Abstract:This paper explores the relationship between new forms of speakability and continuing unthinkability in the context of British local government lesbian and gay work, particularly post-1997. The paper argues new municipal speech acts ushered in progressive modes of sexual citizenship; at the same time, local government's refusal to think hard, deeply or critically, limited the modes of active citizenship made possible. The paper addresses the easing out of active citizenship through an analysis of local government's self-care and its intensification of firewalls e firewalls which restricted the possibility of certain non-state forces guiding from 'a distance'.

Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wishedfor, 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 discussion is the plural state-taking shape as micro, city, regional, national and global formations. Plural state thinking makes room for divergent kinds of states but does not necessarily foreground progressive ones. Thus, to explore in more detail a transformative left conception of the state, discussion turns to 1980s British municipal radicalism. Taking up this adventurous episode in governing as a "thinking tool", an imaginary of the state as horizontal, everyday, activist and stewardly emerges.

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 inherently oppressive nor liberatory, yet with the capacity to be both. In this way, power can be conceived of as ubiquitous and trans-historical without inhibiting the possibilities for social change.

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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 regime involves property‐limitation rules, a dispersal of rights, collective forms of property, and cross‐cutting, pluralized sites of institutional recognition. In exploring how this tension is manifested through property's work, the article focuses on property's contribution to a variegated social life at the school, analyzed in terms of personal, civic, and boundary relations. With belonging treated as the central component of property rather than exclusion or control, ways of understanding what constitutes property and how it works shift.

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 selfperpetuating 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 contrasting temporalities: community time and labour-market time. And in understanding why these two, normative, temporal orders were unable to combine, cohere or simply to coexist, the article addresses three factors: failure in design; individual member responsibility; and wider temporal pressures.

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 challenges certain feminist care assumptions. Drawing on these challenges, in the light of wider problems with normative care theorizing, particularly the sanitization and idealization of personal relationships, the paper seeks to revision care along non-normative lines.

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 in terms of gender's constitution as a socio-legal property, differentially recognised and protected by diverse but unequal bodies. Our discussion proceeds along two intersecting paths. The first concerns the different classificatory methods which could enable state law, without assigning gender, to continue to regulate gender identity decisions, thereby allowing state law to remain involved in tackling gender discrimination. The second concerns the changing form gender might take in conditions where state law withdraws its allocative function. These paths converge in a final discussion which considers what legal and political effects might follow from gender becoming a property that is individually and collectively cultivated.