Be Professional!

In 2010, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender published a series of letters between Adrienne Davis and Bob Chang entitled, Making Up Is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom, along with three response pieces by Adele Morrison, Darren Rosenblum and Dean Spade. Be Professional! is written in letter form like Making Up Is Hard to Do and discusses Spade\u27s experience becoming and being a trans law professor, as well as broader questions about activism, academia, professionalism and the neo-liberal academy

Laws as Tactics

This article will look at how trans scholarship and activism have taken up disciplinary critiques of gender, often influenced by Butler, and suggest that further development of critical trans perspectives focused on sites of regularization is needed, for which Butler\u27s work on governmentality can be useful. To start, it describes some of the key concepts from Butler\u27s work that have been taken up in trans politics and briefly reviews the distinctions Foucault offers between sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics. The article then examines some of the ways that trans politics has critiqued disciplinary norms, looking at resistance to the medicalization of trans identity and the response to anti-trans feminism. Next, it looks at areas where the operation of racialized-gendered normalization at the population level is being examined and might be further troubled by trans scholars and activists. Here the article looks at critiques of identity surveillance practices that use gender as a category of identity verification and critiques of certain trans law reform projects. Using Butler\u27s work, the article raises questions about the role of law reform in resistance to various sites of gender regularization and suggests areas of further inquiry that might be taken up by scholars and activists engaging a critical trans politics rooted in a skepticism about law reform projects

Be Professional!

In 2010, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender published a series of letters between Adrienne Davis and Bob Chang entitled, Making Up Is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom, along with three response pieces by Adele Morrison, Darren Rosenblum and Dean Spade. Be Professional! is written in letter form like Making Up Is Hard to Do and discusses Spade\u27s experience becoming and being a trans law professor, as well as broader questions about activism, academia, professionalism and the neo-liberal academy

Review of Colin Dayan’s The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons

Professor Dean Spade reviews Colin Dayan’s The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons

Undeserving Addicts: SSI/SSD and the Penalties of Poverty

Since the late 1980\u27s, American media and politicians have produced and participated in a moral panic around the issue of illegal drug use. This panic has generated vivid pictures in the American imagination of drug users as a morally depraved, irresponsible, and willfully criminal underclass. Such images have fueled the war on drugs, a multi-faceted rhetoric and policy approach to drug use that focuses on incarceration, interdiction, and other criminal justice strategies. The punitive approach of the war on drugs has bled into poverty and disability policy with alarming persistence. The trend has influenced numerous poverty alleviation and disability programs and protections, leaving drug users increasingly isolated and unaided. This comment explores the impact of such changes on the Americans with Disabilities Act 2 (ADA) and two social security policies, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). It questions the wisdom of a punitive response to drug use by examining the alternative model of harm reduction and applying the principles of harm reduction analysis to the exclusion of drug users from poverty alleviation and disability programs. Part I describes recent changes in disability policy, which reflect a decrease in coverage for persons disabled by drug use. Part II describes the context in which these changes occurred, with the war on drugs in full force, and offers critiques of drug war strategy. Part 1I describes the harm reduction model as an alternative to the drug war approach. Part IV examines the impact of drug war policy on the poor, arguing that pushing drug users further into poverty by denying them public assistance will increase drug-related harms. Furthermore, this section suggests that strong social welfare systems can operate to reduce the intersecting harms of poverty and drug use

Trans Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape

These edited Keynote remarks from the Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review Symposium on transgender law address how questions of law reform strategy relate to critical understandings of neoliberalism. The paper addresses questions of administrative governance, identity documentation, the relationship between law and social movements, and questions of economic and racial justice as applied to transgender politics

Trans Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape

These edited Keynote remarks from the Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review Symposium on transgender law address how questions of law reform strategy relate to critical understandings of neoliberalism. The paper addresses questions of administrative governance, identity documentation, the relationship between law and social movements, and questions of economic and racial justice as applied to transgender politics

Close the prisions! Open the borders! How Abolition is Shaping Queer and Trans Politics

Conferência de Dean Spade no encerramento do X CINABEH, em maio de 2021

Laws as Tactics

This article will look at how trans scholarship and activism have taken up disciplinary critiques of gender, often influenced by Butler, and suggest that further development of critical trans perspectives focused on sites of regularization is needed, for which Butler\u27s work on governmentality can be useful. To start, it describes some of the key concepts from Butler\u27s work that have been taken up in trans politics and briefly reviews the distinctions Foucault offers between sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics. The article then examines some of the ways that trans politics has critiqued disciplinary norms, looking at resistance to the medicalization of trans identity and the response to anti-trans feminism. Next, it looks at areas where the operation of racialized-gendered normalization at the population level is being examined and might be further troubled by trans scholars and activists. Here the article looks at critiques of identity surveillance practices that use gender as a category of identity verification and critiques of certain trans law reform projects. Using Butler\u27s work, the article raises questions about the role of law reform in resistance to various sites of gender regularization and suggests areas of further inquiry that might be taken up by scholars and activists engaging a critical trans politics rooted in a skepticism about law reform projects