Emily Grabham

Citizen Bodies, Intersex Citizenship

The aim of this article is to assess the use of sexual citizenship and intimate citizenship in articulating a concept of ‘intersex citizenship’. Intersex activism diverges in important ways from feminist, queer, lesbian and gay, and trans activism. Nevertheless, concepts of sexual and intimate citizenship help in thinking about the effects of family and kin structures on intersex corporeality, the impact of new technologies on intersex activism, and the advantages and disadvantages of consumer citizenship models for intersex claims, amongst other factors. As long as intersex issues are defined by medically disciplining techniques, there remains a need to think critically about how citizenship norms are constructed through responses to corporeality. Carol Lee Bacchi and Chris Beasleys concept of ‘citizen bodies’ provides a useful starting point both in attempting to theorize the norms underlying the hyper-embodiment of intersexual subjects, and in relating this hyper-embodiment to the construction of intersexual people as non-citizens.

Governing Permanence: Trans Subjects, Time, and the Gender Recognition Act

The UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 contains a provision requiring that transgender applicants intend to remain in their acquired gender ‘until death’. While apparently a straightforward administrative demand within a piece of archetypal New Labour legislation, this article argues that the requirement is unnecessary on the legislation’s own terms. Focusing instead on the temporal work that the provision performs in relation to gender recognition, I situate it in relation to New Labour’s ‘social cohesion’ rhetoric in the areas of immigration and race relations and argue that the permanence requirement is a temporal mechanism that links the supposedly linear development of trans bodies with racialized cultural and national integration.

From social security to individual responsibility (Part Two): Writing off poor women's work in the Welfare Reform Act 2009

This is the second paper of a 2-part article which draws on interdisciplinary feminist perspectives to critique New Labours welfare reform agenda. Through examining the Welfare Reform Bill and the subsequent Welfare Reform Act 2009, the paper argues that the increased use of conditionality and sanctions in relation to female benefit claimants – particularly lone mothers – “writes-off” their caring and informal work and pushes these women into low-paid, highly gendered employment in a precarious labour market. Despite the gender neutral language of ‘lone parents’, the 2009 Act continues a classed and often racialised government tradition of targeting lone mothers in an attempt to privatise social issues, such as povertv and unemployment. Rather than alleviating child poverty and developing the employability skills of claimants – as maintained by the Government – welfare-to-work measures exacerbate the economic insecurities experienced by poor women and their families, restricts their autonomy in choosing work that is right for their family circumstances, and subjects them to ever-increasing degrees of surveillance and coercion.

Legal Form and Temporal Rationalities in UK Work–Life Balance Law

Abstract This article attempts to crack open the temporal assumptions in the goal of ‘balancing’ work and family, as it is mobilised in UK law. Within studies of gender and labour, ‘balance’, as a concept and a politico-legal objective, is worthy of much more scholarly attention than it has received to date. In the UK context, balance is understood as a means of achieving equilibrium, both at the level of the labour market and within the context of unpaid care. Specifically, mobilising the short horizon of a ‘reckonable present’, balance creates a paradigm or topos through which dilemmas of value and care can be played out and resolved. The specific qualities of the UKs right to request flexible work, for its part, indicate that laws temporal qualities can have specific regulatory functions, shifting scale and reframing responsibilities. By looking closely at legal technicalities, we can discern much about the conceptual logic that affects many of us through influential regulatory strategies. The political imperative of analysing work–life balance might, in this way, require us to return not only to time, but also, strangely, to legal form.

Shaking Mr Jones: Law and Touch

This article is about how law constructs its own truths through touch. Whilst there has been an impressive body of work on how the visual paradigm permeates law, less has been written about the other senses and their connected clusters of knowledge, specifically the haptic – or touch-related – paradigm. One of the aims of the article, therefore, is to bring touch to sociolegal theory. Another aim, however, is to trace some ways in which encounters, dispositions, feelings and contact – all forms of touch in themselves – shape law’s objects and parameters. The case-studies in this article all raise the question of how touch constitutes the proper function of criminal regulation in relation to embodied encounters – the nude body in public, the alternative sexual space.

Taxonomies of Inequality: Lawyers, Maps and the Challenge of Hybridity

Intersectional discrimination challenges not only the structure of equality law, but also the techniques that lawyers employ in assessing and arguing discrimination cases. Client forms, akin to questionnaires, assist lawyers in obtaining a full picture of the clients circumstances and in avoiding the omission of any potential legal remedies. Chronologies of events assist lawyers in mapping discriminatory events and establishing that the client is within the time limit for submitting a claim to the Employment Tribunal. These techniques reflect discrimination laws defensiveness against lived complexities, which in itself restricts possible intersectional analyses. For example, through chronologies, each discriminatory event is defined by reference to only one ‘ground’. Discrimination law therefore links the passing of time itself to the categories it has produced. In this context, Homi Bhabhas concept of hybridity provides a useful way of describing how intersectional subjects relate to their categorization through law. It shows how legal subjects simultaneously adopt and resist the grounds that lawyers use to describe their experiences. If discrimination law is based on enabling legal subjects to speak for themselves, then we should investigate these possibilities for resistance.

Bodily Integrity and the Surgical Management of Intersex

Surgeries inevitably raise questions of bodily integrity: how the post-surgical body reframes (or does not reframe) its experiences of functionality to incorporate new features. Nevertheless, when we try to define or delimit the concept of bodily integrity, it becomes increasingly important to think about how the physical and social unease caused by some forms of surgeries sits alongside the more transformative potential of surgical bodily modification. This article focuses on aesthetic genital surgeries on infants with disorders of sex development (DSD, previously termed ‘intersex’ conditions). Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Elizabeth Freeman on time, bodies and ‘chrononormativity’, this article excavates not only the temporalities that produce what I would term ‘chrono-abnormalities’ of sex development, but also the temporalized medical responses, including surgeries, which retrieve ‘abnormal’ bodies into more normative time-lines. My conclusion is that when DSD-affected individuals experience aesthetic genital surgeries as painful and full of social unease this is not necessarily because the pre-surgical body was the ‘natural’, ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ body prior to surgery. Instead, it is because these surgeries interrupt what Bourdieu would term a sense of corporeal ‘immersion into the forthcoming’; an immersion which, in his theory of time as social action, is intimately linked with social power and possibilities.

Time and technique: the legal lives of the 26-week qualifying period

Abstract This paper aims to bring an appreciation of legal form, technicalities, and legislative drafting to growing interdisciplinary literatures on time and governance. Scholarship across politics, geography, science studies and anthropology continues to trace the productive force and specific qualities of diverse temporal horizons. At the same time socio-legal scholars increasingly focus on the work of making and negotiating law, engaging with the dogged, everyday work of legal experts and bureaucrats. Yet little attention has been paid, to date, to the work of legislative drafters. This paper follows the ‘legal lives’ of qualifying periods on family-friendly employment rights. As examples of legal technicalities that work with time, qualifying periods form an important part of the regulatory structure that separates precarious workers from ‘regular’ employees in UK law. Drawing on documentary research and interviews with policy experts, union activists and legislative drafters, this paper focuses on the formal qualities of qualifying periods, arguing that these legal technicalities conjure time and legal form as inextricable. Whenever law becomes relevant to conversations about time and governance, we could usefully pay attention to the idiosyncrasies and controversies occupying legal form and legislative drafting.