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This chapter brings together some of the themes of the book. It explores the tension for the law and society between the emphasis on individualism and the expectation and assumptions around stages of life. It considers the emphasis placed on autonomy in law and approaches to the life course.

Following from the collective wisdoms of anti-racist feminisms, this chapter discusses the ways leadership may be theorised and practised beyond the reinforcement of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal violence. In particular, it explores three ways to ‘do’ leadership theorising and practice differently: decolonising our minds; relating with others; and reimagining leadership. These are not discreet domains of activity, but interconnected processes of social transformation; so that in relating with others, we can collaboratively reimagine leadership, and by reimagining dominant constructions of leadership, it will more readily enable us to decolonise our minds.

This chapter considers how queer diaspora may be generated via mourning. Jackie Kay’s novel shows how mourning makes visible and performatively constructs kinship bonds, and that it is also an active process which rewrites the lives of the dead and living. This process of mourning and the constitution of self and kin in the novel takes place in the ‘diaspora space’ of contemporary Britain. Mourning is a force which creates queer diasporic bonds, affirming connections with the dead and transforming the living, enfolding the past into the future. It becomes clear that mourning and kinship are not only individually determined, but also influenced by a shared Black Atlantic history of loss, displacement and racialization. The novel suggests that two modes of kinship – one state-recognized, governed by genealogy or legal recognition, the other mobile, performative and created by shared experience and aesthetic creation – coexist in the context of late twentieth-century Britain, and that these latter, queerly diasporic notions of kinship have shaped contemporary Britain in numerous ways.

The conclusion shows how these six novels and their treatment of postcolonial, diasporic kinship offer a perspective on current debates on subjectivity, (post)humanism and modernity. These representations of diasporic experience rework the group identity traditionally associated with diaspora into a form of post-individual relationality, while also demonstrating the risks or limits attendant on such a strategy of becoming and social change. In particular, through these texts’ engagement with and rewriting of kinship, they are able to bring together reflections on the colonial history of kinship discourses, the forms of intimate resistance to colonialism, and the reverberations of both on forms of intimacy, family, and diaspora today. By rethinking and rewriting anthropology, historiography, and the meaning of loss and mourning, they challenge assumptions about the meaning and enaction of forms of intimate relationality to culture and subjectivity.

This chapter draws together the findings of the research through an analysis of the creative and collaborative methods which were used throughout the Loneliness Connects Us research project. The partnership between academic (including feminist) research, youth work and creative arts practice produced situated knowledges critical to the success of this project. The immersive theatre performance ‘Missing’ is presented in detail in this chapter, to show how collaboration and creativity were harnessed before during and after the performances. Shared interests and creativity; solitude, creativity and solidarity; relationality, friendship and solidarity, and their part in practices of both collaborative research creation and socio-cultural animation are explored.

This chapter introduces the book’s theoretical approach to relationality and subjectivity and makes a case for studying the author, user and pirate collectively. It goes on to situate this position within a wider body of interdisciplinary literature, addressing key debates in scholarship around copyright law. I then detail the benefits of taking a relational approach, suggesting that it offers a more accurate account of how copyright law is currently constructed and responds to the conceptual uncertainty underpinning copyright. The chapter ends with a brief outline of the rest of the book.

The conclusion begins by outlining the contributions the book has made to the literature, namely its identification of the socio-legal construction of relational subjectivity and the substantial theorization of relationality. In addition to these scholarly contributions, the book challenges simplistic policy narratives about copyright law and explains how it contributes to studies of media industries through its examination of how changes in media consumption, distribution and convergence helped to embed relationality in the broader media environment. The conclusion ends by suggesting that a greater attentiveness to algorithmic processes, better evidence around the role and function of copyright as well as more thought around the conceptual basis for copyright would contribute to a better understanding of the author, user and pirate in law.

This chapter explores the connections between corporeal vulnerability and ecstatic relationality, and their implications for politics and ethics. It argues that focusing exclusively on vulnerability as injury is to overlook a second sense of vulnerability at work in Butler’s writings: vulnerability as impressionability, which it is argued is central to her understanding of both politics and ethics. It also examines the question of how it is possible to practise ethics and politics in conditions of precarity, and particularly when a specific vulnerability may be neither perceived nor recognized. What, it asks, might be done to facilitate ethical responsiveness in such contexts?

Analyzes the key concepts of universality and the transcendental in Peter Hallward's critique of postcolonial theory, Absolutely Postcolonial. Argues, following Nathan Brown, that his ‘transcendental deduction’ of human relationality must itself be historicized, rather than positing such human attributes as atemporal absolutes.

