What’s love got to do with it? Marriage and the security state

This article explores how marriage animates the racial logic of the security state. While the pursuit of romantic love culminating in a wedding is considered to be a universal good, arranged marriages are viewed as a dangerous anachronism which threaten the state’s authority. By revealing the animating force of arranged marriage in the UK immigration regime and the War on Terror, we can see the central role of love marriage within the principles of choice, autonomy and individuality around which the liberal subject organises their moral economy. The legalisation of gay marriage – constructed as a kind of love marriagepar excellence – becomes the means through which the nation state can uphold this moral economy and be renewed and reinvigorated in the process. By putting gay marriage in dialogue with arranged marriage, the gendered and racial configuration of the UK as a security state becomes visible

many voices, one chant:30th anniversary roundtable

This article is extracted from a discussion between Camel Gupta, Jay Bernard and Sita Balani. We took as our starting point ‘Becoming visible: Black lesbian discussions’ (Carmen et al, 1984), featured in the 1984 special issue of Feminist Review on black feminism. Here, we reflect on the political, cultural and technological transformations of queer life since the publication of ‘Becoming visible’. The original discussion focused on questions of identity, safety, the public and the private, and the tensions between race and sexuality. The discussants took personal and political risks to be active organisers. As the beneficiaries of that activism, we interrogate not only the broader ideas of race, sexuality and feminism, but critique some of the discussions circulating within our own ranks. We also consider our responsibility to follow our predecessors and to learn from their mistakes. We are more visible than ever, but at what price? What has been gained and lost? Beyond visibility, what is our responsibility? In an attempt to understand these questions we cover contemporary notions such as QTIPOC, monolithic whiteness and online activism. </jats:p

Exit, consoled by a bear: Hunting for meaning in Paddington, The Queue, and sanctioned and unsanctioned grief

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Black British Feminisms

Keynote: Prof. Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, University of London), Chair: Dr Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University/Feminist Review editorial collective), Panel: Ego Ahaiwe, Sita Balani, Lauren Craig, Camel Gupta, Nydia Swaby, Performance: Dorothea Smartt

Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State

We are in a moment of profound overlapping crises. The landscape of politics and entitlement is being rapidly remade. As movements against colonial legacies and state violence coincide with the rise of authoritarian regimes, it is the lens of racism, and the politics of race, that offers the sharpest focus. In Empire's Endgame, eight leading scholars make a powerful intervention in debates around racial capitalism and political crisis in Britain. While the 'hostile environment' policy and Brexit referendum have thrown the centrality of race into sharp relief, discussions of racism have too often focused on individual behaviours. Foregrounding instead the wider political and economic context, the authors trace the ways in which the legacies of empire have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and the instability of the nation-state. Engaging with movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, Empire's Endgame offers both an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a political vision that includes rather than expels in the face of crisis