Studies making use of (de)politicisation have flourished as governments have embraced technocratic and delegated forms of governance. Yet this increase in use is not always matched by conceptual or analytical refinement. Nor has scholarship generally travelled into empirical terrain beyond economic and monetary policy, nor assessed whether politicising and depoliticising processes could occur simultaneously. It is within this intellectual context that we make a novel contribution by focusing on the (de)politicising discourses, processes and outcomes within policy surrounding assisted reproductive technologies. We reveal a pattern of partial repoliticisation that raises questions about the relationship between governance, technology, society and state.

Over the past decade, resilience has emerged as a key priority linking disparate areas of British policy. Yet research to date has focused heavily on resilience as a dimension of international development and security agendas. This article maps the movement of resilience into British social policy. It finds that, as in other areas of policy, resilience in social policy functions to depoliticise, placing the structural determinants of gender, racial, and other inequalities beyond the reach of policymakers. Yet, in a departure from academic accounts of resilience, in social policy, resilience appears to play another role: that of regulating social deviance.

Many authors have argued that sex-selective abortion (SSA) poses a problem for defenders of reproductive choice: the notion that a woman has "freely chosen" to abort a female fetus becomes problematic when she faces compelling pressure to bear a male child. This argument reflects the broader concern of the reproductive justice movement that mainstream pro-choice discourse has defined "choice" in narrow, legalistic terms, and overlooks the barriers to reproductive choice often faced by poor women and women of color. This article examines recent debates surrounding a proposed ban on SSA in the United Kingdom. It finds that despite attempts by the ban's proponents to make intersectional claims around gender, ethnicity, and class, their arguments also invoke xenophobia by constructing Indian migrants as a threat to "British" values of gender equality. Thus, the article suggests that the concept of disarticulation may fruitfully be used to make sense of such "intersectional" claims.

This article argues that gender-equality policy may function to cultivate women’s ‘psychological capital’, that is, psychological traits that assist women in becoming better workers and therefore further the interests of capital. It assesses documents produced by the UK government’s Body Confidence Campaign. First, the article finds that the campaign promoted narrow and corporate ideas about gender equality, only treating women’s aspiration as valuable if it led them to pursue profitable and traditionally ‘male’ professions. Second, it finds that despite campaign leaders’ criticisms of initiatives that blame women for their own low self-esteem, in practice, the campaign ended up doing exactly this by portraying low confidence as a drain on society and instructing women and girls to ‘build resilience’. Finally, the article finds that the campaign allowed companies to receive credit for limited and temporary efforts to appear ‘woman-friendly’ without overhauling their harmful marketing strategies in the long term.

Policy strategies for managing risk are now well-established in British social policy. These strategies are highly individualized, placing emphasis on the capacity of individuals to mitigate risk in their everyday lives. Further, the paper argues that the dominance of individualized risk governance agendas has serious implications for the design of equality initiatives. Through a case study of sexual and reproductive health policy in England, the paper demonstrates that risk governance has the potential to 'shrink' the meaning of equality by institutionalising a narrow, individualized definition of 'equality' in policy, and 'bend' equality initiatives to fit a broader neoliberal policy agenda.