist thought and practice into contact with contemporary questions about the politics and lived experience of sexuality. Both in style and in content, it is conceived as a book that aims to question, subvert and overflow authoritarian divisions between the personal and political; between sexual desires categorised as heterosexual or homosexual; between seemingly mutually exclusive activism and scholarship; between forms of expression such as poetry and prose; and between disciplinary categories of knowledge. Anarchism & Sexuality seeks to achieve this by suggesting connections between ethics, relationships and power, three themes that run throughout. The key objectives of the book are: to bring fresh anarchist perspectives to debates around sexuality; to make a queer and feminist intervention within the most recent wave of anarchist scholarship; and to make a queerly anarchist contribution to social justice literature, policy and practice. By mingling prose and poetry, theory and autobiography, it constitutes a gathering place to explore the interplay between sexual and social transformation.This book will be of use to those interested in anarchist movements, cultural studies, critical legal theory, gender studies, and queer and sexuality studies.

Employing feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives, Global Justice and Desire addresses economy as a key ingredient in the dynamic interplay between modes of subjectivity, signification and governance. Bringing together a range of international contributors, the book proposes that both analyzing justice through the lens of desire, and considering desire through the lens of justice, are vital for exploring economic processes. A variety of approaches for capturing the complex and dynamic interplay of justice and desire in socioeconomic processes are taken up. But, acknowledging a complexity of forces and relations of power, domination, and violence – sometimes cohering and sometimes contradictory – it is the relationship between hierarchical gender arrangements, relations of exploitation, and their colonial histories that is stressed. Therefore, queer, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives intersect as Global Justice and Desire explores their capacity to contribute to more just, and more desirable, economies.

This book develops a new framework for analyzing the spatio-temporal workings of law and other forms of governance. Chronotopes of Law argues that studies of law and governance can be reinvigorated by drawing on a bundle of quite heterogenous analytical tools that do not have a single provenance or a single political or normative aim but that work well in combination. Analyses of legal temporality carried out by anthropologists and studies of law and space undertaken by geographers and legal scholars have proliferated in recent years, but these research traditions have remained largely separate. By adapting notions such as intertextuality, dialogism, and the ‘chronotope’ from Mikhail Bakhtin, notions designed specifically to synthesize considerations of space and time in a framework that is open-ended, interactive and dynamic, Mariana Valverde develops an anti-metaphysical theory and method for legal studies. This approach will be useful both to theorists and to researchers seeking to illuminate the actual workings of law and other forms of governance. Indeed, a key aim of the book is to break down the institutional and disciplinary barriers that prevent theorists from learning from empirical studies and viceversa.Written by one of the foremost sociolegal scholars writing today, this theoretically innovative work constitutes a major contribution to contemporary studies in law and society.

Groups seeking legal equality often take a victory as the end of the line. Once judgment is granted or a law is passed, coalitions disband and life goes on in a new state of equality. Policy makers too may assume that a troublesome file is now closed. This collection arises from the urgent sense that law reforms driven by equality call for fresh lines of inquiry. In unintended ways, reforms may harm their intended beneficiaries. They may also worsen the disadvantage of other groups. Committed to tackling these important issues beyond the boundaries that often confine legal scholarship, this book pursues an interdisciplinary consideration of efforts to advance equality, as it explores the developments, challenges, and consequences that arise from law reforms aiming to deliver equality in the areas of sexuality, kinship, and family relations. With an international array of contributors, After Legal Equality: Family, Sex, Kinship will be an invaluable resource for those with interests in this area.

Research on law's relationship with time has flourished over the past decade. This edited collection aims to put law and time scholarship into wider context, advancing conversations on time and temporalities between socio-legal scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers and historians. Through a diverse range of contributions, the collection explores how legal modalities of time emerge and have effects within wider clusters of social and political action. Themes include: law’s diverse roles in maintaining linear historicist models of time; law’s participation in the materialisation of times; and the unsteady effects of temporal pluralism and polytemporalities in law. De-naturalising the ‘time’ in law and time scholarship, this collection positions time as something that can be enacted and materialised as well as experienced, with distinct implications for questions of social justice.The Introduction and Chapter 6 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

While there is no shortage of studies addressing the state’s regulation of the sexual, research into the ways in which the sexual governs the state and its attributes is still in its infancy. The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority argues that there are good reasons to suppose that our understandings of state power quiver with erotic undercurrents. The book maintains, more specifically, that the relationship between ideas of political authority and male same-sex desire is especially fraught. Through a series of case studies where a statesman’s same-sex desire was put on trial (either literally or metaphorically) as a problem for the good exercise of public powers, the book shows the resilience and adaptability of cultural beliefs in the incompatibility between public office and male same-sex desire. Some of the case studies analysed are familiar ground for both political/constitutional history and the history of sexuality. The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority argues, however, that only by systematically reading questions of institutional politics and questions of sexuality through each other will we have access to the most interesting insights that a study of these trials can generate. Whether they involve obscure public officials or iconic rulers such as Hadrian and James I, these compelling fragments of queer history reveal that the disavowal of male same-sex desire has been, and partly remains, central to mainstream understandings of political authority.

