Structural Liberalism and Anti-Bullying Legislation

This article investigates the legal, semantic, and material implications of Massachusetts' anti-bullying law through an analytic framework of structural liberalism. Specifically, this article asks how the law produces categories of fit and unfit subjects of the state through raced and gendered practices of individualism, paternalism, meliorism, and neutrality. Ultimately, this article suggests that the liberal law draws on and entrenches existing racial categories of victim and perpetrator, making non-dominant dimensions of LGBTQ identity and collectivity in schools legally and ideologically unrecognizable.