Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority
272
Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority
272Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478004745 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2019 |
| Series: | Global and Insurgent Legalities |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.57(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Legal Dramas of Refusal
Hello Vanessa,
Sorry if our last response was a confusing one. Yes, you are correct in saying we do not photograph same-sex weddings, but again, thanks for checking out our site!
Have a great day, ELAINE
In the early twenty-first century, conservative Christian opposition to gay politics in the (neo)liberal North acquired a new form. With equality and human rights laws extending to embrace sexual orientation, Christian bodies changed tack. With gays unwilling to turn away from their desires, conservative Christians felt compelled to turn away from them, demanding legal recognition of their right to do so. In this way, gay people became the sex act from which conservative Christians sought to lawfully abstain.
Yet to characterize this conservative Christian move as one of withdrawal does not mean that religious individuals or organizations had previously been supportive. In some cases, lesbians and gays collectively lost something they had previously acquired — such as when the new mayor of a Canadian city refused to issue the annual Gay Pride proclamation granted by his predecessor (see chapter 4). In other cases, withdrawal involved the loss of expectations and provision that a normative sexuality would have gained or retained. The employee of a Christian organization who came out and lost her job, or the gay couple who were asked whether their venue booking was for a same-sex partnership ceremony and then found the booking canceled, faced the withdrawal of an opportunity or resource that would have stayed available had they not been marked as gay. In these cases of employment or commercial agreement, an individual lost what she or he had previously been granted or promised. But withdrawal also occurred in cases where nothing had been secured, as in Vanessa Willock v. Elane Photography. There, withdrawal operated as a retraction or deduction in relation to a norm — what would be given except to those identified as gay. Withdrawal, in this sense, was not just about the loss that followed subjects' falling short of a heterosexual norm. Central to its operation were equality and human rights laws requiring nondiscrimination in relation to sexual orientation. These laws were not always held at the "highest" state level, but for withdrawal to be meaningful as something more than a subtraction from the norm (what would have been), to function as a retraction of the norm (what should have been), gay equality needed to constitute a strong animating norm within the polity. Otherwise, refusal was simply the banal and unexceptional form of differentiation that conservative Christians declared it to be (no different from morally singling out pedophiles, adulterers, or bigamists), even as the unrelenting stress placed on gay equality, alongside abortion and gender transitioning, constituted these wrongs as theo- politically exceptional.
The legal drama of this book, however, does not just concern conservative Christian withdrawal. Scholarship on refusal and resistance often centers on actions against the state (see, e.g., Weiss 2014). But here, state bodies also turned away, withdrawing jobs, promotions, contracts, opportunities, resources, and even words, from withholding Christians. In contrast to many accounts in which one set of bodies simply withdraws from another, or where withdrawal constitutes a single, discrete act in which something once offered becomes lost, in this legal drama withdrawal proved far more dynamic and serial. We might describe it as an economy of withdrawal, involving different bodies as the American case of Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights illustrates. In that case, a group of law schools (unsuccessfully) challenged the withholding of federal funds resulting from their collective decision to deny "best access" to military recruiters on campus because of the recruiters' employment discrimination on sexuality grounds. In this drama, then, we have the military's withdrawal of employment opportunities from openly gay men and lesbians, causing law schools to withdraw recruitment privileges, leading to the federal state's withdrawal of funds. Episodes such as this, and the political imaginaries and practices they invoke, constitute the empirical heart of this book. In this chapter, I trace their drama. Reimagining the state through a drama of withdrawal foregrounds the subjects, conflicting authorities, competing normative worlds, and fusion and separation of bodies and things, with all the feelings and textures this engages. These themes provide the basis for discussing the state in the chapters that follow.