We’ve seen it before, with asbestos-related disease, leukaemia clusters and lung cancer caused by cigarettes. There tends to be a lag between the emergence of environmental risks and chemical injuries, and their recognition and therapeutic treatment by medicine and the law. Law, Environmental Illness and Medical Uncertainty examines how our society governs new health concerns as they emerge, and the barriers that face new and uncertain theories seeking recognition in the law. In this book, Tarryn Phillips focuses her investigation on the struggle over the controversial condition multiple chemical sensitivities, or MCS (also known as environmental illness). Presenting nine case studies where workers sought compensation for MCS from their multinational employers, she captures a nuanced portrait of their embittered, unequal battles over the scientific, legal and insurance paradigms for understanding toxic risk, environmental illness and the regulation of industry. It draws on three years of fieldwork in Australia, including interview data with lay people and sympathetic and sceptical experts, participant observation in the courtroom and textual analysis of official reports. The book gives a unique, ethnographic insight into the governance of risk and uncertainty within a neoliberal economy, medico-scientific controversies and courtroom dramas. It highlights how a skeptical approach towards emergent environmental concerns is encouraged within the current regime, and decision-makers face disincentives for taking a sympathetic approach. Compellingly written and easy to read, it should appeal widely to interested lay people, and students and scholars of science and technology studies, medical anthropology, sociology of health and illness, and critical legal studies.

Protest, Property and the Commons focuses on the alternative property narratives of ‘social centres’, or political squats, and how the spaces and their communities create their own – resistant – form of law. Drawing on critical legal theory, legal pluralism, legal geography, poststructuralism and new materialism, the book considers how protest movements both use state law and create new, more informal, legalities in order to forge a practice of resistance. Invaluable for anyone working within the area of informal property in land, commons, protest and adverse possession, this book offers a ground-breaking account of the integral role of time, space and performance in the instituting processes of law and resistance.

This book draws on the analytic and political dimensions of queer, alongside the analytic and political usefulness of emotion, to navigate legal interventions aimed at progressing the rights of LGBT people.Scholars, activists, lawyers, and judges concerned with eliminating violence and discrimination against LGBT people have generated passionate conversations about pursuing law reform to make LGBT injuries, intimacies, and identities visible, while some challenge the ways legal systems marginalise queer minorities. Senthorun Sunil Raj powerfully contributes to these ongoing conversations by using emotion as an analytic frame to reflect on the ways case law seeks to "progress" the intimacies and identities of LGBT people from positions of injury. This book catalogues a range of cases from Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom to unpack how emotion shapes the decriminalisation of homosexuality, hate crime interventions, anti-discrimination measures, refugee protection, and marriage equality. While emotional enactments in pro-LGBT jurisprudence enable new forms of recognition and visibility, they can also work, paradoxically, to cover over queer intimacies and identities. Raj innovatively shows that reading jurisprudence through emotions can make space in law to affirm, rather than disavow, intimacies and identities that queer conventional ideas about "LGBT progress", without having to abandon legal pursuits to protect LGBT people. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of human rights law, gender and sexuality studies, and socio-legal theory.

Through theoretical and empirical examination of legal frameworks for court diversion, this book interrogates law’s complicity in the debilitation of disabled people. In a post-deinstitutionalisation era, diverting disabled people from criminal justice systems and into mental health and disability services is considered therapeutic, humane and socially just. Yet, by drawing on Foucauldian theory of biopolitics, critical legal and political theory and critical disability theory, Steele argues that court diversion continues disability oppression. It can facilitate criminalisation, control and punishment of disabled people who are not sentenced and might not even be convicted of any criminal offences. On a broader level, court diversion contributes to the longstanding phenomenon of disability-specific coercive intervention, legitimates prison incarceration and shores up the boundaries of foundational legal concepts at the core of jurisdiction, legal personhood and sovereignty. Steele shows that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities cannot respond to the complexities of court diversion, suggesting the CRPD is of limited use in contesting carceral control and legal and settler colonial violence. The book not only offers new ways to understand relationships between disability, criminal justice and law; it also proposes theoretical and practical strategies that contribute to the development of a wider re-imagining of a more progressive and just socio-legal order.The book will be of interest to scholars and students of disability law, criminal law, medical law, socio-legal studies, disability studies, social work and criminology. It will also be of interest to disability, prisoner and social justice activists.