CHALLENGING DIVERSITY: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference

CHALLENGING DIVERSITY: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference Davina Cooper Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; 235pp. Davina Cooper's Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference grapples with some often overlooked questions in the context of equality jurisprudence. Utilizing what she refers to as the and analytic space of the of as a point of departure, Cooper carves out an analytic terrain of the various ways in which equality are utilized by marginalized groups and can also be co-opted by dominant groups in legal forums. Focussing on equality claims made by gay, lesbian and transgender communities as well as marginalized religious groups, Cooper also examines the various ways in which equality and jurisprudence responds to equality claims organized by groups beyond the left's political and legal gaze, such as smokers, British recreational hunters, divorced fathers, and, in the United States...white conservative Christians who utilize (and most often distort) the reach of equality to graft their various political agendas on to and against the intended aims of equality politics. In this vein, Cooper also examines the co-optation of equality and jurisprudence for the collective self-interpellation of seemingly powerful groups through discourses of vulnerability (p. 6). Cooper's examination of this politically fraught terrain is largely a theoretical exercise focussing on the ways in which equality claims cast themselves within and against discourses of harm. To this end, Cooper offers a reading of writers whose work broadly engages the notions of social diversity and the of freedom. These theorists include Chantai Mouffe, Nancy Fraser, Susan Miller-Okin, Jeffrey Weeks, Zillah Eisensten and Judith Butler, among others. As a particular political rationality, harm functions as both the conceptual and procedural basis upon which equality proceeds. To get at the political, and subjective workings of harm, Cooper's analysis focusses briefly on a number of empirical sites which include the debate about religious symbolism in the context of the Orthodox Jewish community that erupted in Britain in the early 1990s over establishment of an eruv in London, the claims made by pro-smoking lobby groups, the debate about the of gender that divides (some) feminist and transgender activist communities, and the various debates surrounding same-sex marriage and same-sex registered partnership. Cooper attempts to unpack these debates in the hopes of intervening in equal politics which in her view stands in for a set of political and social commitments that are predicated on the need to transform key institutions, structures and practices (p. 9). In this sense. Cooper's intervention unsettles the nature and content of diversity's and, in a related manner, the subject of diversity, in order to begin to disrupt the normative orientations of equality politics. Examining the political challenges facing radical equality today, Cooper asks the following questions: what does equality mean for individual choices that appear to be harmful?; is the of equality a concern of individuals, of groups, or of something else entirely?; how can equality be conceived in a way that recognizes the relationship between being and doing, between social structure and individual agency, without losing the specificity of either? …

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