Thinking about Withdrawal
Although infrequently discussed in general overarching terms, withdrawal is a pervasive technique within world politics. Sometimes it takes shape as a self-healing or self-maintenance measure, as when radical separatist groups withdraw from a shared polity or when conservative religious groupings withdraw from a state- regulated secular world to establish their own, communal governmental structures, with courts, schools, care facilities, accommodation, and employment. Withdrawal can also be an assertion of sovereignty, or something demanded of others, including by nations in conditions of colonization withholding legitimacy from the dominant state. Audra Simpson (2014) traces this in her account of Kahnawá:ke Mohawks' refusal to recognize the territorial authority and borders of the Canadian state, despite considerable personal inconvenience and cost. In other contexts, withdrawal takes place to avoid sustaining and being implicated in undesired practices or as a way to penalize people and bodies for behaving undesirably. A punitive rationality is often tied to governmental action in conditions in which states withdraw benefits — from welfare payments to physical protection, housing, and even the right to inhabit particular spaces — to express their opprobrium or incentivize "better" behavior. Likewise, employees, companies, and consumers use withdrawal to pressure others to act, as in boycotts or strikes, where money, labor, participation, and recognition are withheld to compel companies, nation-states, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to introduce new policies, practices, and allegiances.
Withdrawal takes away goods and benefits. It also takes away the specific activities, uses, and relations those goods bear within the networks of action in which they exist. Yet withdrawal is also more than simply loss. Drawing back and acts of refusal bring other practices and meanings into play. Withdrawal, like refusal, is typically interpreted as a cutting of relations as the move to take the UK out of the European Union exemplifies (see also Mauss 1967; McGranahan 2016: 335); however, dramas of withdrawal should not be juxtaposed with dramas of connection. Just as law is involved and present in the so-called state of exception, and just as conservative Christians' denial of gay-positive recognition involves its endless sexual citation, so chains of withdrawal engender contact. We can find contact in the conflictual relations that develop through withdrawal, supported by the mediating figures and spaces that withdrawal often involves; in the reconfigured relations with those withdrawn from that take shape postwithdrawal (generating, in turn, the anxiety that separation may not prove possible); and in the new or consolidated associations that form as withdrawal from one set of bodies produces contact or closer contact with others (see chapter 5). Withdrawal is a curiously productive focus for thinking about political contact. But if this legal drama is to stimulate our thinking about how states touch and feel, and how different forms of contact compose them, how might it do so? In this chapter, I want to trace some of the relations and rationalities to emerge and be expressed in this drama, to ask: What is taking shape in those instances in which conservative Christians claim the right to make an exception, to treat specific others differently from the norm, and to have their own departure from new norms accommodated?
One useful starting point is the academic work that draws on Giorgio Agamben's (1998, 2005) and Carl Schmitt's ([1934] 2005) work on sovereignty and the "exception" to think about everyday (neo) liberal political life (see, e.g., Farías and Flores 2017; Gray and Porter 2015; Neilson 2014; Sarat and Clarke 2008). In the legal drama of this book, declaring an exception to the law (or the right to lift or cross its demands) takes shape in ways that are partial, contested, and certainly outside state claims to emergency. In such conditions, where rights and freedoms appear to collide, Bonnie Honig's (2009: xvii) phrase "everyday emergencies of maintenance" is helpful. Conservative Christian claims, in particular, are replete with talk of sovereignty, urgency, crisis, and the need to act in the name of religious freedom. They are also replete with expressed anxieties about banishment, exclusion, and discrimination in response to their own need to withdraw (see chapter 2). In such conditions, work on quotidian crises and dramas of sovereignty — on exceptions rather than the exception — illuminate key stakes and discourses in this conflict.
One central theme is the contested and plural character of political authority, hailed by different subjects even as it also hails them. Hosna Shewly explores the implications of competing forms of sovereignty, focusing on the harms that result when multiple authorities withdraw. Drawing on Agamben, she addresses the abandonment of people trapped between two states (India and Bangladesh), where they are "geographically located in one country but politically and legally [belong] to another" (Shewly 2013: 23). In Shewly's example, people are not transported to camps or extraterritorial prisons but abandoned in their own land. Their territorially remote home nation fails to provide most basic rights; the host nation, which surrounds them politically, intrudes only to further its own interests, disregarding urgently needed local rights and services. Shewly's account reveals experiences of powerlessness that seem far more acute than those evidenced in the legal drama of this book. Nevertheless, her focus on the withdrawal of political responsibility as a result of competing sovereign authorities is instructive for thinking about the relationship between exclusion, sovereignty, and plurality. In the legal drama over conservative Christian withdrawal, the problem is not so much the absence of legal authority as its multiplicity in conditions in which conservative Christians subordinate state-enacted rights to religious norms. Many democratic theorists adopt a celebratory attitude toward rights, driven by their desire to extend its project and vision. But the encounter between conflicting rights projects, including the right not to be subjected to others' rights (as conservative Christians demand), highlights how rights cannot be simply and harmoniously extended in conditions where gains for some become read (or felt) as losses for others.
