D Cooper
Biographic Data
| ID | 35002 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Cooper |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Cooper |
| SIGNATURE | COOPER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kent |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1175-433X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 325 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1836 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Introduction
Failure is often perceived as negative, destructive, and demoralising to all things utopian. Indeed, charges of failure routinely confront utopian experiments in living. But whilst failure is a key part of utopian thinking and projects, we still lack a sufficiently nuanced and focused account of its different purposes and affordances. This introduction highlights how the Special Issue on Utopia and Failure addresses this lacuna by interrogating t…
Keeping Prefigurative Law in Play
Prefigurative law reform develops and experiments with ideas about radical legal change. But these ideas are vulnerable to being challenged, including for having failed and for being unreal. This article responds to such charges, drawing on utopian studies for a different account of failure and the not real. Its focus is a speculative legal proposal to “decertify” sex and gender so that they would no longer be assigned, obligatory aspects of lega…
How concepts do activism
What is conceptual activism and how should we understand the form and affordances of the concept as it takes shape within it? Drawing on interviews with twenty-three interdisciplinary academics, along with social theoretical and empirical research, this article offers an onto-methodological approach to the concept, focused on the work of concepts (qua concepts) in critical, prefigurative, campaigning and counter-institutional projects. Foreground…
De-producing gender
This article explores the contribution that the figure of economy can make to understanding gender in contemporary Britain, focusing on gender as a social quality and legal category that is produced, allocated and used. The article proceeds in two parts. The first part considers the politics of sex-based feminism and gender-as-diversity through an economic frame. The second part focuses, in detail, on one specific juncture where these diverging p…
Reconceptualizing the Real in the Struggle for Gender
The conflict surrounding gender categories in Britain between proponents of immutable sex-based rights and those advocating for diversity and self-identification is, at its heart, a conceptual conflict about what gender is, with the “real” deployed to confer authority and status on both sides. This is largely a mainstream conception of the real as independent existence and truth. While it can support different gender politics, it inclines toward …
Introduction to Special Issue
of Legal Gender project, which formally started in 2018 (in design from 2015), decided to research this question, to ask: Are there good reasons to continue to accord sex and gender legal status in Britain, including in light of developments elsewhere?In response to this question, we investigated contemporary socio-political uses of sex and gender categories, in Britain, as well as movements in other directions.With its manifold distinctions and …
Crafting Prefigurative Law in Turbulent Times
This article explores the challenge of developing a feminist law reform proposal to decertify sex and gender based on research conducted for the ‘Future of Legal Gender' project. Locating the proposal to decertify within a do-it-yourself, prefigurative approach to law reform, the article asks: Can a law reform proposal be both instrumental and radical? Can a proposal take shape as a viable legislative text and as a more subversive intervention to…
Decertification
Reimagining Gender Through Equality Law
British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning, and sex. This article considers the future of gender-related equality protections in relation to ‘decertification’—an imagined reform that would detach sex and gender from legal personhood. One criticism of decertification is that de-formalising gender membership would undermine …
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen
What does gender equality need? Revisiting the formal and informal in feminist legal politics
This article explores the political conflict over reforming how sex and gender categories are used in British law, focusing on the speculative legal proposal to ‘decertify’ sex and gender. Three interconnected arguments are advanced. First, diverging views on decertification are both about and seek to marshal competing perspectives on the value and risks of formalization and its undoing. Third, while formalization can pin down responsibilities an…
Towards an adventurous institutional politics
Discussion of prefigurative politics typically focuses on the revisioning of means to ends within grass-roots activities taking shape against or apart from the state. This article takes a different approach. Addressing prefiguration through the terms of the 'as if', it explores the assertion of counterhegemonic meanings, facts, norms and authority both by and about institutions, including state ones. Through four contentious acts: municipal expre…
Feeling Like a State
Doing activism like a state
Activism is typically placed in opposition to state practice. Yet, state bodies often participate in campaigns and movements for change, drawing on different powers and capacities, including the ability to withhold goods, land and contracts. This article explores subnational state activism – what it means and the activist framework it offers – through a study of UK local government’s episodic participation in the pro-Palestinian movement for dive…
Possessive Attachments
