The Sexual Constitution Of Political Authority

While there is no shortage of studies addressing the state’s regulation of the sexual, research into the ways in which the sexual governs the state and its attributes is still in its infancy. The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority argues that there are good reasons to suppose that our understandings of state power quiver with erotic undercurrents. The book maintains, more specifically, that the relationship between ideas of political authority and male same-sex desire is especially fraught. Through a series of case studies where a statesman’s same-sex desire was put on trial (either literally or metaphorically) as a problem for the good exercise of public powers, the book shows the resilience and adaptability of cultural beliefs in the incompatibility between public office and male same-sex desire. Some of the case studies analysed are familiar ground for both political/constitutional history and the history of sexuality. The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority argues, however, that only by systematically reading questions of institutional politics and questions of sexuality through each other will we have access to the most interesting insights that a study of these trials can generate. Whether they involve obscure public officials or iconic rulers such as Hadrian and James I, these compelling fragments of queer history reveal that the disavowal of male same-sex desire has been, and partly remains, central to mainstream understandings of political authority.

How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters? Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.

Edward II is one of the most unsuccessful and unconventional kings in English history, and is well-known for having passionate and probably intimate relationships with men. In modern times, he has often been considered an LGBT+ icon of sorts. Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships looks at the men in the king’s life and examines the relations he had with them in the context of medieval notions of sexuality and the famous, albeit almost certainly mythical, idea that he was murdered with a red-hot poker as punishment for having sex with men. It also investigates Edward’s associations with women. Though often thought of as a gay man, it is more likely that Edward was bisexual: he fathered an illegitimate son in his early twenties, at the age of forty had an intimate encounter with a woman in London which is recorded in his household account, and might even have had an incestuous relationship with his own niece. Edward’s marriage to the king of France’s daughter Isabella, arranged when they were children, has often been depicted as a tragic disaster from start to finish. Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships takes a detailed look at the royal marriage and at all the evidence that it was in fact a happy and mutually supportive partnership for many years, and at Isabella’s important though over-romanticized association with the baron Roger Mortimer. Because Edward is often assumed to have been solely attracted to men, numerous modern authors have depicted him as a grotesque caricature of a camp, weak, foppish gay man. Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships reveals him as he truly was: as a chronicler puts it, ‘one of the strongest men in his realm.'

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

Care is central to life, and yet is all too often undervalued, taken for granted, and hidden from view. This collection of fourteen substantive and highly innovative essays, along with its insightful introduction, seeks to explore the different dimensions of care that shape social, legal and political contexts. It addresses these dimensions in four key ways. First, the contributions expand contemporary theoretical understandings of the value of care, by reflecting upon established conceptual approaches (such as the ‘ethics of care’) and developing new ways of using and understanding this concept. Second, the chapters draw on a wide range of methods, from doctrinal scholarship through ethnographic, empirical and biographical research methodologies. Third, the book enlarges the usual subjects of care research, by expanding its analysis beyond the more typical focus on familial interconnection to include professional care contexts, care by strangers and care for and about animals. Finally, the collection draws on contributions from academics working in Europe and Australia, across law, anthropology, gender studies, politics, psychology and sociology. By highlighting the points of connection and tension between these diverse international and disciplinary perspectives, this book outlines a new and nuanced approach to care, exploring contemporary understandings of care across law, the social sciences and humanities.

A transformative progressive politics requires the state's reimagining. But how should the state be reimagined, and what can invigorate this process? In Feeling Like a State, Davina Cooper explores the unexpected contribution a legal drama of withdrawal might make to conceptualizing a more socially just, participative state. In recent years, as gay rights have expanded, some conservative Christians—from charities to guesthouse owners and county clerks—have denied people inclusion, goods, and services because of their sexuality. In turn, liberal public bodies have withdrawn contracts, subsidies, and career progression from withholding conservative Christians. Cooper takes up the discourses and practices expressed in this legal conflict to animate and support an account of the state as heterogeneous, plural, and erotic. Arguing for the urgent need to put new imaginative forms into practice, Cooper examines how dissident and experimental institutional thinking materialize as people assert a democratic readiness to recraft the state.

The Southern Low Countries were among Europe’s core regions for the repression of sodomy during the late medieval period. As the first comprehensive study on sodomy in the Southern Low Countries, this book charts the prosecution of sodomy in some of the region’s leading cities, such as Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, from 1400 to 1700 and explains the reasons behind local differences and variations in the intensity of prosecution over time. Through a critical examination of a range of sources, this study also considers how the urban fabric perceived sodomy and provides a broader interpretive framework for its meaning within the local culture.