University of Toronto, Faculty of Law
FEMINISM & LAW WORKSHOP SERIES
presents
Davina Cooper
University of Kent
Stripping the Public Bare:
Theorizing the Politics of In/Equality from Nudist Encounters
12:30 – 2:00
Wednesday, October 29, 2009
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Flavelle Dining Room – 78 Queen’s Park
We are used to the listing of inequalities (gender, class, race, sexuality), with new entrants and inevitable etceteras, but is there any logic for progressives in the constitution of the list? What makes an illegitimate relation of inequality, when groups, such as smokers, describe themselves today in these terms? And what does undoing such inequality mean? This paper explores these questions, as they animate current discussion on inequality and difference, through a case-study of social nudism. An unusual supplement to listed inequalities, the paper explores how we might go about asking the question: does the nudist/ textile divide constitutes a relation of illegitimate inequality. It then asks what undoing such inequality might mean: parity between dressed and undressed groups, equal but different spaces for nudism and clothing, nudity/ dress as an insignificant distinction and so on.
Centring analysis on naked bodies within mainstream public spaces and public encounters, the paper uses nudism to explore, conceptually, the compositional character of inequality, the power of norms to structure what undoing (textile) domination might mean, and the fantasmatic quality of equality, when it attaches to anti-subordination practices, as a non-governmental, elusive, virtual virtue.
Davina Cooper is Professor of Law & Political Theory at the University of Kent (UK). An interdisciplinary academic, her current project explores the conceptual and social power of everyday utopias. Earlier publications include: Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference (2004), Governing out of Order: Space, Law & the Politics of Belonging (1998), Power in Struggle: Feminism, Sexuality & the State (1995), and Sexing the City: Lesbian and Gay Politics within the Activist State (1994). Between 2004-9, she directed the AHRC Centre for Law, Gender & Sexuality (UK), and was a local elected councillor in London in the 1980s.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
