Davina Cooper

Everyday Utopias: The conceptual life of promising spaces

Everyday utopias enact conventional activities in unusual ways. Instead of dreaming about a better world, participants seek to create it. As such, their activities provide vibrant and stimulating contexts for considering the terms of social life, of how we live together and are governed. Weaving conceptual theorizing together with social analysis, Davina Cooper examines utopian projects as seemingly diverse as a feminist bathhouse, state equality initiatives, community trading networks, and a democratic school where students and staff collaborate in governing. She draws from firsthand observations and interviews with participants to argue that utopian projects have the potential to revitalize progressive politics through the ways their innovative practices incite us to rethink mainstream concepts including property, markets, care, touch, and equality. This is no straightforward story of success, however, but instead a tale of the challenges concepts face as they move between being imagined, actualized, hoped for, and struggled over. As dreaming drives new practices and practices drive new dreams, everyday utopias reveal how hard work, feeling, ethical dilemmas, and sometimes, failure, bring concepts to life.

Local Government Legal Consciousness in the Shadow of Juridification

For almost two decades, British local government has been subject to intensive legal restructuring. Statutes have reallocated municipal powers and duties, judicial decisions declared council practice ultra vires; new subjects have gained grievance rights and scrutinizing powers. Law, commentators argue, has colonized local government, re-forming its practices, procedures, culture, and agendas.2 But what impact have these changes had on legal consciousness? This raises two further questions. First, how do local government actors understand and experience law; second, to what extent is this a product of structural legal change, that is, of juridification? Exploring the relationship between legal consciousness and juridification poses difficulties. If juridification identifies structural shifts, to what extent can these be meaningfully explored through individual perceptions and responses? If legal understandings are varied and contradictory, does this negate the existence of a central determining condition, such as juridification? In this paper, my aim is not to use legal consciousness as a way of proving or disproving juridification. Nor do I aim to establish juridification as the conclusive determinate of current municipal legal understandings. Both ventures, I would suggest, are fraught with methodological and epistemological problems. My objective, in contrast, is more modest: to explore the character of legal consciousness within local government in the 1980s and early 1990s, and, in doing so, to consider its relationship to juridification.

`Well, you go there to get off': Visiting feminist care ethics through a women's bathhouse

This paper examines normative feminist care scholarship through the lens of a sexual bathhouse. At first glance, a space dedicated to casual sexual pleasure seems at odds with feminist care. Drawing on the Toronto Womens Bathhouse (TWB) as a case study, this paper argues that bathhouse spaces can exemplify feminist care norms. At the same time, as a casual sexual space oriented towards personal autonomy, carefree conduct, and self-care, TWB also challenges certain feminist care assumptions. Drawing on these challenges, in the light of wider problems with normative care theorizing, particularly the sanitization and idealization of personal relationships, the paper seeks to revision care along non-normative lines.

Regard between strangers: diversity, equality and the reconstruction of public space

This article critically explores public space as a site and object of policy, and examines the way in which the spatial agendas of the New Urban Left and New Labour have been articulated to normative paradigms of community. I argue that both Labour approaches are limited in their understanding and approach towards space. In particular, their concep tion of public space as an already existing site for policy detracts atten tion from the processes of creating public space. In focusing on this process, I reject a public space framework based on formally universal access to explore the capacity of spaces to create communities as public— in other words as collectivities of strangers sharing equal regard. The final section explores the role of spatial heterogeneity, use-bans and cul tural symbols in developing public space.

Governing from the margins: Queering the state of local government?¹

Based on original field research, this article explores the relationship between lesbian and gay municipal politics and the local state. More particularly, it uses lesbian and gay work between 1990 and 2001 as a lens through which to examine local governments state identities. Focusing on local governments relationship to state power, its corporeality, agency, representative role and ties to local residents, the article argues that the lens brought by lesbian and gay work, for the most part, coincided rather than conflicted with dominant narratives. Yet lesbian and gay municipal activities offered more than a lens on the local state. The final part of the article examines the extent to which it also impacted upon local governments identities, in particular local governments relationship to heterosexuality and desire.

