This paper explores conservative Christian demands that religious-based objections to providing services to lesbians and gay men should be accommodated by employers and public bodies. Focusing on a series of court judgments, alongside commentators’ critical accounts, the paper explores the dominant interpretation of the conflict as one involving two groups with deeply held, competing interests, and suggests this interpretation can be understood through a social property framework. The paper explores how religious beliefs and sexual orientation are attachments whose power has (...) been unsettled by equality law. But entangled with this property is another—that held in workers’ labour and public bodies’ resources. Arguing against the drive to balance competing interests, the paper uses social property to illuminate the agonistic character of the stakes. At the same time, it questions property as a normative framework for sexual orientation and religious beliefs. (shrink)

If how the state is imagined shapes social and political action, the politics of state imagining provides an important site for progressive reflection. Arguing that conceptual approaches which support critique may not necessarily prove the best frameworks for supporting change, this article takes a left poststructuralist conception as its starting point to explore the place of conflicting interests, beliefs and affect in the make-up of the state and in shaping its enactment within civil society. Seeking to re-imagine state form in (...) a way that enhances the state's relevance for progressive politics, the paper moves between (i) conservative Christian refusal to provide gay people with a service, as public sector staff and guesthouse owners; and (ii) feminist work in embodiment studies and on the intimate/impersonal, with its ways of thinking about, and imagining, a state that is oriented to encounters, dissonance, tension and change. (shrink)