Reflections on Queering Law and

Sex(uality)

Professor Chris Ashford

Professor of Law and Society Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne

@lawandsexuality

Stories as Truth(s)

• Personal ‘story’

• The field

• The focus

Nowt so Queer as Folk

• Time and Place

• The orbit of Manchester

• A 90s Queer

• Extraordinary social and legal transformation that took place post 1997

• Legacy of 80s politics and activism

• University 1998 - the notion of self within this context

Perspective(s) from the Coppice

• Who am I today?

• Law as a ‘Field’/Discipline

• Post War

• The textbook

• Doctrinal/‘black-letter’/theory/socio-legal

• Teaching/Practice/Research

• Law as an academic subject

The Legacy of Ideas

• Undergraduate ideas

• Why aren’t we talking about…?

• The Outsider

• Sex(uality) as an area of discrete legal inquiry: Human Rights/IT Law

• Working out the scaffolding… theory/methodology - underpinning theory

• Where’s the law?

–Derek Jarman (2000) Smiling in Slow Motion, 218

“…the sort of opaque intellectualism that tries to define something new and doesn’t quite grasp what it might be…”

Ideas

• “Awkward bugger”

• Activism - 70s/80s/90s - ACT UP/Liberation: ideas that speak to me

• Ideas of the 70s - John Alan Lee (Tim Dean)

• Art: Chad States, William E Jones, Matt Lippiatt/Liam Cole

• Joe Orton

• Quentin Crisp

• Guillaume Dustan

• Derek Jarman

• Queer Zines

Public Sex

• Online

• Cyber-ethnography

• Literature - interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary

• Archives

• Theory

Sex Work

• Cyber-ethnography

• Online spaces

• Conceptions and understandings of law

• Identities of sex workers

• ‘Straight’/MSM

Bareback

• Sex

• Slutty

• Cum

• Boundaries

• Connectivity of Self and Society and Intimacies

• d.o.c lust letters

Homonormative

• The Aggressive Homosexual Community

• A Militant Homosexual

• Queer Theory

• Responsive?

• Next steps?

• A tool (merely ‘destructive’)?

• A vision?

Who’s looking from the Coppice today?

• Law’s shifting conception of self

• Law’s future in the realm of sex(uality)

• Pathways for researchers of tomorrow - who cares?

Stay in touch…

@lawandsexualitychris.ashford@northumbria.ac.uk

Or write…

Law SchoolNorthumbria UniversityCity Campus EastNewcastle upon TyneNE2 2DT