Prefigurative politics and law have long been seen as opposing phenomena – one a grassroots radical practice that embodies sought-after norms (horizontality, social justice, and ecology, for instance); the other an institutional structure that is typically hierarchical and backed by force. Yet, there is a growing interest in the relationship between the two. In this […]
[A revised version of this post is published on the LSE Engenderings blog: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/2023/01/30/4784/ ] In January 2020, I gave a talk at a US university. It started the way I was told all their seminars started, with each of us in turn giving our pronouns. At a London meeting for an art exhibition, I […]
I have been watching the letter wars – multi-signed letters from different quarters in the gender/ sex debate – wing their way through the press and social media. Many legal academics I respect signed a recent letter in support of Sussex University’s “defence of academic freedom”, following a similar one from philosophers. I didn’t sign […]
The current conflict over sex and who gets to count as a woman is also a conflict about how to understand reality and how to have a discussion. While the conflict over defining sex and womanhood has received fierce attention, far less attention has been paid, in Britain, to the relationship between sex, what counts […]
Some months back, I received an email asking me for an academic reference. With it came a request that, in writing the reference, I pay attention to my unconscious gender bias, which I should try and limit. I am glad universities, internationally, are directing reference-writers’ attention to the different kinds of recommendation letters that men […]
Can feminism develop and grow if the room for reasonable divergence between us becomes ever narrower? We need spaces where we can discuss feminist politics to improve all our feminisms. The cheerleading, backslapping and feuding of twitter is not a good substitute. [image: Ben Kanter] I’ve been wondering how to respond to the social media […]
Now is an exciting time to be asking the question: do we need an assigned legal gender? The research project I’ve started with colleagues on gender’s legal future is situated in a swirl of critical and creative approaches to gender and its possible futures – in terms of what gender means, what it does, and […]
Is making a cake for a gay wedding the same as making a cake with an anti-gay message? This equivalence was drawn by conservative judge, Justice Gorsuch, in the US Supreme Court decision on Masterpiece Cakeshop recently released. For the Trump nominee, both kinds of cakes were exercises in expression, and to require bakers to make the […]
Photo: Ben Kanter This post was prompted by the responses of some critical scholars to my recent work on reimagining the state; I focus on the challenge of developing transformative methods and the relationship they might have to more critical accounts. The task of the critical academic is often seen as one of exposure – […]
Davina Cooper and Didi Herman Yet another episode in the story of Jeremy Corbyn’s antisemitism. This time from 2012, in expressed support for a graffiti artist’s free speech rights after the artist’s painting of white bankers playing monopoly on the backs of the globe’s dispossessed was declared offensive for its racist caricatures of Jews. And […]
social politics and stuff 