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Whether states can ever contribute to progressive social transformation has long divided the left. But is this division dependent on a particular state conception? If the state can be meaningfully conceptualised in multiple ways, are there ways of conceptualising that might bridge this political divide, granting the state a constructive part within radical left politics? This essay adopts a utopian conceptual methodology to consider more politically hopeful ways for reimagining what it means to be a state. It challenges an anti-state left perspective on four grounds: to avoid the reification of a bounded state; to avoid romanticising civil society as the state's antithesis; to pay attention to dissident intra-state actions; and to recognise the importance of different governing scales. But if the state concept should be retrieved, what can statehood mean? Does local government offer a more progressive paradigm than the nation-state with its radically different relationship to space and governing? And what then follows? What does imagining progressive states do since they cannot be practiced in any simple sense? If reimagining the state is not to be hopeless, are modes of take-up available that can prefigure the state without relying on its material actualisation? This essay explores the possibilities ''play'' offers for representing what states and institutional systems could be like. Taking pop-up republics, crowd-sourced constitutions, fictive feminist legal judgments, and local currencies as contemporary examples, it considers play as a register for experimenting with other modes of political government. The essay closes by addressing two questions: if counter-representational forms of play involve performing institutional activities differently, are there good reasons to articulate these together into reimagined states, using play to experiment with new forms of assemblage? Second, what can playing at other kinds of states or institutions accomplish politically?

Toward a utopian conceptual attitude -- Casting equality and the touch of state governance -- Public nudism and the pursuit of equality -- Unsettling feminist care ethics through a women's and trans bathhouse -- Normative time and the challenge of community labor in local exchange trading schemes -- Property as belonging at Summerhill School -- Market play at Speakers' Corner.

Cover; Half-title; Series-title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgments; 1 Introduction: mapping the terrain; 2 Diversity politics: beyond a pluralism without limits; 3 From blokes to smokes: theorising the difference; 4 Towards equality of power; 5 Normative encounters: the politics of same-sex spousal equality; 6 Getting in the way: the social power of nuisance; 7 Oppositional routines: the problem of embedding change; 8 Safeguarding community pathways: 'possibly the happiest school in the world' and other porous places; 9 Diversity through equality; Bibliography; Index.

This article explores the contribution that the figure of economy can make to understanding gender in contemporary Britain, focusing on gender as a social quality and legal category that is produced, allocated and used. The article proceeds in two parts. The first part considers the politics of sex-based feminism and gender-as-diversity through an economic frame. The second part focuses, in detail, on one specific juncture where these diverging politics meet: decertification – a law reform proposal to dismantle the system for assigning, registering and regulating legal sex. Decertification is a controversial strategy. Advocates argue that self-expression and interpersonal communication, whether through gender or against it, is hindered by a state-based disciplinary certification system. Critics disagree. They argue that dismantling legal communication about a person's sex makes it harder to put categories of female and woman to remedial use. Drawing on other uses of certification, including commercial ones, this article suggests that certification not only communicates information about a process, quality or thing; it also contributes to their production. The impact of decertification on how gender is produced, what gets produced as gender and the uses to which gender is put are central to determining whether decertification is beneficial to a progressive transformative gender politics.

Discussion of prefigurative politics typically focuses on the revisioning of means to ends within grass-roots activities taking shape against or apart from the state. This article takes a different approach. Addressing prefiguration through the terms of the 'as if', it explores the assertion of counterhegemonic meanings, facts, norms and authority both by and about institutions, including state ones. Through four contentious acts: municipal expressions of international solidarity; legislating new gender categories; role-playing micro-states and new money; and acting like a law reform commission, the article considers what prefiguration, and reading for prefiguration, can contribute to a progressive transformative politics. While rehearsing, anticipating and representing alternatives are important, well-recognised prefigurative attributes, this article also addresses less explored dimensions. Specifically, it considers how institutional prefiguration retroactively constitutes its conditions of legitimacy and authority, its depiction as fiction, the performative constraints it faces from diffuse and unequal circuits of power, and the work done by recognition (and non-recognition) of new facts, rules and norms. Together, these dimensions speak to the complicated and plural character of what is real when institutions are enacted as if they were otherwise. This quality of being both real and not real, in conditions of wider opposition, support and torpidity, constitutes the crux of prefiguration's efforts and promise.

This essay explores the challenge that soft decertification poses for feminist politics. In soft decertification, people continue to have a formal legal sex/ gender status; however, public and other bodies act as if such status was no longer determinative (at least in certain contexts). As glimpses of soft decertification emerge, what are its implications for gender equality initiatives hitherto focused on addressing the asymmetrically patterned lives of women and men? What new ways of understanding gender are coming to the fore, and what challenges arise for bodies engaged in equality governance in trying to address them? This essay explores these questions through the prism of responsibility - the ethical, political, and legal obligation to pay attention or respond that different bodies have because of their capacity to undo or ameliorate social inequalities and other injustices. Specifically, it asks: What does responsibility for gender entail when gender is treated as both institutionalised and self-determined; public and private? The essay addresses two contexts where equality governance approaches gender as a site of institutional re-making and redress. The first concerns the front-stage initiatives and policies of public sector provision; the second concerns the back-stage scenes of organisational action, where informal decision-making arises. In both cases, taking responsibility for gender, as an institution, is far from straight-forward. This essay explores the importance of doing so - not just despite, but because of, the complex conditions responsibility confronts when institutional forms also exist as individual attachments.