April 7, Wednesday 6 to 8 PM

Dean Spade, Seattle University School of Law; Founder, Sylvia Rivera Law Project

As critical trans politics continues to emerge and develop, there is an increasingly vocal demand for trans political formations to center racial and economic justice and respond to crises facing [...]]]> A lecture by Dean Spade

April 7, Wednesday
6 to 8 PM

Dean Spade, Seattle University School of Law; Founder, Sylvia Rivera Law Project

As critical trans politics continues to emerge and develop, there is an increasingly vocal demand for trans political formations to center racial and economic justice and respond to crises facing trans populations, such as criminalization and immigration enforcement, that have often been marginalized in a employment discrimination/family recognition-focused “LGBT rights” framework. This critical trans politics is often openly opposed to the legal reforms that dominate the most visible trans political schemes, such as the push to include “gender identity or expression” in hate crimes statutes. This lecture examines how we might take up the challenge of these critical interventions, recognizing the limits of formal legal equality demands, while still engaging with certain legal reform strategies. Specifically, the lecture will examine whether Foucault’s description of laws as tactics in the context of governmentality might be helpful to understanding and strategizing the role of law reform in social movements that understand formal legal equality to be a feature of neoliberalism that masks or even contributes to disparity.

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

For more information about this event, please call Social and Cultural Analysis at 212-992-9650.

Presented by the the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law and the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School

Each year the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law devotes a day-long symposium to the significant contributions of a senior scholar to the literature [...]]]> Friday, March 5, 2010 9:00 am

Presented by the the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law and the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School

Each year the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law devotes a day-long symposium to the significant contributions of a senior scholar to the literature of gender and/or sexuality law and theory. This year’s symposium will recognize the work of Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her works have had significant, and in many cases paradigm shifting influence in the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. The Symposium will take up Butler’s work on gender, sexuality, kinship, terrorism, torture, war and free speech.

Register here for the Symposium.

Her work of greatest influence in law includes:

Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies That Matter (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Giving An Account of Oneself (2005), and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009).