ABSTRACT
“Trans Law and Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape” is excerpted from law professor and activist legal theorist Dean Spade’s 2015 book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Spade discusses how, since the 1980s, the lesbian and gay rights movement has become increasingly focused on a narrow set of priorities that serve only to further uplift lesbian and gay people who already enjoy a privileged relation to the state. In contrast to the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that focused on redistribution of resources and expansive ideals of social transformation, Spade argues that the narrow rights-based focus of LGBT activism in recent decades reflects the consolidation of neoliberal values. Sexist, racist, and xenophobic images and ideas have been mobilized in the media and by politicians to transform growing economic loss and dissatisfaction into calls for “law and order”.
