Blair Unbound

As 2007 draws to a close it's worth remembering that 2007 saw the long anticipated (at least for Gordon Brown if no-one else) transition from Blair to Brown. The end of 2007 saw the second volume of Blair's Seldon biography published - Blair Unbound. I've been working through the text in the last couple of days and what I find striking is that although this volumes starts in 2001 and runs until 2007, the sexuality agenda is rather lacking. You might have expected civil partnerships for example to be located somewhere in the index but no, it is conspicuously absent. Though Blair will probably be remembered as a Prime Minister who had it all and blew it on an unpopular war, he was genuinely transformative on the social agenda. The age of consent, repeal of section 28, Civil partnerships, Gay Adoption Rights, Gay Forces Personnel, Goods and Services and crucially in setting a national tone in which those things become normalised.

50 Most Powerful List

The Pink Paper has just published the list of the 50 most powerful LGBT people in British Politics. The full list can be viewed at: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-6416.html The top place goes to Spencer Livermore, 32, Director of Political Strategy, 10 Downing Street. I found the number of Tory Shadow spokesman on the list rather surprising but impressive.

Melbourne Conference

It's been a while since I updated this blog so apologies. With the clock ticking towards 2008 I thought I'd do a quick update before the new year. Let's start with the 2007 International Conference of the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand. I was lucky enough to attend this conference, held in the city of Melbourne at the end of November. My own paper was entitled 'Policing at the Boundaries: Public Sex Environments and the Law - A UK Perspective' and considered some of the broad issues relating to PSEs - and was really about outlining how our legal system deals with these offences in theory and the postcode lottery of policing that takes place in reality. In my slot, Dave McDonald (University of Melbourne) delivered a very interesting paper entitled 'Injury in the Marking of Homosexual Desire'. His paper focused on a series of murders between 1979 and 1983. The victims were five males aged between fourteen and twenty-five and the signs of anal trauma borne on the bodies of some of the victims became important in the subsequent telling of their story. McDonald sought to address two areas; the ways through which certain markings, specifically the marking of anal trauma, has been read as a sign of the inscription of homosexual desire; and second, how the construction of victims as children, and child-like, functions to render homosexuality as paedophilia.

What was striking to me in listening to his paper in a year of attending many papers across across three continents this year is the similarity in theoretical focus. The work of Butler and Sedgwick has become the only work of value to young academics in this field. Whilst this is undoubtedly a reflection of the power of those ideas it troubles me that there are so few dissenters on the academic circuit.