Davina Cooper’s Feeling Like a State sets out to do nothing short of “conceptually reimagining what it means to be a state” (p. 2). Set against projects that conceptualize the state as essentially disciplinary, coercive, and hierarchical, on the one hand, and those that pursue new institutional designs premised on normative principles, on the other, Cooper’s aspirations are at once more radical and more provisional. At its most basic, the book suggests that theorists seeking a progressive politics cannot afford to ignore what she calls “postnormative” events, such as the “legal drama” surrounding conservative Christian refusals to participate in LGBT equality projects. But these events are more than flies in the ointment. In fact, they are the ground on which Cooper stakes her entire theoretical gamble: considering these episodes of conservative Christian refusal, for Cooper, requires that theorists think through the provisional, contentious, and “sticky” practices of politics—especially in relation to claims that seem “far from progressive” (p. 12)—even as they seek a radically more caring, responsible, and responsive practice of governing.
The book begins with the claim that conservative Christian withdrawals—refusals to bake “gay” cakes, to sign “gay” marriage licenses, to admit gay people into schools, or to hire them in professional roles—belie depictions of the state as hierarchical, coercive, and disciplinary. Quite in contrast to static narratives of the state as a “vertical structure, able (rightly or wrongly) to reach out, exert authority, and advance its agenda” (p. 53) in the face of conservative resistance, Cooper first develops a conception of a heterogeneous and plural state. On the one hand, such a conception of the state would hold that even refusals of state authority (in favor of, say, religious authority) are in fact part and parcel of the governing practices that sustain relationships between various embedded state actors. “Dissident forces,” she argues, are neither distinct from nor entirely subject to an external, bounded entity called “the state.” Conservative Christians who refuse to accept changing norms around LGBT inclusion are “not just engaged in resistance; they [do] not just say ‘no’ to power.” Instead, they take up and deploy “the opportunities, access, and resources that state-based roles and partnerships offered them— from the teacher who used his presence in the classroom to belittle gay relationships to the youth organizations that used state subsidies…to renormalize and protect a nationalist, binary-gendered heterosexuality” (p. 73).
Conversely, if such refusals ought to be considered part of a heterogeneous state, Cooper also contends that such provocations reveal the full scope of the state’s responsibilities. For example, Cooper details the many instances in which public bodies “withdrew grants and subsidies from conservative Christian antigay organizations,” arguing that by “refusing to permit others to make an exception,” states perform their “moral and legal obligation[s]…to support gay equality” (p. 71). To the extent that conservative Christian refusals provoke the embedded, relational, and reflexive responsibilities that already inhere—however fleetingly—in governing practices, they reveal a provisional space for thinking the radical work that states could do, if only we dared imagine.
Cooper’s point, of course, is that what is radical is always deeply provisional. Such dramas of refusal, then, underpin the rather more radical act of reconceiving of the state in “erotic” and “playful” terms. An erotic conception of the state, Cooper holds, might help theorists “avoid reconceiving the state in ways that [tie] it too securely to a specific political project” (p. 155). The point of such a move is to take seriously the stated ends of much critical theory: multiplicity, contestation, agonism. Cooper is at her strongest when describing the relational and reflexive—that is, the antihegemonic—practices toward which we might put the concept of the state to work, and she is undoubtedly right that imagining these ends will require thinking beyond the state’s more disciplinary and authoritative tendencies.
Yet despite the profoundly important task of reconceptualizing the state toward more caring, responsible, and relational ends, Feeling Like a State ultimately founders in its bid to do so in and through the context of anti-LGBT Christian activism. It is one thing to argue that political theorists can and should take up the challenging process of articulating politics on terms other than those traditionally associated with the state. But it is quite another to do so in ways that bracket—and so elide—the concrete political contexts in which those imaginings will have to take place.
Consider, for example, Cooper’s depiction of conservative Christian refusal as counterhegemonic; that is, as articulated in contrast to the hierarchical, disciplinary, and coercive state. Even as she claims to resist “romanticizing” these claims, Cooper takes Christian rhetoric at face value, suggesting that Christian bakers, civil servants, and other dissenters seek to contest a powerful and increasingly state-sanctioned consensus around LGBT protection and inclusion. But it is difficult to sustain this position, given that it is precisely these claims to victimhood that enable conservatives Christians to demand an ever-more restrictive, normative, and hierarchical sexual order.
Take just one instance of fiery conservative rhetoric against a purported liberal hegemony. With palpable disdain for the majority decision, Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent to Obergefell v. Hodges that “these justices… are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.” There is a particular richness in Scalia’s claim that all of history, every government, and all generations represent a “unanimous judgment” about LGBTQ people—even as he claims victimhood under a new hegemony. This historical “unanimous judgment,” of course, is an utter fiction, one that serves only to excuse state actors from recognizing the ongoing political purchase of claims about the validity of LGBTQ marginalization. However much Cooper wishes to bracket the content of such arguments in favor of their performative potentialities, political contexts do matter: as the speakers of these coded and deeply hierarchical messages know, the responses that “counterhegemonic” utterances will provoke have everything to do with the ways that certain vulnerabilities are registered as more legitimate—and some more dismissible—than others. When considered in the context of ongoing LGBTQ vulnerability and precarity, such arguments cannot be reworked in the way that Cooper hopes, precisely because they are intended to foreclose the very possibility of a more capacious understanding of state responsibility.
One wonders, then, why Cooper chose to foreground these particular refusals, especially given that there exist myriad moments of productive, relational, and reflexive refusal within marginalized communities themselves. Lesbian separatism, two-spirit Indigenous activism, Black feminist antiviolence movements, and Black Lives Matter all engage in the refusal to demand more relational and responsible governing practices. Are we to see conservative Christian refusals as enacting the same kind of imaginative work as these projects? Surely not. But in bracketing the content of conservative Christian activism in favor of its more imaginative possibilities, Cooper also brackets the possibility of distinguishing between them. Feeling Like a State thus accomplishes the goal of seeking out a path forward that avoids “suturing” the future to a prescribed progressive agenda, but in so doing it risks breathing new life into those discourses that seek to deflect and misrepresent their own power.
