Governance & Regulation Research Cluster
Coordinators: Toni Williams & Kate Bedford
The core focus of the governance and regulation research
project is the implications for law, gender and sexuality
of techniques and processes of governance, with particular
emphasis on how these techniques and processes are productive
of, and resistant to, inequality, disadvantage and exclusion.
Core research questions include:
-
how Gender, Sexuality and Law studies can contribute
to the conceptualisation of legal and policy developments
(in national, cross-national and international contexts)
-
how particular areas of law have been gendered
historically, and how and why such gendered legal
arrangements may be changing
-
how GSL scholarship can contribute to more aspirational
and utopian legal and political projects
-
how a focus on governance and regulation can throw
light on policy initiatives in the equality field
particularly in the context of furthering understandings
of, and responses to, intersectional inequality
Overall the project is one which sees law as a repository
of a set of governance and regulatory techniques through
which power may be both exercised and resisted.
Three areas of studies that are particularly significant in the work of CentreLGS members:
In the context of citizenship, a primary goal is to assess
both the progressive and regressive dimensions of citizenship
discourse in a GSL context. An additional concern is to
track the rise and deployment of ideas of citizenship
(explicit or implicit) in governance contexts. Citizenship
here includes notions of economic citizenship (particularly
in relation to participation in paid work), sexual citizenship
(encompassing strategies to extend or withhold full citizenship
rights on the basis of sexuality) and national/supranational
citizenship (highlighting GSL issues in the context of
questions of immigration, asylum, development and human
rights).
Regulation of intimate relations
A focus on the regulation of intimate relations sets
out to dispel understandings of intimacy as outside the
sphere of law and tracks the many ways in which intimacy,
including sexual intimacy, is constructed and produced
through law. Key contexts here include same sex partnerships,
marital/shared property rights, transgender law reform,
the regulation of sexual offences and sexual/gendered
violence.
A report from the Regulating
Intimacy Workshop is available to download:
Regulating
Intimacy Workshop Report
Regulation of communities
The focus on communities and activism is primarily concerned
with how non-state actors are positioned in and regulated
by law and the role of gender and sexuality in this regulatory
context. It encompasses work focused on the strategic
deployment of law for social/public interest purposes,
the incorporation of communities within law and state
policy implementation, and the regulation of intra-community
conflicts (or potential conflicts). Much of this work
is also grounded in or engaged with a normative framework
which is equality-seeking.
