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British Journal of Sociology 2007 public lecture
Date: Tuesday 30 October 2007
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Judith Butler
Discussant: Professor Chetan Bhatt
Chair: Dr Suki Ali
This lecture considers the conditions for coalition that might exist between religious and sexual minorities through focusing on differential forms of state coercion. Several arguments have emerged in Europe and elsewhere, claiming that feminism and progressive sexual politics are threatened by new religious communities and the effects of Islam in particular and base their views on libertarian principles (feminism and progressive sexual politics rely on increasingly robust conceptions of personal liberty) and on criticisms of multiculturalism (cast as a relativist enterprise that is unable to ground strong normative claims). Such arguments tend to rely on conceptions of sexual or gender freedom which presume certain conceptions of secular progress and to forget or dismiss conceptions of sexual politics that are bound to anti-racist struggle. Without denying that clear tensions exist between religious traditions that condemn and forbid homosexuality and progressive sexual movements that tend to promote exclusionary conceptions of the secular, the lecture focuses on the importance of conceptions of cultural translation, antagonism, and the critique of state coercion to consider what 'critical coalition' might mean for religious and sexual minorities
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Chetan Bhatt is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths.
Transcript
The hugely popular British Journal of Sociology 2007 Annual Public Lecture is now freely available online (Volume 59, Number 1 (March) 2008). Also appearing in this issue are the comments on Judith Butler's paper from Chetan Bhatt, Suki Ali, James A. Beckford, Tariq Modood and Linda Woodhead. Judith Butler's response to these comments will be published in Volume 59, Number 2 (June 2008.) Please use the following link http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/bjos/59/1| to read this issue online.
Judith Butler's response to these comment will be appearing in the June 2008 issue. For more details of this please visit British Journal of Sociology