This chapter takes up the challenge of non-Western voices for theology’s political relevance, more specifically for elaborating a constructive feminist public theology. Rosemary P. Carbine critically analyzes public theology’s prevailing anthropology, which often aligns itself with Euro-American modernity’s rationalist notion of humanity and its associated modes of political participation. This modern anthropology falsely naturalizes elite gendered, racial, nativist, and corporatist constructs of the human person. To offer a theo-political alternative view of public engagement and personhood, Carbine reconfigures public theology as the praxis of imagining, creating, and sustaining a community, and does so by revisiting Catholic social teaching on the Church’s public role in an eschatological and anthropological light. Feminist, womanist, and mujerista theological anthropologies propose a relational notion of the person, which Carbine weaves with Catholic social teaching into a religio-political reconceptualization of the imago Dei, beckoning us to live our full humanity in an ever more just community. Carbine argues that effective public theology should subsist in rhetorical, symbolical and prophetic practices that perform this community-creating work as exemplified by movements for social and economic justice as well as for the civil rights of immigrants.

With a challenging title, based on an anecdote about a dialogue between a scientist/philosopher and a lady on the structure of the universe, David Kirchhoffer proposes that the insight that human beings are the world (rather than merely live in the world) should be our starting point for reflections on theological anthropology. Relationality thus being the key-word for an up-to-date theological anthropology, this chapter discusses the main challenges that such an anthropology faces: first, anthropocentrism (challenged by the ecological crises, the debate on who counts as a person and technology); second, historicity (as introduced by social-constructivism and as taken more seriously in the Christian tradition in recent decades); third, vulnerability (as a morally neutral consequence of our interdependency); and finally, language (as a means to engage with diverse discourses ranging from art through to philosophy,business and cognitive neuropsychology). More than claiming to know the solutions for these different challenges, Kirchhoffer rather encourages theologians to further reflect on them and the way they are discussed in theological and other discourses with a necessary (self-)critical epistemological suspicion. For only in this way will we arrive at a relevant theological discourse on what human beings are, and be a legitimate dialogue partner for other discourses.

Jackie Stacey's essay on the idea of being ‘open to difference’ is a discussion of her experiences of two very different groups: an academic centre for the study of cosmopolitan cultures and an introductory course on group psychotherapy. Exploring ideas about being open to the differences other people represent, she shows how the complex interactions played out in the groupwork course offer important insights for rethinking cosmopolitan aspirations.

The Introduction provides an overview of Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity as well as a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between Stein’s writings and her gender. By using psychoanalysis to complicate historicist imperatives and engaging recent debates over queer temporalities and relationalities, the Introduction lays the groundwork for the book’s argument that Stein ultimately rejected early twentieth-century gender formations in favor of a flexible, feminist, and anti-identitarian mode of transsubjectivity inscribed in texts that cross genres. Pushing back against formalist and materialist critiques of biographical interpretation, the Introduction also makes the case for readings that trace visual artworks’ and her writings’ roles as nodal points for intersubjective desire. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the book’s seven chapters and coda: four chapters that identify signs of Stein’s transmasculinity in her writings and others’ representations of her; three that track her masculine homosocial bonds with Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten; and a coda that points to possibilities for examining the implications of Stein’s masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy.

This chapter examines the hermeneutical and conceptual contributions of three Muslim women interpreters of the Qurʾān: Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Riffat Hassan. It explores their Qurʾān-centered hermeneutic of suspicion that emphasizes a Qurʾānic worldview, textual holism, context, textual silence, the distinction between text and interpretation, and polysemy. This chapter also examines their conception of human difference, which acknowledges sameness, divinely intended difference, human relationality, and taqwā (God consciousness) as the sole basis of evaluative distinction among humans. The chapter argues that elements of these scholars’ conception of sexual difference can be generalized and connected to an alternative conception of religious difference.

This chapter analyses central foci of Amat al-Latif’s life trajectory and memory world. Recounting her life from a relational perspective, Amat al-Latif wishes to establish an enduring memory of her relationship with her father and exonerate him from accusations of treason. Asserting that allegations regarding his involvement in Imam Yahya’s assassination were belied by his devoutness and disapproval of violent overthrow, she offers an alternative appraisal of the events of 1948. Exploring women and men’s biographies, this chapter unsettles the notion of gendered memory, and argues that the normative constraints of gender on processes of remembering cannot be analyzed adequately without taking class into account. Selective twentieth-century biographies written by Yemeni men reveal that gender does not foreclose men’s employment of emotive parameters. Nor are they necessarily characterized by a disavowal of the personal and the domestic, often taken to be central features of women’s life writing. The chapter concludes that all (auto-)biographies studied in Mirrored Loss are none the less implicated in the politics of memory in different ways.