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A Responsibility to Representational Justice: A Few Notes on Reading Davina Cooper’s ‘Taking Responsibility for Gender’
Get PDFCommentary on Cooper. 
Sordid Pasts, Indigenous Futures: Necropolitics and Survivance in Louis Owens' Bone Game
Get PDFThis article develops from current examinations of the link between racial subjectivity and death that increased in prominence after the publication of Achille Mbembe’s 2003 article “Necropolitics.” In a context specific to Native American/Indigenous Studies, Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw) points out how designating an individual or group “Indian” allows for their genocide. Elaborating on Mbembe’s and Byrd’s respective frameworks, my article provides a necropolitical reading of Louis Owens’ 1994 novel Bone Game, arguing that the book prompts readers to discuss and reconcile the historical relationships between death and subjectivity and, more importantly, explore the possibilities of Indigenous futures and sovereignty.
This article draws on Indigenous scholarship like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s concept of ‘Indigenous freedom,’ Vine Deloria Jr.’s critique of Anthropological study, and Vizenor’s notion of ‘survivance,’ in its analysis of the struggles and survivance strategies of Owens’ characters, all of whom emphasize Native agency and sovereignty over the predominant, mainstream narrative of Native tragedy. The injustices and tragedies are part of the California landscape, written into the state and national histories, what Owens once described in an interview as “dark” but what this article characterizes as dystopic based on the novel’s “defamiliarization” of a well-known setting for political purposes (Booker) and based on how it “depends on and denies history” (Baccolini). While illustrating the link between history and the present day of the book, up to and including how we can construct the future, my reading posits that the actions of Cole and his family help readers imagine possibilities for Indigenous futures.
The first part of my article’s title draws on one of Cole’s quips about the history of California. Cole’s reference to the state’s “sordid past” critiques the common conception of California as a terra nullius paradise. California long exists in the public imagination as a source of hope (for gold, for a new beginning); it is thus appropriate that Owens sets his novel here to explore his own sense of hope for an Indigenous future, one that accounts for settler colonialism while also beginning to move past it, one that does not skirt the hard work of reconciliation and sovereignty
Poetry, Activism, and Queer Indigenous Imaginative Landscapes: Conversations with Janice Gould: Lisa Tatonetti
Get PDFThis essay offers a final interview with Koyoonk’auwi writer and scholar Janice Gould (1949-2019). Tatonetti first contextulaizes Gould's work and then presents their discussion in three sections: Questions on Seed (2019), Gould's latest poetry collection; Questions on California; and Questions on Queer Indigenous History.
 
Seeing Things Differently: Art, Law and Justice in the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project
Get PDFThis paper illustrates how turning to art rather than focusing solely on legal reform can form part of an alternative response to gender inequality that allows for deeper understandings of social (in)justice. We show how the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project – a collaborative endeavour by legal academics, practising lawyers, judges, artistic contributors and representatives from the third sector – can offer those who engage with our art the experience of hearing and seeing law in different ways. More specifically, we explore how art can open law up to scrutiny, render vivid the impact of legal decisions, and create richer and more democratic communities of understanding. At the same time, by discussing knowledge differentials and the quandaries of creating art ethically, we also highlight some of the challenges involved in engaging in artistic-legal collaboration
Pulling the Thread of Decertification: What Challenges are Raised by the Proposal to Reform Legal Gender Status?
