How can conceptions of power explain a law that, without force, both disciplined its targets and provoked their resistance?

On 4^th May 1988, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government enacted a law named the Local Government Act, better known as Section 28.^[1] This law had the following as its stated purpose: “local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales shall not intentionally promote homosexuality, or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality, or promote the teaching in any school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”^[2] Section 28 led to no prosecutions in its fifteen years of enforcement yet, it simultaneously silenced and mobilised millions of people across the UK.^[3] This encapsulates the very paradox of the 1988 Act; it silenced without ever being properly enforced, and mobilised the very community it was meant to suppress and erase. Despite having produced widespread self-censorship across British schools, libraries and councils as well as a broader societal clash, the law only strengthened the presence of the Queer movement and community within the country.^[4] This brings us to the very topic of this essay; How can conceptions of power explain a law that, without force, both disciplined its targets and provoked their resistance? Firstly, we will dive into the paradox of Section 28 using orthodox theorists. Secondly, we will analyse the origin of the law using the works of Gramsci. Then, we will explore the application of the Act using Foucault’s “Panopticon” and Arendt’s concept of violence. Finally, we will analyse its consequences through the works of Allen.

Personally, I discovered Section 28 and its history by watching the film Blue Jean (2022) by Georgia Oakley, which takes viewers through the life of a closeted PE teacher in 1980s Newcastle, as she navigates the complications and consequences of the passing of Section 28.^[5] The film depicts the tense paranoia, shame, oppression and fear the law induces, alongside the activism and bravery that followed.^[6] This very contradiction is what drew me to this question. Can orthodox theories break down this paradox? Well, Robert Dahl simplistically defines power as “A gets B to do something B would not otherwise do,” making it observable and intentional, but Section 28 did not operate as such.^[7] There was no command, no compelled compliance, and no observable A-over-B event. There was only a law which built upon a pretence of a “moral” collective as justifier and a utilization of collective fear and shame of the Queer community. Furthermore, Mearsheimer has a “hard” and material understanding of power, defining it as military or economic coercion, which isn’t the case here, as, for instance, queer teachers or librarians could not be legally fired on the basis of their identity.^[8] This brings us to Joseph Nye, who coined the term “soft power,” which might be the most relevant theory mentioned so far.^[9] Nye extends this definition as almost synonymous with attraction, characterizing it as the ability to get others to want what you want through the appeal of your values and culture.^[10] Soft power, he explains, operates between states in the international arena and works by attraction.^[11] Now, Section 28 was intra-societal and repellent, producing revulsion and resistance, not co-optation.

Yet, there are still some classical theorists which allow for the understanding of this paradox. For instance, in his Theory of Democracy, Jürgen Habermas coined the concept of communicative power, which he defines as “the legitimate political influence generated by citizens through free, uncoerced public deliberation and rational argumentation.”^[12] Yet, communicative power, too describes the wrong mechanism as Habermas locates legitimate power in open, rational deliberation among equals, whereas Section 28 worked by foreclosing such deliberation altogether, shutting down the very discussion through which a community might have contested its terms.^[13] What every one of these orthodox understandings miss is that the law’s power lay not in any act of compulsion but in the moral climate its presupposed and entrenched in, one that has to be manufactured long before the statute was ever drafted. To grasp how that climate came to feel like settled common sense, we must turn from the application of the law to its origins.