Against the Current: Social Pathways and the Pursuit of Enduring Change

Radical innovations and practices frequentlyfind themselves in an inhospitable environment,struggling against the gravitational force ofdominant norms, practices and relations. Thispaper explores the problems radical changeconfronts in its attempts to become sustainable.Against the postmodern valorisation of thetransient and ephemeral, the paper argues forthe importance of routinisation and repetitionin the process of creating and sustainingchange. A metaphor of social pathways isdeveloped to explore how new routines arecreated through de jure (governance) andde facto (usage) means. The paper arguesthat, in contrast to governance, the emergentdurability generated by usage enables routinesto outlive their conditions of existence.At the same time, routines at odds with theirsocial and institutional environment tend overtime to disappear. The second half of the paperdraws on four British attempts to introduce newpathways: lesbian and gay local governmentinitiatives, Conservative education reforms,Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp and LocalExchange Trading Systems (LETS). Through theseexamples, the paper reflects on attempts tocreate more conducive environments, and some ofthe difficulties this generates.

‘And You Can't Find Me Nowhere’: Relocating Identity and Structure within Equality Jurisprudence

This paper explores key tensions in conceptualizing equality. It begins by arguing for the equality of lives lived and then goes on to link this to equality based on power. Yet, although equality of power seems to offer a more radical model than approaches to equality based on resources, satisfaction, and recognition, it nevertheless is not entirely suitable, since it too centres equalitys subject. After addressing some of the analytical problems a subject-centred framework raises, including how to deal with reactionary identities and practices, the paper considers instead a structural approach to equality. This focuses on targeting social organizing principles, while recognizing the complex relationship between inequalities of gender, race, sexuality, and class and inequalities associated with unpopular viewpoints or beliefs. Finally, using lesbian and gay sexuality as an example, the paper considers the ways in which normative-epistemological organizing principles ? proper place and the public/private ? naturalize, legitimize but also hold the possibility of undercutting asymmetries of power.

Caring for Sex and the Power of Attentive Action: Governance, Drama, and Conflict in Building a Queer Feminist Bathhouse

This article considers the deployment of care as a modality of power that works to augment and sustain the autonomy of a counterhegemonic space. Focusing on a women’s bathhouse, a space intended for casual, experimental sex, the article maps the exercise of care—reframed nonnormatively, and thus in contrast to the prevailing approach in feminist care ethics—as weighted attentiveness. Care’s power is manifested in various ways within a bathhouse site. This article focuses on organizers’ governmental exercise of care in pursuit of an alternative sexual democracy and public, and on the civil interactions of participants that both mirrored and contested the bathhouse project. It argues that the dynamic interaction between governmental and civil deployments of weighted attentiveness exemplifies care’s power in establishing not only the distinctiveness but also the heterogeneous and evolving character of an otherwise marginal site.

Governing Troubles: authority, sexuality and space

Abstract This paper analyses events at Kingsmead School, Hackney, in the aftermath of head teacher, Jane Browns refusal to take children to a ballet of Romeo and Juliet. The paper explores the ensuing struggle over space, governance and gender within the context of LEA power after IMS. It analyses different levels of governance: direct, midway and at a distance, and explores the relationship between these levels and devolved legal powers. The paper links Hackneys techniques of governing, and school supporters’ acts of resistance, to their competing spatial representations of Kingsmead. Highlighted are discourses of ridicule, excessive sexuality, kinship, community and parents rights, as well as techniques of discipline, law, and fortification. Finally, the paper explores the conflict in terms of the production of lesbian feminist space, and considers the centrality of gender to the events that occurred.

Promoting injury or freedom: radical pluralism and orthodox Jewish symbolism

This article provides an interrogation of radical pluralism as an analytical and normative framework through the prism of the eruv. The eruv is a symbolic perimeter structure which, by privatizing public space, enables orthodox Jews to carry on the Sabbath beyond their homes. The article focuses on the controversial, highly contested attempt to establish an eruv in North London in the 1990s. While radical pluralisms response to the eruv constitutes a blend of neo-Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, and communitarianism, the article critically focuses on the particular influence of liberal individualism on radical pluralisms understanding of privacy, freedom and harm.