1 Itās not Only About Trade and Migration
On 23 June 2016 the people of the United Kingdom (UK) voted in a referendum narrowly in favour of leaving the European Union (EU). This historic result, which has led to the UK Governmentās decision to end the UKās more than four-decade long membership of the EU in 2019, has important consequences that will be felt far into the future. Such consequences may affect people across the EU and beyond, but the greatest impact will be felt by individuals living in the UK.
Some people will meet the challenges that lie ahead with resilience and will take full advantage of the opportunities that regaining some law-making competences and a new form of politics promise. Others may be less fortunate and may see the rights and protections offered by the EU starkly withdrawn, leaving them more vulnerable and with diminished horizons and fewer prospects and resources than previously.
Much has been said about Brexit, but the bulk of the debate and commentary has focused broadly on matters such as trade and migration (see Sect. 2). Very little has so far been said about the way Brexit matters from gender and queer perspectives.1 This collection examines the opportunities and challenges, the rights and wrongs, and the prospects and risks of the Brexit debate from this particular perspectiveāthat of gender and sexuality. Women and gender and sexual minorities have been historically marginalised and their voices have tended to be less audible in political debatesāboth nationally and at the European level. In essence, this collection explores how Brexit might change the equality , human rights and social justice landscape, but from gender and queer viewpoints. We envisage that Brexit will impact upon women and gender and sexual minorities in a variety of ways and will potentially present particular challenges for these groups.
Our starting point is the breakdown of voting in the referendum which demonstrates that, overall, men and women do have different views of Brexit (as do different generations) (Cain 2016; Clarke et al. 2017). Furthermore, in the political sphere, and in terms of party politics, Brexit has seen opportunities created for female politicians and paved the way for Britainās second female Prime Minister. Additionally, Brexit impacts upon a myriad of policy areas that are highly important to women and gender and sexual minoritiesāemployment law, discrimination law, single market , free movement , migration , citizenship rights, to name but a few.
This collection will examine a number of core themes and poses fundamental research questions around the barely recognised gendered and queer dimensions of Brexit, exploring the risks and opportunities for women and queer communities in the UK and in Europe. These questions include, but are not limited to the following:
- What does Brexit mean for women and queer people in politics in Britain today?
- How will the human rights of women and of gender and sexual minorities be affected by Brexit?
- How does Brexit impact upon debates in the UK on intersectionality ?
- What is the impact of withdrawal from the single market on women and gender and sexual minorities, particularly in relation to free movement rights?
- What is the impact of Brexit trade policy for women and gender and sexual minorities?
- What does Brexit mean for citizenship and national identity from gender and queer perspectives?
- What is the impact of Brexit on children and families and does this have a gender or queer dimension?
- Is there a gender and queer perspective on Brexit and devolution ?
- What can be learnt from other countries about the potential impact of Brexit for women and gender and sexual minorities?
This collection will answer these and other questions by offering a multidisciplinary , policy-oriented and intersectional analysis of Brexit from a gendered and queer perspective. The importance of doing this becomes even clearer, if one considers the academic and policy debates about Brexit so far.
2 A Myriad of Takes on Brexit
Academic and policy commentary on Brexit has been extensive and has led to prolific activity in practically all academic disciplines and policy sectors. In the light of the continuous outpouring of Brexit news and developments, the most obvious outlet for such commentary has become blogs, amongst them The UK in a Changing Europe,2 the LSEās Brexit blog,3 the Monckton Chambersā Brexit blog,4 The Brexit Blog,5 and the CEP Brexit Blogs.6 These outlets consider a range of relevant aspects, most frequently relating to trade and migration issues. In such blogs, we can also find some short pieces on the gender dimensions of Brexit, such as in relation to residency rights and child care (Shutes 2017), the views of women on Brexit (Guerrina et al. 2016), gender dimensions of Brexit beyond employment rights (Guerrina 2016), the EUās contribution to gender policies in the UK (OāBrien 2016), and womenās participation in the Brexit political process (Achilleos-Sarll 2017). On the queer dimensions of Brexit, there are also some blog pieces, although these are rare (Danisi et al. 2017). Equally, as blog pieces, these are necessarily short and present very narrow analyses of particular issues.
