Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority

In Feeling Like a State, Davina Cooper sets out to reconceptualise what it could mean to be a state in ways that support a progressive, transformative politics. This reconceptualisation is supported and inspired by her engagement with a series of legal dramas in which conservative Christians in the (neo)liberal states of Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom ‘withdraw’ (e.g. refuse services and goods) from LGBTQ individuals and groups, thereby prompting the state to reciprocally withdraw (e.g. refuse licenses or revoke charitable status) from them. Drawing on a combination of theory and empirical data, Cooper posits that these reciprocal dramas of withdrawal – particularly those that involve conservative Christians operating as state actors (e.g. foster parents, county clerks, etc) – challenge conceptions of the state as orderly, vertical, homogenous and wholly distinct from the society over which it governs. Cooper – whose stated objective is a reconceptualisation of the state – welcomes this challenge, organising her response around two questions she sees as posed by conservative Christian withdrawal. The first is a question of state parts: what are they and how do they conceive of their relationship[s] to each other? In answering this question, she draws heavily on the legal dramas at the heart of this book in order to emphasise the plural and heterogeneous nature of the state. The second question Cooper raises is one regarding state responsibility. She asks: What practical and imaginative possibilities are made possible by thinking of the state as plural and heterogenous? Here, Cooper’s focus is on the role that play and the erotic could have in both the imagining and the functioning of a new kind of state. She concludes by offering prefigurative role-play (i.e. the act of imitating statehood on a microcosmic scale through venues such as people’s tribunals and free universities) as one modality by which progressives can experiment and engage with statehood in ‘a progressive, transformative key’ (Cooper, 2019, p. 27).