One feature of the neo/liberal possessive self is the propertied character of certain beliefs: treated as belonging to those who hold them, recognized and supported in acting on the world, and protected. While an ownership paradigm predates anti-discrimination and human rights regimes, these regimes have consolidated and extended the propertied status of certain identity beliefs in ways that naturalize and siloize them. But if beliefs' propertied…
Prefiguring the State
Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wished-for, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my di…
If the State Decertified Gender, What Might Happen to its Meaning and Value
As jurisdictions reform gender identity laws to accommodate transgender and intersex people, this article speculatively explores a more fundamental shift: eliminating state law's role in determining and assigning gender status altogether. Adopting a feminist perspective, we explore what the meaning and effects of comprehensively reforming legal gender might be upon gender's constitution as a socio‐legal property, differentially recognized and pro…
Enacting counter-states through play
Transformative state publics
Against the conventional assumption that publics, and particularly radical publics, are outside the state, this article explores their mutual combination and entanglement in order to consider how states might contribute to progressive politics. At the heart of this account is a concept of the state that incorporates the dissident and fleeting, and a conception of transformative publics based on four modalities: prefigurative, improper, liberatory…
Bringing the state up conceptually
If how the state is imagined shapes social and political action, the politics of state imagining provides an important site for progressive reflection. Arguing that conceptual approaches which support critique may not necessarily prove the best frameworks for supporting change, this article takes a left poststructuralist conception as its starting point to explore the place of conflicting interests, beliefs and affect in the make-up of the state …
Everyday Utopias
On being included
Sara Ahmed’s lively ethnographic study explores the twenty-first-century experience of developing diversity policies in Australian and British universities. Focusing on words, commitments and bodie
Up Against the Property Logic of Equality Law
Time against time
Why did Local Exchange and Trading Schemes (LETS) fail to realise their promise in 1990s Britain? This article argues that a core reason was the inability to make community labour, a concept at the heart of LETS logic, function as a self-perpetuating dynamic, in which community bonding would encourage trade and trade in turn would build community. In exploring reasons for this failure, the article focuses on the centrifugal pull of two contrastin…
Reading the State as a Multi-Identity Formation
Prefiguring the State
Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wished-for, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my di…
Opening Up Ownership
Drawing on empirical data and property theory, this article explores the property structure of a "free school" and the work property performs there.At Summerhill, we can see a tension between two property registers.On the one hand, the founder and present members stress the importance of individual ownership; at the same time the school's property ownership regime involves propertylimitation rules, a dispersal of right, collective forms of proper…
Productive, Relational and Everywhere? Conceptualising Power and Resistance within Foucauldian Feminism
This paper critically explores the ways in which power has been conceptualised within Foucauldian feminism. I focus on two facets within this framework: power as productive and power as relational. Although Foucauldian feminism combines both, tensions between them exist, particularly when it comes to understanding resistance. I argue for the need to focus on a productive or generative paradigm of power which perceives power neutrally as neither i…
Towards an adventurous institutional politics
Discussion of prefigurative politics typically focuses on the revisioning of means to ends within grass-roots activities taking shape against or apart from the state. This article takes a different approach. Addressing prefiguration through the terms of the 'as if', it explores the assertion of counterhegemonic meanings, facts, norms and authority both by and about institutions, including state ones. Through four contentious acts: municipal expre…
Active citizenship and the governmentality of local lesbian and gay politics
Sometimes a Community and Sometimes a Battlefield
Speakers' Corner in London is perceived as a space in which people speak freely without state interference; it is also popularly known as a place in which eccentrics and others, without access to mainstream media, orate. In this paper I explore Speakers' Corner as a discursive space, seeking to find a way through its polarised representations as a free space of serious and important deliberation and as a degraded trivial public sphere. I do so th…
Governing from the margins
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 government's state identities. Focusing on local government's relationship to state power, its corporeality, agency, representative role and ties to local residents, the article argues that the lens bro…
The Citizen's Charter and Radical Democracy
Talmudic Territory? Space, Law, and Modernist Discourse
This paper explores the conflict engendered by attempts to install an eruv a Talmudic, symbolic perimeter in the borough of Barnet, suburban, north-west London. On the Sabbath, Jewish law forbids a range of labour. This includes, as well as formal work, travelling, spending money, and carrying objects beyond the home. The eruv concerns this latter injunction. It enables objects to be carried or pushed within a non-domestic area through the creati…
