I wrote “Under the Cover of Gay Rights,” published in N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change in 2013. You can read it here.
Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform
I wrote an article called “Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform” in Signs, published in 2013. You can read the full text online here, or download it here.
Abstract:
Critical race theory generally and intersectionality theory in particular have provided scholars and activists with clear accounts of how civil rights reforms centered in the antidiscrimination principle have failed to sufficiently change conditions for those facing the most violent manifestations of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and xenophobia. These interventions have exposed how the discrimination principle’s reliance on individual harm, intentionality, and universalized categories of identity has made it ineffective at eradicating these forms of harm and violence and has obscured the actual operations of systems of meaning and control that produce maldistribution and targeted violence. This essay pushes this line of thinking an additional step to focus on the racialized-gendered distribution schemes that operate at the population level through programs that declare themselves race and gender neutral but are in fact founded on the production and maintenance of race and gender categories as vectors for distributing life chances. In the context of intensifying criminal and immigration enforcement and wealth disparity, it is essential to turn our attention to what Michel Foucault called “state racism”—the operation of population-level programs that target some for increased security and life chances while marking others for insecurity and premature death. This essay looks at how social movements resisting intersectional state violence are formulating demands (like the abolition of prisons, borders, and poverty) that exceed the narrow confines of the discrimination principle and take administrative systems as adversaries in ways that pull the nation-state form itself into crisis.
Interview: Four Burning Questions for Dean Spade
New article about pinkwashing and new interview in Upping the Anti
Big thanks to Robert Nichols for interviewing me for the journal, Upping the Anti. You can read the interview here. Also, the N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change just published a symposium issue about the Perry v. Brown same-sex marriage litigation. I have an article in it about pinkwashing. I also recommend you check out articles by Andrea Ritchie, Gabriel Arkles, and many more.
“Their Laws Will Never Make Us Safer” in Spanish
The amazing and generous Morgan Ztardust has translated my introduction to the new Against Equality book about hate crime law critiques into Spanish. Thanks, Morgan! You can read it here.
New Syllabus, Review, Blogpost and Translation
I’m co-teaching a class this semester with Prof. Katherine Franke about the law of occupation and colonialism. The class looks at the occupation of Palestine, US colonialism in Guam, Puerto Rico, North America, Hawaii and the Marshall Islands, the US occupation of Iraq, and more. You can see the syllabus here.
I also wanted to share a new review of Normal Life by Ro Velasquez Guzman in Shameless magazine, and a new blogpost I wrote for SRLP’s blog about how recent debates about gun control and mental health relate to trans politics and criminalization. Finally, HUGE THANKS to Morgan Ztardust for translating “For Lovers and Fighters” in Spanish. The translation is here.
Impossibility Now: A Trans Politics Manifesto
Blog Post for Upcoming Conference
This coming Friday and Saturday I’m heading to Los Angeles for a conference that marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the 10th anniversary of Lawrence v. Texas. In advance of the conference, speakers were asked to write blog posts related to the themes of the conference panels we are participating in. These were posted to the Balkinization blog. I thought I’d re-post what I wrote here as well:
Sexual freedom, legal equality and settler colonialism
In recent weeks, the world has been captivated by the emergence of the Idle No More movement. Indigenous people and their allies in Canada and around the world have been engaging in a wave of protest actions. These protests, which include marches, vigils, road blocks, railway blocks, flashmobs and the prominent hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat, are raising a number of significant issues. Initially, the movement was a response to the Harper government’s introduction of Bill C-45, legislation that would significantly weaken environmental protection laws in Canada. As the movement has grown, its message has broadened to raise questions about indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection more generally, both in Canada and around the world where indigenous people struggle against colonization and environmental degradation.
Movements against colonization raise significant questions for scholars studying the legal regulation of sexuality and family. The imposition of gender norms and family formation norms and the use of sexual violence as a tool of war have been significant to processes of colonization. The depiction of cultures and peoples targeted for colonization as “backward” in terms of sexuality and family formation has been a rationalization for colonization, and has often included portraying indigenous women as needing to be saved by the colonizers from their own families and cultures. These methods and rationalizations are visible in the history of the colonization of North America where the Idle No More movement has been most visible so far, but we can also hear these rationales deployed to justify the war in Afghanistan, proposed war with Iran, and in rationales for Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine.
These dynamics are particularly interesting in the context of a contemporary gay and lesbian rights framework in the US and its global influence. As many scholars have noted, the gay and lesbian rights framework has increasingly moved toward demands for formal legal equality in recent decades, particularly focusing on demands for military participation and access to legal marriage. There has been a great deal of critique of these demands by a range of feminist, anti-racist, queer and trans scholars. One aspect of this critique that is particularly interesting in the context of the Idle No More movement’s growing momentum is how these demands speak or fail to speak to the quest for sexual freedom for those imagining freedom from an anti-colonial perspective.
Ostensibly, the contemporary gay and lesbian rights agenda developed from the sexual liberation movements of the 1960’s and ‘70’s that are remembered in images from the Stonewall Riots where queer and trans people fought back against police harassment and criminalization. As it developed, its vision of “freedom” has become more aligned with joining the apparatuses of colonial occupation than fighting them. The US military literally operationalizes US colonial and imperial violence, and marriage enforces the family formation norms for the settler colonial state by disbursing essential benefits to the population based on whether we conform to that norm. As the Idle No More movement and other anti-colonial movements such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement continue to grow, queer and trans politics faces interesting questions about how various approaches to conceptualizing sexual freedom relate to anti-colonial agendas that seek to dismantle the apparatuses in which certain lesbian and gay rights campaigns and court cases seek gay and lesbian inclusion. These questions are particularly interesting now, as gay and lesbian people are increasingly articulated as those that need saving in colonial discourses. Access to legal marriage and military participation for gays and lesbians are now often used as measuring sticks for whether or not a country respects human rights, and human rights enforcement rationalizations are a popular justification for military intervention. The Idle No More movement’s emergence in this moment provides an opportunity for reflection on the relationship between commitments to sexual freedom and commitments to self-determination and decolonization.
Favorite books
Thanks to the owner of the most stylish collection of eyeglasses I have seen, Kate Clinton, for including Normal Life among her favorite books of the year in The Progressive’s “Favorite Books of 2012.” And thanks to the Modern Language Association/GLQ Caucus’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize Committee for honorable mention for Normal Life. Such a treat to be recognized alongside this year’s wonderful winners of that prize, Chandan Reddy’s Freedom with Violence and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism.
New Videos and a New Syllabus
I am teaching a January Term class at Seattle U for the first time, starting in a few weeks. It will be a four day intensive about imprisonment. I just posted the syllabus in case it is of interest.
I also wanted to share some new videos. GritTV recently posted an interview that Laura Flanders did with me.
http://blip.tv/grittv/dean-spade-the-most-imprisoning-nation-in-the-world-part-1-of-2-6482091
Also, I recently attended the World Social Forum: Free Palestine! in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I was part of a Queer Visions contingent that put on two public panels, this one and this one. Here’s the talk I gave about marriage and the military and pinkwashing: