Book Reviews : Davina Cooper, Sexing the City : Lesbian and Gay Politics Within the Activist State. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1994, 216pp
| Author | Lisa Adkins |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399500400417 |
| Published date | 01 December 1995 |
| Date | 01 December 1995 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
546
DAVINA
COOPER,
Sexing
the
City :
Lesbian
and
Gay
Politics
Within
the
Activist
State.
London:
Rivers
Oram
Press,
1994,
216pp.
Sexing
the
City
focuses
on
struggles
in
the
UK
in
the
late
1970s
and
1980s
to
mobilize
the
local
state
to
achieve
lesbian
and
gay
equality.
Specifically,
it
looks
at
the
development
of
lesbian
and
gay
initiatives
within
urban
local
government.
In
so
doing,
Cooper
seeks
to
explore
both
the
potential
and
the
limitations
of
working
with
and
within
the
local
state.
Sexing
the
City
therefore
contributes
to,
and
develops,
ongoing
debates
regarding
the
local
state
and
social
change,
and
feeds
into
broader
concerns
about
the
relationship
between
activism
and
institutional
processes.
Cooper’s
focus
on
lesbian
and
gay
struggles
and
the
development
of
lesbian
and
gay
state
initiatives
is,
however,
unusual,
and
leads
her
to
raise
an
exciting
set
of
relatively
unexplored
questions
and
issues.
In
particular,
Sexing
the
City
raises
questions
regarding
the
relationship
between
sexuality
and
the
state.
How
does
the
state
engage
with
the
sexual?
To
what
extent
can
state
struggles
lead
to
a
reshaping
of
sexual
identities
and
politics?
What
happens
to
lesbian
and
gay
activism
when
it
enters
state
processes?
To
address
these
issues,
Cooper
draws
throughout
the
book
on
her
own
wide
ranging
research
on
the
’lesbian
and
gay
municipal
project’.
This
includes
case
studies
of
four
individual
councils
and
involves
close
textual
analysis
of
the
discursive
struggle
surrounding
lesbian
and
gay
municipalism.
The
specific
historical
conditions
which
led
to
the
emergence
of
lesbian
and
gay
work
in
British
local
government,
policy
development
and
implementation
and
their
attendant
problems,
struggles
over
the
meaning
of
policy,
and
the
emergence
and
mobilization of
opposition
to
lesbian
and
gay
work,
are
all
richly
documented.
Cooper
carefully
documents
what
she
terms
the
’organizing
out’
of
certain
perspectives
on
lesbian
and
gay
work
from
the
lesbian
and
gay
municipal
project.
In
particular,
she
shows
how
bureaucratic
processes
and
political
interests,
including
for
example, long
periods
of
consultation,
management
monitoring,
powers
of
inter-
vention
by
senior
officers
and
councillors,
and
institutional
pressures
to
conceptualize
lesbian
and
gay
issues
in
terms
of
already
established -
and
very
limited -
equal
opportunities
discourses,
meant
that
many
issues
were
blocked,
postponed
or
watered
down.
She
shows
how
such
processes
meant
that
lesbian
and
gay
issues
were
predominately
conceptualized
in
terms
of
civil
rights,
emphasizing
equal
treatment
and
non-discrimination.
Such
a
focus
tended
to
exclude
sexual
politics:
there
was
an
’inability
to
locate lesbian
and
gay
policies,
that
is,
both
homosexuality
and
local
government
practices,
in
an
explicit
wider
analysis
of
power,
heterosexuality
and
gender’
(p. 177).
Even
when
policies
did
emerge,
Cooper
shows
that
widespread
opposition
within
council
organizations
hindered
their
implementation.
Moreover,
the
structural
characteristics
of
public
bureaucracies,
such
as
departmental
autonomy,
institutional
hierarchies
and
highly-refined
divisions
of
labour,
meant
policies
were
rarely
put
into
practice.
Thus,
for
example,
there
was
little
communication
to
front-line
workforces
scattered
in
various
service
departments
(such
as
housing
or
education)
of
what
non-discrimination
policies
meant,
let
alone
how
they
should
be
incorporated
in
everyday
working
practices.
Policies
were,
therefore,
either
not
implemented
or
practised
in
an
ad
hoc
manner,
often
by
committed
individuals.
The
latter,
in
turn,
created
its
own
problems,
especially
as
it
apparently
confirmed
that
lesbian
and
gay
work
was
marginal
and
insignificant
and
the
product
of
the
actions
of
self-interested
individuals.
Through
her
close
tracking
of
institutional
processes
and
procedures,
Cooper
shows
that
the
’organizing
out’
of
more
radical
perspectives
on
lesbian
and
gay
issues
(such
as
radical
pluralist
or
feminist)
was
relatively
straightforward,
and
explains
how
this
led
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