Gender Futures:
Law, Critique and the Struggle for Something More  

3-4 April 2009 @ Westminster University, London  

PLENARY SPEAKERS:

Dean Spade, Professor of Law, School of Law, Seattle University, USA

"Trans Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape"

This paper draws from Critical Race Theory's critique of the discrimination principle and Foucault's theory of biopolitics to contemplate the role of law reform in US trans politics.  The most common and visible tran law reform strategies focus on expanding anti-discrimination laws and hate crimes laws to explicitly include gender identity and expression. The paper draws on scholarly and activist characterizations of neoliberalism to ask what significance such strategies have for trans life chances and how such reforms come to be framed as the keys to equality.  It further asks what role law reform might have in efforts to improve trans life chances or to seek broader redistributive change if we let go of neoliberal fantasies of privacy, accuracy, and inclusion that being explicitly named by protective laws supposedly promises.  Finally, it looks at recent organizing in marginalized trans political formations to examine what demands might emerge from a trans politics not focused on inclusion and incorporation into a neoliberal order.