Get PDFIn decertification, the state withdraws from registering, assigning, or guaranteeing a person’s sex and gender, giving one shape to the growing momentum towards their informalisation. This article explores decertification as a speculative reform, now emerging onto the political and legal agenda, in two primary ways. First, it asks what contribution, if any, might decertification make to a feminist politics intent on undoing gender-based hierarchies. Second, as a methodological thread, what concerns, issues, and hopes does decertification bring with it? In addressing these questions, the article considers different versions of decertification alongside an alternative reform strategy of legally recognising multiple gender identities. It explores the feminist benefits of decertification; the concerns and criticisms expressed; and strategies for responding to feminist worries. Here, the article turns to possible and already in-place governmental strategies to manage the informalisation of sex/ gender, alongside criticisms that can and have been made of these strategies. It then considers decertification’s relationship to other strategies that foreground purpose, specificity, connection, and context, within a politics intent on questioning and unsettling existing orderings. Finally, the article considers the risks of androcentrism and gender-neutral law; and argues for the need to embed decertification within a wider multiplex progressive agenda
Exploring the Textual Alchemy of Legal Gender: Experimental Statutes and the Message in the Medium
Get PDFThis article draws on original empirical research to explore the politics of experimental feminist statutes. It has two main aims. First, it traces how conventional legislative drafting techniques have participated in the wider social creation and continuance of sex/gender norms. It shows how dominant statutory expressions of sex and gender that might otherwise appear timeless have shifted with social change and legal innovation. The article contributes to debates in feminist legal studies, legal anthropology, and legislative drafting by making visible, and analysing the particular power of legislative text, its ‘alchemy’, in expressing and re-creating sex/gender as a social, cultural and political artefact. Second, drawing on this research, the article explores what the Future of Legal Gender project might consider and do when drafting an experimental statute to decertify legal gender. Addressing questions of positionality, believability, legal form and the use of potentially innovative or contested drafting techniques (the singular “they”, the second person), the article explores tensions between legislative drafting and feminist legal method, as well as the benefits for bringing feminist analysis and perspectives to this important aspect of legal practice. Given that legislative drafting does not merely inscribe pre-agreed policy ideas into legal text but helps to shape emerging ontologies of gender, then drafting an experimental statute invites feminists to pay attention to interlinked questions of substance and form in the exploration of prefigurative legal futures
Gender’s Wider Stakes: Lay Attitudes to Legal Gender Reform
Get PDFThe Future of Legal Gender (FLaG) project is interested in examining the implications, for a wide range of stakeholders, of changing how legal sex/gender is regulated in England and Wales. In this article, we explore the views of ‘the wider public’ as manifest in responses to our ‘Attitudes to Gender’ survey (n=3,101), which ran in October to December 2018. Generally, respondents were invested in the status quo regarding a binary two-sex registration of gender close to birth. We discuss this finding with reference to cisgenderism and endosexism, focusing particularly on being critical of ‘gender’ and foregrounding biological sex, and views for and against self-identifying gender. In tandem, we also provide a critical commentary on the methodological positives and pitfalls associated with online survey research on a ‘topical’ issue. We suggest that cisgenderism could provide a less individualised framework for understanding different people’s hopes and worries with regard to both the current legal gender framework, and the possibility of reform.  
End of Trump's Rule Will Not End the Assault on Reproductive Rights in Africa
Get PDFThis comment highlights the damaging and long-lasting effects of the Trump administration's policies on reproductive rights in Africa. 
Taking Public Responsibility for Gender: When Personal Identity and Institutional Feminist Politics Meet
Get PDFThis essay explores the challenge that soft decertification poses for feminist politics. In soft decertification, people continue to have a formal legal sex/ gender status; however, public and other bodies act as if such status was no longer determinative (at least in certain contexts). As glimpses of soft decertification emerge, what are its implications for gender equality initiatives hitherto focused on addressing the asymmetrically patterned lives of women and men? What new ways of understanding gender are coming to the fore, and what challenges arise for bodies engaged in equality governance in trying to address them? This essay explores these questions through the prism of responsibility - the ethical, political, and legal obligation to pay attention or respond that different bodies have because of their capacity to undo or ameliorate social inequalities and other injustices. Specifically, it asks: What does responsibility for gender entail when gender is treated as both institutionalised and self-determined; public and private? The essay addresses two contexts where equality governance approaches gender as a site of institutional re-making and redress. The first concerns the front-stage initiatives and policies of public sector provision; the second concerns the back-stage scenes of organisational action, where informal decision-making arises. In both cases, taking responsibility for gender, as an institution, is far from straight-forward. This essay explores the importance of doing so - not just despite, but because of, the complex conditions responsibility confronts when institutional forms also exist as individual attachments
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