I would argue that Section 28 was less a response to a real threat than an act of hegemonic re-securing, it was an attempt to “re-naturalize” a particular moral order and an attachment to traditions at a moment of perceived crisis. A first instance of this is the HIV-AIDS-era moral panic. By early 1988, the UK had 8459 recorded laboratory reports of HIV-positive tests, with the annual reported death toll that year reaching over 500.^[14] This provoked a panic-crisis across the country, notably through the tabloid-press’ demonisation of gay men, blaming them for the creation and spread of the disease.^[15] For instance, in 1983 the proportion of the public who agreed with the statement that “same-sex relations are always wrong” was at 50%, rising to 64% by 1987, demonstrating how attitudes and beliefs which had been undergoing a process of liberalisation were reversing.^[16] Additionally, the mid-1980s saw a tabloid label for the Labour-controlled local councils which were pursuing progressive social policies pushed by papers like The Sun and the Daily Mail called the “loony left.”^[17] These, such as the Greater London Council (GLC) or Haringey Council, were pushing anti-racism initiatives, feminist programmes, and Gay and Lesbian equality work, which the right saw as provocative.^[18] The “loony left” phrase had political success as it painted the councils as absurd, wasteful, and out of touch with ordinary people, dismissing their policies and serving as a foil to the government.^[19] Finally, this is highlighted in Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 Conservative Party Conference speech, which was broadcaster across the country, in which she states: “children are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay” and are therefore being “cheated” by society, legitimizing a demonization of queerness, and thus, a top-bottom intervention from the government.^[20] In my opinion, this pre-Section 28 period which built-up towards its creation can be summarized through Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony theory.^[21] He claims that hegemony works by making a particular worldview feel like neutral common sense rather than one contestable position among others. By framing LGBT-inclusive education as the bizarre overreach of a fringe, portrayed as a threat to the family, the campaign positioned the suppression of that education as therefore natural, sensible and child-protecting by default.^[22] The council policies were cast as the aberration to be corrected which let exclusion present itself as protection. That is precisely the manufactured common sense, which Gramsci describes, succeeding, and it is why the law could later operate through self-censorship rather than force, as it ratified a moral climate that already felt normalized to much of the public.^[23]

From its creation in 1988 to its final repealing in 2003, Section 28 did not result in a single criminal charge.^[24] It bound local authorities, not teachers or governors, with its meaning never tested in court, as there was literally nothing to prosecute since its vagueness is precisely what made it possible. It is clear that the law succeeded through the upholding of a generalized state of fear and paranoia, as teachers withdrew from ever mentioning same-sex relationships, support groups closed, and homophobic bullying went unchallenged.^[25] This was later proved during a House of Lords debate, conceding that the section “confuses and inhibits teachers.”^[26] This is exactly what Michel Foucault’s “Panopticon” demonstrates, as when you don’t know whether you’re being watched, you start watching yourself.^[27] Section 28 set up exactly that kind of uncertain and fearful gaze.^[28] No one knew what “promoting homosexuality” meant and no court spelled it out, so teachers and librarians stayed silent. By calling same-sex households a “pretended family relationship,” the law did more than restrict speech, it made Queer lives into something that couldn't be spoken of at all.^[29] In Amy Allen's terms, this is power-over working through self-surveillance rather than command, as the state didn't have to do anything to its targets, because, under that uncertain gaze, they did it to themselves.^[30]

From 1988 onwards, the same non-coercive mechanisms that maintained the Act and silenced the Queer community also unified, strengthened and liberated it. Despite loss of funding, further limitations on opportunities for members of the community and support to Queer organisations, Section 28 ended up producing the movement it meant to bury. For instance, the very year after the Act passed, Stonewall was founded by Ian McKellen and others, joining the Organisations for Lesbian and Gay Action (OLGA) and a wider ecology of groups mobilising against the legislation.^[31] These then channelled an unprecedented wave of direct action. For instance, on the day of the Act’s passage, four lesbian activists abseiled into the House of Lords, armed with ropes and aiming to disrupt the debate and enactment.^[32] At the same time, others invaded the BBC Six O’clock News live on air whilst wearing t-shirts that showed a pink triangle and read “Stop The Clause.”^[33] The scale of mobilisation matched its boldness, with roughly 20,000 people marching in Manchester and Ian McKellen coming out publicly in direct response to the law.^[34] In doing so, Section 28 placed LGBTQ+ lives within the national public sphere as a subject of legitimate political debate for the first time, the precise opposite of the silence it was designed to impose.

As seen earlier, the orthodox theories fail at breaking down the mechanisms at play here, but a multitude of heterodox and alternative perspectives succeed. The pattern can be best understood through the theories of Foucault, Arendt, and Allen as they anticipated precisely such an inversion. Firstly, Foucault states that resistance is immanent to power rather than external to it.^[35] For him, the disciplinary apparatus and the counter-power it provokes are two faces of the same productive mechanism.^[36] Therefore, the simultaneous silencing and galvanising of the Queer community is not a contradiction to be explained but a single phenomenon operating as the theory predicts.^[37] Hannah Arendt also follows this. The state’s reliance on an essentially unenforceable statute betrayed weakness rather than strength, as command and coercion are symptoms of power vanishing rather than power being held.^[38] Here, Arendt would say that genuine power emerged instead among those acting in concert, here the Queer community and allies, through for instance the founding of Stonewall, the marches and the protests.^[39] Finally, Allen facilitates the cyclical understanding Section 28 over time. What began as an attempted power-over (with legislation imposed from above), which created a disciplinary climate that pushed individuals into the power-to of self-assertion and that scattered self-assertion gradually cohered into the power-with of organised and collective action.^[40] Allen helps us understand how repression and liberation, though antonyms, were never working against each other from opposite ends, but actually bound up in the same process.^[41] By trying to bury a community and movement, Section 28 produced the very conditions it needed to be strengthened and unified.

