City Research Online 'It's not me, it's the corporation': the value of corporate accountability in the global political economy Grietje Baars * 'Corporate accountability' legitimises and thus reinforces the current system of surplus value extraction. Accountability struggles effectively to reduce corporate capitalism's violence to the good corporate citizen's occasional 'wrongdoing', which becomes a calculable risk capable of being exchanged-signifying 'planned impunity'. Corporate accountability, though a seemingly emancipatory process, thus exemplifies law's constitutive role in capitalism and the need to move beyond law for emancipation. We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man. Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you're wrong there-quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it. 1

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Law's role in upholding and continually reproducing the cisheteropatriarchy is increasingly being challenged in Western courts. This is happening directly, by 'non-gendered' claimants wishing to undo law's compulsory gender performance, and by 'birthing men' seeking to queer law's gender binary. Indirectly 'fucking' law's gendering function are the defendants in the so-called 'gender deception' prosecutions. Here we see the judicial system reasserting its hegemony as heteronormmaker and enforcer. A different face of state pushback against queer anti-normativity shows in accommodation: several European courts have recently ordered the creation of a third gender option. This paper evaluates these 'queer cases', and asks what the queer struggle with the heteronormative can tell us about law's social function, its relationship to the body, its material effects and emancipatory potential more broadly. Can we queer the legal structures that seek to know, categorise, assign, police and contain our genders and sexualities or is now the time to say 'fuck law'?

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