{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01991310644460536, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005430847212165098, 'mean_word_length': 5.3663594470046085, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Reviews : Davina Cooper, Sexing the City : Lesbian and Gay Politics Within the Activist State. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1994, 216pp

Sexing the City focuses on struggles in the UK in the late 1970s and 1980s to mobilize the local state to achieve lesbian and gay equality. Specifically, it looks at the development of lesbian and gay initiatives within urban local government. In so doing, Cooper seeks to explore both the potential and the limitations of working with and within the local state. Sexing the City therefore contributes to, and develops, ongoing debates regarding the local state and social change, and feeds into broader concerns about the relationship between activism and institutional processes. Cooper’s focus on lesbian and gay struggles and the development of lesbian and gay state initiatives is, however, unusual, and leads her to raise an exciting set of relatively unexplored questions and issues. In particular, Sexing the City raises questions regarding the relationship between sexuality and the state. How does the state engage with the sexual? To what extent can state struggles lead to a reshaping of sexual identities and politics? What happens to lesbian and gay activism when it enters state processes? To address these issues, Cooper draws throughout the book on her own wide ranging research on the ’lesbian and gay municipal project’. This includes case studies of four individual councils and involves close textual analysis of the discursive struggle surrounding lesbian and gay municipalism. The specific historical conditions which led to the emergence of lesbian and gay work in British local government, policy development and implementation and their attendant problems, struggles over the meaning of policy, and the emergence and mobilization of opposition to lesbian and gay work, are all richly documented. Cooper carefully documents what she terms the ’organizing out’ of certain perspectives on lesbian and gay work from the lesbian and gay municipal project. In particular, she shows how bureaucratic processes and political interests, including for example, long periods of consultation, management monitoring, powers of intervention by senior officers and councillors, and institutional pressures to conceptualize lesbian and gay issues in terms of already established and very limited equal opportunities discourses, meant that many issues were blocked, postponed or watered down. She shows how such processes meant that lesbian and gay issues were predominately conceptualized in terms of civil rights, emphasizing equal treatment and non-discrimination. Such a focus tended to exclude sexual politics: there was an ’inability to locate lesbian and gay policies, that is, both homosexuality and local