Neil Cobb

Governance Through Publicity: Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, Young People, and the Problematization of the Right to Anonymity

Since the early twentieth century, young people under eighteen involved in legal proceedings have been granted a degree of protection from the glare of media publicity. One controversial consequence of recent reforms of the anti-social behaviour order (ASBO), however, is the incremental reduction in the anonymity rights available to those subject to the mechanism, together with calls by the Home Office for details of such individuals to be publicized as a matter of course. Numerous commentators have criticized the government accordingly for reinstating the draconian practice of ‘naming and shaming’. This paper contends that these developments can be usefully analysed through the lens of Foucaults work on state governance. It explores, in particular, how challenges to the right reflect both the fall of anonymity and the rise of publicity in the governance of what I term ‘ASBO subjects’, together with the communities in which they live, under ‘advanced liberal’ rule.

‘Gay Couple’s Break Like Fawlty Towers’: Dangerous Representations of Lesbian and Gay Oppression in an Era of ‘Progressive’ Law Reform

This article reconsiders the politics of knowledge production surrounding the discursively constructed sexual subject in light of the politico-cultural debates that ensued over enactment of the controversial 2007 Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations. Exploring the rise, in the course of these debates, of what it terms the ‘bed and breakfast paradigm’ of lesbian and gay oppression, the article questions whether that paradigm provides a suitably representative account of housing-related discrimination experienced by lesbians and gay men. It then goes on to highlight the silence during the debates that surrounded the pervasive intra-familial discrimination experienced by young lesbians and gay men within the home; a consequence, it finally argues, of law’s power to define the parameters of explanatory discourse around antidiscrimination protections according to an implicit public/private binary.

Rethinking the “World Polity” Perspective on Global Sodomy Law Reform

Sociologist John W. Meyer’s neo-institutionalist “world polity” perspective has had considerable influence on scholarly interrogations of globalization, international relations, and transnational governance. Put simply, Meyer and his collaborators argue that modern nation states are embedded increasingly within dense webs of shared cultural meaning, grounded predominantly in “Western” values, norms, and standards such as international human rights, which script their behavior and have led to striking levels of isomorphism or homogeneity across otherwise highly differentiated country contexts. Recently, the world polity perspective has been used by other sociologists to analyze why so many states across all regions of the world have apparently moved so swiftly since the Second World War to liberalize their criminal laws against same-sex genital relations (so-called “sodomy laws”). This chapter reappraises the world polity perspective on global sodomy law reform. In doing so, it draws attention to long-standing criticisms that Meyer’s work, in its emphasis on convergence of global cultural values, underplays or ignores entirely the continuing role of conflict in world society, and the dynamics of power and resistance through which that conflict is resolved. In turn, the chapter uses four recent case studies to evaluate the relevance of world polity analysis to the social process of sodomy law reform given the particular regimes of conflict, power, and resistance, especially between global North and South, which it shows are also shaping this particular social process.

The Church of England’s Hold over Marriage: The Queer Case for Disestablishment

It would no doubt be tempting, only a year or so after the celebration of the first same-sex marriages in England, to quietly forget the outpouring of hostility that followed the UK Coalition Government’s consultation on its proposals for equal marriage. It might also be simpler to ignore the fact that some of the most persistent and vocal opposition to the proposals came from within the Church of England, the nation’s established church (Church of England 2012; Carey 2013; Tatchell 2013). It seems to me, however, that important and unavoidable questions about the legitimacy of faith-based opposition to lesbian and gay rights are raised by the English same-sex marriage debates, and especially the resistance of the Church to the reforms, in an era of apparently increasing secularization in Britain (Brown 2009; Morris 2003).