More encompassing, complex and nuanced analyses of the gender and queer dimensions of Brexit can be found in a handful of journal articles. Amongst these, it is worth mentioning pieces that have explored the overall gendered dimension of the Brexit process (Guerrina and Masselot 2018), links to political developments across the Atlantic (Hozic and True 2017), family life and migration (Majella 2017), political partiesā voting choices (Heppell et al. 2017) and the impact of Brexit on UKās equality law (Wintemute 2016). These and other journal articles demonstrate a developing academic interest in the gender and queer perspectives on Brexit, but are far from exhaustive of this theme.
Several longer pieces, namely monographs and edited collections, have also explored Brexit. Some have adopted encompassing approaches, attempting to consider a broad range of angles (Fabbrini 2017; Alexander et al. 2018), others have concentrated on the causes, negotiation process and future avenues (Armour and EidenmĆ¼ller 2017; Armstrong 2017; Clarke et al. 2017), and yet others have focused on particular issues in the post-Brexit era, such as the relationship with the Commonwealth (Clegg 2017), the financial services sector (Alexander et al. 2018), and the international economic position of the UK (Morgan and Patomaki 2017). These books show a growing interest in the academic debate about Brexit, but none of these deals explicitly with the gender and queer dimensions of Brexit.
The dearth of academic and policy analysis of the gender and queer angles on Brexit needs to be addressed, and this edited collection will go a long way in filling this worrying gap in scholarly and policy debate.
3 Setting the Context, Assessing the Impact, Listening to Devolved Voices and Looking Beyond Our Borders
To answer the questions posed above and thoroughly assess the Brexit debate from gender and queer perspectives, in this collection we present a broad range of contributions that help to understand the context for this debate, assess the possible impact of Brexit on the UK, its component nations and the EU, and also what repercussions there may be for relationships between the UK and the rest of the world. The contributions collected here have been authored by academics and activists from the UK, other European countries and beyond, including both internationally established and promising scholars and lobbyists. In this way, the collection reflects a variety of opinion, new thinking and unpublished research on this subject matter, both from academia and NGOs.
The collection is divided into four parts. Part I lays out the foundations for gender and queer analyses of specific policy areas and transversal themes that are provided in the rest of this collection. Part II then gathers several contributions that concentrate on how Brexit will have an impact in the UK on particular areas of legal and policy activity. Part III moves on to focus on the views of devolved jurisdictions in the UK. Finally, Part IV complements all the previous contributions by considering how Brexit may have an impact beyond the UK and EU spaces.
Thus, following on from this first introductory chapter briefly exploring why Brexit matters for women and queer individuals and why it is important to adopt gender and queer lenses to analyse Brexit, Part I of the collection continues in Chapter 2, with Achilleos-Sarll and Martillās contribution which argues that the campaign for Britain to leave the EU and the subsequent Brexit process have been dominated by discourses of toxic masculinity. These discourses, it is argued, have manifested themselves in two distinct ways: firstly, through the deployment of language that was associated with deal-making, and, secondly, through the deployment of language associated with militarism. This has been compounded by a campaign that has been dominated by a coterie of elite, white malesāwhose values have come to define the discourses surrounding the negotiations, which produced and (re-)produced power relations, prejudices and myths during the Brexit campaign, and now with regards to the content of a Brexit ādealā. Drawing on a combination of critical feminist theory, documentary analysis and elite, semi-structured interviews with individuals close to the process, Achilleos-Sarll and Martill discuss the extent to which Brexit has been dominated by discourses of militarism, which overinflated Britainās assumed global role in the world emphasising strength, security, global power and deal-making. These discourses have tended to equate the negotiations to a business transaction, positioning Anglo-European discussions in conflictual terms. Achilleos-Sarll and Martill conclude with four potential (gendered) consequences of these discourses: setting the UK on the path towards a āharderā Brexit; the consolidation of free-market norms and retrenchment of social policies; the diversion of attention from domestic to international distributional consequences; and the persistent under-representation of women and minority groups in politics. In Chapter 3, Gill and Ahmed further help to understand the relevant context for this collection, by examining Brexitās specific impact on the lives of black and minority ethnic (BME) women. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum result, BME women became the focus of an outpouring of racist and Islamophobic attacks and assaults, and Gill and Ahmed examine this impact through two proseāpoetic creative pieces written by themselves as British Asian authors. Throu...