Well, you go there to get off
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 Women's 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…
Regard between strangers
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 …
Crafting Prefigurative Law in Turbulent Times
This article explores the challenge of developing a feminist law reform proposal to decertify sex and gender based on research conducted for the ‘Future of Legal Gender' project. Locating the proposal to decertify within a do-it-yourself, prefigurative approach to law reform, the article asks: Can a law reform proposal be both instrumental and radical? Can a proposal take shape as a viable legislative text and as a more subversive intervention to…
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 cons…
Transformative state publics
Against the conventional assumption that publics, and particularly radical publics, are outside the state, this article explores their mutual combination and entanglement in order to consider how states might contribute to progressive politics. At the heart of this account is a concept of the state that incorporates the dissident and fleeting, and a conception of transformative publics based on four modalities: prefigurative, improper, liberatory…
Time against time
Why did Local Exchange and Trading Schemes (LETS) fail to realise their promise in 1990s Britain? This article argues that a core reason was the inability to make community labour, a concept at the heart of LETS logic, function as a self-perpetuating dynamic, in which community bonding would encourage trade and trade in turn would build community. In exploring reasons for this failure, the article focuses on the centrifugal pull of two contrastin…
Caring for Sex and the Power of Attentive Action
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 s…
Against the Current
Up Against the Property Logic of Equality Law
Doing activism like a state
Activism is typically placed in opposition to state practice. Yet, state bodies often participate in campaigns and movements for change, drawing on different powers and capacities, including the ability to withhold goods, land and contracts. This article explores subnational state activism – what it means and the activist framework it offers – through a study of UK local government’s episodic participation in the pro-Palestinian movement for dive…
Enacting counter-states through play
Far Beyond ‘The Early Morning Crowing of a Farmyard Cock’
Private and public nuisance have been the subject of extensive legal scholarship; however, far less has been said about nuisance as a sociolegal and political concept. Bringing a normative perspective to the analysis of nuisance claims, this article seeks to draw together discussions of nuisance in very different contexts - from the tortious injuries caused by sounds, vibrations and odours crossing property boundaries to the everyday claims that …
Governing Troubles
This paper analyses events at Kingsmead School, Hackney, in the aftermath of head teacher, Jane Brown's 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…
An Engaged State
For lesbians, gay men, feminists, and other progressive forces, the state has proved in recent years a key site of engagement. Objectives and strategies have, nonetheless, varied: resisting police practices and repressive legislation through direct action; the development of municipal equal opportunities initiatives; campaigning for law reform; protesting government inaction over AIDS. Out of these struggles, different perspectives and issues hav…
Reimagining Gender Through Equality Law
British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning, and sex. This article considers the future of gender-related equality protections in relation to ‘decertification’—an imagined reform that would detach sex and gender from legal personhood. One criticism of decertification is that de-formalising gender membership would undermine …
If the State Decertified Gender, What Might Happen to its Meaning and Value
As jurisdictions reform gender identity laws to accommodate transgender and intersex people, this article speculatively explores a more fundamental shift: eliminating state law's role in determining and assigning gender status altogether. Adopting a feminist perspective, we explore what the meaning and effects of comprehensively reforming legal gender might be upon gender's constitution as a socio‐legal property, differentially recognized and pro…
A list of the land and fresh-water shells found in the environs of London. Extracted from the "Flora metropolitana"
An Investigation Into Two Methods of Teaching English in Modern Schools
Psychological services in rehabilitation—a Western Australian view
A questionnaire was distributed to rehabilitation staff in Western Australia to determine: (a) the extent to which psychological services were congruent with staff expectations of what the services should offer, and (b) areas of need not currently being met by the psychological services. The results were highly similar to Australian and American findings. In Australia psychologists are viewed as members of the rehabilitation team, but their activ…
Letters
The Citizen's Charter and Radical Democracy
An Engaged State
For lesbians, gay men, feminists, and other progressive forces, the state has proved in recent years a key site of engagement. Objectives and strategies have, nonetheless, varied: resisting police practices and repressive legislation through direct action; the development of municipal equal opportunities initiatives; campaigning for law reform; protesting government inaction over AIDS. Out of these struggles, different perspectives and issues hav…
