Emily Grabham | University of Kent (original) (raw)

Books by Emily Grabham

This collection addresses the present and the future of the concept of intersectionality within s... more This collection addresses the present and the future of the concept of intersectionality within socio-legal studies. Intersectionality provides a metaphorical schema for understanding the interaction of different forms of disadvantage, including race, sexuality, and gender. But it also goes further to provide a particular model of how these aspects of social identity and location converge – whether at the level of subjectivity, everyday life, in culture or in the institutional practices of state and other bodies. Including contributions from a range of international scholars, this book interrogates what has become a key organizing concept across a range of disciplines, most particularly law, political theory, and cultural studies.

Papers by Emily Grabham

The perceived emergence of a "care deficit" is attracting significant attention from scholars, ac... more The perceived emergence of a "care deficit" is attracting significant attention from scholars, activists and policymakers. This preoccupation with care reflects a concern with the social implications of demographic and structural changes in the labour market in the context of radical, cross-national changes in welfare regimes. Much of the debate, particularly from a gender perspective, revolves around working mothers and the difficulties they face in combining work and care responsibilities. This has led to a focus on the role of the state within the broader context of social reproduction and social care provision. This article shifts the focus of enquiry away from the "working mother" as a privileged subject offeminist enquiry to consider some wider implications of the care debate, in particular, to explore the relationship between changes in the configuration of market, family and state with respect to care provision and the recent "success" of lesbian and gay equality-seeking strategies. In assessing the role played by care considerations in the development of "progressive" legal discourses around sexuality, we invoke the notion of the "citizen-carer", arguing that within the context of current political and legal reform in the U.K., such developments are, to considerable extent, shaped and constrained by the state's need to manage the care consequences of post-industrial transformation. The question for gay and lesbian activists is how far equality-seeking strategies may be allied to care concerns and to what extent (and in what contexts) are they subverted by them?

This is the second paper of a 2-part article which draws on interdisciplinary feminist perspectiv... more This is the second paper of a 2-part article which draws on interdisciplinary feminist perspectives to critique New Labour's welfare reform agenda. Through examining the Welfare Reform Bill and the subsequent Welfare Reform Act 2009, the paper argues that the increased use of conditionality and sanctions in relation to female benefit claimants -particularly lone mothers -"writes-off" their caring and informal work and pushes these women into low-paid, highly gendered employment in a precarious labour market. Despite the gender neutral language of 'lone parents', the 2009 Act continues a classed and often racialised government tradition of targeting lone mothers in an attempt to privatise social issues, such as povertv and unemployment. Rather than alleviating child poverty and developing the employability skills of claimants -as maintained by the Government -welfare-to-work measures exacerbate the economic insecurities experienced by poor women and their families, restricts their autonomy in choosing work that is right for their family circumstances, and subjects them to everincreasing degrees of surveillance and coercion.

This article is about how law constructs its own truths through touch. Whilst there has been an i... more This article is about how law constructs its own truths through touch. Whilst there has been an impressive body of work on how the visual paradigm permeates law, less has been written about the other senses and their connected clusters of knowledge, specifically the haptic -or touch-relatedparadigm. One of the aims of the article, therefore, is to bring touch to sociolegal theory. Another aim, however, is to trace some ways in which encounters, dispositions, feelings and contact -all forms of touch in themselves -shape law's objects and parameters. The case-studies in this article all raise the question of how touch constitutes the proper function of criminal regulation in relation to embodied encounters -the nude body in public, the alternative sexual space. 'I have been extremely shaken by this. It has been very upsetting and worrying. I don't want to bring up my children in such an environment.' (Mr Morien Jones, quoted by the BBC, 25 May 2008, talking about the experience of seeing his neighbour Lynett Burgess walk naked along a shared driveway.) 1 Earlier versions of this article were presented at 'Gender Futures: Law, Critique and the Struggle

The UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 contains a provision requiring that transgender applicants int... more The UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 contains a provision requiring that transgender applicants intend to remain in their acquired gender 'until death'. While apparently a straightforward administrative demand within a piece of archetypal New Labour legislation, this article argues that the requirement is unnecessary on the legislation's own terms. Focusing instead on the temporal work that the provision performs in relation to gender recognition, I situate it in relation to New Labour's 'social cohesion' rhetoric in the areas of immigration and race relations and argue that the permanence requirement is a temporal mechanism that links the supposedly linear development of trans bodies with racialized cultural and national integration.

Surgeries inevitably raise questions of bodily integrity: how the post-surgical body reframes (or... more Surgeries inevitably raise questions of bodily integrity: how the post-surgical body reframes (or does not reframe) its experiences of functionality to incorporate new features. Nevertheless, when we try to define or delimit the concept of bodily integrity, it becomes increasingly important to think about how the physical and social unease caused by some forms of surgeries sits alongside the more transformative potential of surgical bodily modification. This article focuses on aesthetic genital surgeries on infants with disorders of sex development (DSD, previously termed 'intersex' conditions). Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Elizabeth Freeman on time, bodies and 'chrononormativity', this article excavates not only the temporalities that produce what I would term 'chrono-abnormalities' of sex development, but also the temporalized medical responses, including surgeries, which retrieve 'abnormal' bodies into more normative time-lines. My conclusion is that when DSD-affected individuals experience aesthetic genital surgeries as painful and full of social unease this is not necessarily because the pre-surgical body was the 'natural', 'whole' or 'intact' body prior to surgery. Instead, it is because these surgeries interrupt what Bourdieu would term a sense of corporeal 'immersion into the forthcoming'; an immersion which, in his theory of time as social action, is intimately linked with social power and possibilities.