Religious and secular political bodies confront a changing sociolegal and cultural landscape of obligations, freedoms, and entitlements; within this landscape, withdrawal provides an important political and governmental technique. In the main section of this chapter, I focus on three of its dimensions: the subjectivities that withdrawal expresses and constitutes; its authorities and authorizations; and its scope and reach. Agamben's influence has led many authors to trace these dimensions in terms of bare life (or homo sacer), the sovereign declaration of emergency, and the state of exception, respectively. In this legal drama, these dimensions acquire a rather different shape. So subjectivities are variously represented (and constituted) as immoral, abject, desertable, governing, and playing; questions of authority and authorization foreground diverse sovereign projects as different authorities justify, confront, and perform refusal. Meanwhile, the scope and reach of withdrawal brings to the fore divergent notions of the normative world and its bodies (as whole, divided, and sticky). But before discussing these dimensions further, I want to map the five primary forms of refusal to have taken place in this legal drama.
Mapping Withdrawal
1. Conscientious objection. The first and probably best-known set of cases concern state officials and other public sector agents demanding the right to be an exception. Christian marriage registrars, doctors, firefighters, police officials, and others here refused to carry out particular work responsibilities, where gay clients were involved, on grounds of their religious conscience, that "ethical regulator … [which] require[s] the individual to privilege these imperatives above other social obligations" (Weiss 2014: 6). Facing their own religious communities but speaking in ways that rippled through other publics, conservative Christians claimed that their conscience required them to refrain from acting when doing otherwise would constitute an endorsement of gay sexuality or same-sex relationships (see chapters 2 and 5). These refusals did not go down well with many state employers. Demotions, dismissals, suspensions, and, in some cases, compulsory diversity training followed, leading conservative Christians, in turn, to challenge their employers' actions in court. Litigated cases include family panel adjudicators who refused to participate in adoption decisions where gay people were being considered as parents; marriage and civil partnership registrars who declined to conduct ceremonial or "marriage" formalities for gay couples; and firefighters who refused to accompany or participate in Gay Pride events (see Baskerville 2011: 97–98). But withdrawal did not just involve pulling back from contact with gay individuals, couples, or groups. It also included unwillingness to create gay-positive environments on the part of schoolteachers and librarians; refusals by foster parents to raise children in their care with positive attitudes toward gay sexuality; and even a refusal by public sector workers to attend gay-positive training sessions. One news story tells of a federal government official who refused to watch a video on LGBT diversity, or to sign a document saying he had watched it, on the grounds that affirmative contact with such a video would itself "certify sin."
2. Political representation. The political refusal to reconfigure the boundaries of the "normal" constitutes a second strand of this legal drama as (elected) public bodies declined to provide gay equality with support or political backing. In one set of cases, Canadian cities in British Columbia and Ontario withheld mayoral proclamations supporting Gay Pride in contexts in which proclamations for other causes and events were routinely given (see chapter 4). In Kelowna v. O'Byrne, the mayor was prepared to proclaim "a lesbian and gay day" but refused to add the word "pride." In Hudler v. City of London, the mayor declared she would "never grant this proclamation" since, as an evangelical Christian, turning her "back on God … would lose [her] authority as mayor." In other cases, resisting gay equality measures came from school boards and districts. In the Canadian case, Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 36, an elected school board refused a teacher's request to be allowed to use books depicting lesbian and gay families (see chapter 3). In A. W. et al. v. Davis School District, a children's book depicting lesbian parents was removed from school shelves and placed behind the library counter (available only with parental permission). In Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, Inc.v. Camdenton R-III School District, a public school district in Missouri used Internet filtering software to prevent students from accessing LGBT-positive websites.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Feeling Like a State"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Reimagining the State 1 1. Legal Dramas of Refusal 28 2. Retrieving Dissident State Parts 52 3. Pluralizing a Concept 75 4. State Play and Possessive Beliefs 105 5. The Erotic Life of States 130 6. Feeling Like a Different Kind of State 153 Notes 177 References 225 Index 253What People are Saying About This
“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.”
“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.’”