Off the banner and onto the agenda
Drawing on original research, this paper examines the rise of lesbian and gay politics within the urban arena. It explores the process by which homosexuality made a new place for itself on the British municipal left's agenda. Over a period of 10 years, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1 980s, the construction of the homosexual problem' shifted so that minority group discrimination rather than undesirable sexual practices became Me policy-makers' tar…
Productive, Relational and Everywhere? Conceptualising Power and Resistance within Foucauldian Feminism
This paper critically explores the ways in which power has been conceptualised within Foucauldian feminism. I focus on two facets within this framework: power as productive and power as relational. Although Foucauldian feminism combines both, tensions between them exist, particularly when it comes to understanding resistance. I argue for the need to focus on a productive or generative paradigm of power which perceives power neutrally as neither i…
Defiance and Non-Compliance Religious Education and the Implementation Problem
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 cons…
Talmudic Territory? Space, Law, and Modernist Discourse
This paper explores the conflict engendered by attempts to install an eruv a Talmudic, symbolic perimeter in the borough of Barnet, suburban, north-west London. On the Sabbath, Jewish law forbids a range of labour. This includes, as well as formal work, travelling, spending money, and carrying objects beyond the home. The eruv concerns this latter injunction. It enables objects to be carried or pushed within a non-domestic area through the creati…
Factors associated with unprotected anal intercourse in gay men's casual partnerships in Sydney, Australia
We assessed the factors associated with unprotected anal intercourse in gay men's casual partnerships, using data from a longitudinal cohort study ongoing since October 1992. Participants were recruited through gay community and a variety of other sources and interviewed for the Sydney Men and Sexual Health study. Of 1,037 interviewees at outset, 834 men had casual partners during the six months prior to interview; 609 had any anal intercourse wi…
Fiduciary Government
Governing Troubles
This paper analyses events at Kingsmead School, Hackney, in the aftermath of head teacher, Jane Brown's 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…
For the Sake of the Deer
Political activism by local government is a well known phenomenon in Britain. Less known are the interests affected. In this study, Somerset council's decision to ban hunting clashed with the long standing activities of the Quantock Staghounds. My discussion focuses on the conflict between hunt and council as a conflict of governance in which land rights provided both terrain and techniques of struggle. For the hunt, land rights functioned as a f…
Regard between strangers
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 …
And You Can't Find Me Nowhere’
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 equality's subject. After addressing some of the analytical problem…
Promoting injury or freedom
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 pluralism's response to the eruv constitu…
Against the Current
Far Beyond ‘The Early Morning Crowing of a Farmyard Cock’
Private and public nuisance have been the subject of extensive legal scholarship; however, far less has been said about nuisance as a sociolegal and political concept. Bringing a normative perspective to the analysis of nuisance claims, this article seeks to draw together discussions of nuisance in very different contexts - from the tortious injuries caused by sounds, vibrations and odours crossing property boundaries to the everyday claims that …
Governing from the margins
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 government's state identities. Focusing on local government's relationship to state power, its corporeality, agency, representative role and ties to local residents, the article argues that the lens bro…
Challenging Diversity
What challenges are presented by the claim that diversity should be celebrated? How should equality politics respond to controversial constituencies, such as smokers and sports hunters, when they position themselves as disadvantaged? Challenging Diversity brings a new and original approach to key issues facing social, political and cultural theory. Critically engaging with feminist, radical democratic and liberal scholarship, the book addresses f…
Active citizenship and the governmentality of local lesbian and gay politics
Sometimes a Community and Sometimes a Battlefield
Speakers' Corner in London is perceived as a space in which people speak freely without state interference; it is also popularly known as a place in which eccentrics and others, without access to mainstream media, orate. In this paper I explore Speakers' Corner as a discursive space, seeking to find a way through its polarised representations as a free space of serious and important deliberation and as a degraded trivial public sphere. I do so th…
Being in Public
License to Harass provides a sociolegal study of racially and sexually abusive within common outdoor spaces. Based on interviews with street users across three Californian cities, Laura Beth Nielsen's book examines subjects' experiences with offensive public speech, their attitudes about the extent to which it poses a problem for American society, and their beliefs about whether the law should be employed to restrict it (Nielsen 2004, 2). At the …
Sociology (47 works) · Political science (43 works) · Law (37 works) · Law (28 works) · Gender Studies (25 works) · Politics (25 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (16 works) · Law and economics (15 works)