Agency, truth and meaning: judging the Hutton Report

The Hutton Report is now established as an important element of Britain's involvement in the Iraq War. In this article the ideas that underpin it are analysed. In particular, the focus is on Hutton's presuppositions concerning the nature of truth, agency, subjectivity, meaning and language. It is shown how unquestioned assumptions structured his method and shaped his conclusions. Although such presuppositions are widely shared by the public, too, a discursive conflict within the report is identified, revealing a sub-text of competing understandings that protagonists invoked. These suggest a more phenomenological and intersubjective approach to the interpretation of events. The conclusion is that Dr Kelly and the BBC were victims of a particular sense of truth and that Hutton failed to situate important actors and events within geopolitical, institutional, experiential and affective structures. The author suggests that a greater appreciation of the contingent way information enters the public domain (itself more evident in the Butler Report) is a pre-condition for better intelligence and public policy making

Gender and class in Britain and France

This article examines the treatment of women's oppression in feminist theory, focusing on the engagement of second wave feminists with the concept of class and its relation to gender. This examination is carried out with reference to British and French feminisms, identifying the main trends and shifts that have developed over the last 35 years and noting that while these are undoubtedly influenced by a particular national context they are also shaped by increasing European integration and social, political and cultural exchanges at a global level. The authors find evidence of a number of similarities in the questions that feminist theorists have asked in Britain and France but also demonstrate that there are significant differences. They conclude that areas of convergent theoretical interests will extend along with cross-border flows of peoples and information

Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence

Butler’s phenomenological existentialism

Book synopsis: Judith Butler has been arguably the most important gender theorist of the past twenty years. This edited volume draws leading international political theorists into dialogue with her political theory

Threads and plaits or an unfinished project? feminism(s) through the twentieth century

This article defines feminism's enduring aim as one of abolishing discrimination or exclusion on the basis of gender. From this perspective any reflection on the twentieth century must note its many successes in winning real gains for women. Yet developments within feminism itself problematize the way its history can now be recounted. The article considers two possible approaches. One presents feminism as an unfinished emancipatory project, an aspect of a more general process of modernization and amenable to a grand narrative history. The other suggests that women's struggles were always contingent and diverse, matching political strategies to the exigencies of their context. The article ends by re-presenting a century of British feminisms from this latter, more genealogical, perspective

Agentic capacities and capacious historical materialism: thinking with new materialisms in the political sciences

In this article, I note that the idea of a new materialist turn has recently been gathering steam. The first part considers some of the signature elements of the new materialisms. The most distinctive aspect identified here is the invocation of a generative or vital ontology of immanence. Following discussion of some of its principal claims, the article draws out its implications for reconceptualising agency, in particular regarding the way agentic capacities are recognised to be distributed across animate, and perhaps also inanimate, entities. The significance of this development for the political sciences is then explored. In a second part, I suggest that the new materialism entails a normative project. Here, ethical overtures towards a new sensitivity predicated on vital materialist insights are contrasted with a renewed critical theory. The latter is commended as a material reckoning of the 21st century: a project provisionally labelled a capacious historical materialism

Cartographic convulsions: public and private reconsidered

I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time. Fredric Jameson The joyous disturbance of certain women's movements, and of some women in particular, has actually brought with it the chance for a certain risky turbulence in the assigning of places within our small European space.... Is one then going to start all over again making maps, topographies, etc.? distributing sexual identity cards? Jacques Derrida We are dealing with an imaginary cartography, which projects onto the real landscape its own shadowy ideological antagonisms, in the same way that the conversion-symptoms of the hysterical subject in Freud project onto the physical body the map of another, imaginary anatomy. Slavoj Zize