Abstract:This paper explores the relationship between new forms of speakability and continuing unthinkability in the context of British local government lesbian and gay work, particularly post-1997. The paper argues new municipal speech acts ushered in progressive modes of sexual citizenship; at the same time, local government's refusal to think hard, deeply or critically, limited the modes of active citizenship made possible. The paper addresses the easing out of active citizenship through an analysis of local government's self-care and its intensification of firewalls e firewalls which restricted the possibility of certain non-state forces guiding from 'a distance'.

Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wishedfor, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my discussion is the plural state-taking shape as micro, city, regional, national and global formations. Plural state thinking makes room for divergent kinds of states but does not necessarily foreground progressive ones. Thus, to explore in more detail a transformative left conception of the state, discussion turns to 1980s British municipal radicalism. Taking up this adventurous episode in governing as a "thinking tool", an imaginary of the state as horizontal, everyday, activist and stewardly emerges.

This paper critically explores the ways in which power has been conceptualised within Foucauldian feminism. I focus on two facets within this framework: power as productive and power as relational. Although Foucauldian feminism combines both, tensions between them exist, particularly when it comes to understanding resistance. I argue for the need to focus on a productive or generative paradigm of power which perceives power neutrally as neither inherently oppressive nor liberatory, yet with the capacity to be both. In this way, power can be conceived of as ubiquitous and trans-historical without inhibiting the possibilities for social change.

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Drawing on empirical data and property theory, this article explores the property structure of a “free school” and the work property performs there. At Summerhill, we can see a tension between two property registers. On the one hand, the founder and present members stress the importance of individual ownership; at the same time the school's property regime involves property‐limitation rules, a dispersal of rights, collective forms of property, and cross‐cutting, pluralized sites of institutional recognition. In exploring how this tension is manifested through property's work, the article focuses on property's contribution to a variegated social life at the school, analyzed in terms of personal, civic, and boundary relations. With belonging treated as the central component of property rather than exclusion or control, ways of understanding what constitutes property and how it works shift.