These alternative theories by Foucault, Arendt, and Allen fit Section 28 as they anticipate the very inversion it produced. Read together, they describe the trajectory of a law that attempted domination from above but, working through internalised surveillance rather than force, called forth the resistance always immanent to power. This turned private self-censorship into individual self-assertion and finally into collective action, the capacity of people acting in concert. The case bears this out, as the Act secured no prosecutions across its fifteen years yet was repealed only after Stonewall, founded the year after its passage, had grown from fourteen campaigners into Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organisation.^[42] This was the clearest measure of the movement the law inadvertently and paradoxically built. That a regime would reach for an unenforceable statute at all is itself the tell as genuine power had already slipped away and command was standing in for it. Finally, beneath of all of it lies the hegemony that made the law possible in the first place, the Act needed no enforcer because it simply ratified a moral climate that already felt like plain common sense.

In conclusion, Section 28 demonstrated how power’s most durable effects can be wholly uncoupled from force, and that domination as well as resistance are not opposites but co-produced, as highlighted by heterodoxic theories. The Act, despite never securing a single prosecution, reshaped the conduct of an entire society while calling into being the movement that would eventually dismantle it. The orthodox tradition, which is slightly fixated on command and material force, can account for neither half of this, whilst the heterodox theories predict both. Nor is the case a historical exception. For instance, in recent years we have witnessed Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” Act,^[43] or Russia’s 2013 law against the “propaganda or non-traditional sexual relations”^[44] or even Hungary’s 2021 Fidesz-led legislation,^[45] which all work through the same combination of vague prohibition, fear-based compliance, and the re-naturalisation of “traditional family values.” Recently, scholarship has increasingly read such measures as instruments through which legal mechanisms legitimise discrimination and consolidate power on the basis of oppression.^[46] This brings us back to this course’s central question and to Nye as the most consequential power in contemporary world politics seems to be growing more disciplinary and hegemonic than coercive, through notably the governance of conduct, even as, on the international stage, such laws often misfire as soft-power domestic goals, and end up repelling far more than they attract.^[47] Section 28, in the end, responds to the traditional myth that political power comes only from force or coercion, proving that power does not, after all, grow only “out of the barrel of a gun.”^[48]

Bibliography

Allen, Amy. 1991. Solidarity after Identity Politics: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Feminist Theory. Vol. 25/1. Philosophy & Social Criticism.

Allen, Amy. 1996. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Power, Chapter: 2.1.” PhD Thesis, Northwestern University.

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Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York, USA: Stellar Classics.

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Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: Routledge.

“Country Policy and Information Note: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression.” GOV.UK. July 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/russia-country-policy-and-information-notes/country-policy-and-information-note-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-and-expression-june-2025-accessible.

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Footnotes

^[1] Baker, Paul. 2022. Outrageous!: The Story of Section 28 and Britain’s Battle for LGBT Education.

London: Reaktion Books.

^[2] “Local Government Act 1988.” 2021. Legislation.gov.uk.

^[3] Ipsos. 2000. “Public Attitudes to Section 28.” Ipsos.

^[4] Severs, George. “‘No Promotion of Homosexuality’: Section 28 and the No Outsiders Protests.” History &

Policy. 2025.

^[5] Oakley, Georgia, dir. 2022. Blue Jean. UK: Altitude Films.

^[6] Youngs, Ian. 2023. “Blue Jean: The Lesbian Teachers Who Inspired Film about Section 28.” BBC.

^[7] Dahl, Robert A. 1959. The Concept of Power. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Comp.

^[8] Mearsheimer, John. 2001. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W.W. Norton &

Company.

^[9] Nye, Joseph S. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: PublicAffairs.

^[10] Ibid.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Jürgen Habermas, and William Rehg. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge Polity Press.

^[13] Ibid.

^[14] Cox, Rosamond A., and Michael Catchpole. 1989. “Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection in

the United Kingdom.” Journal of Infection 18 (1): 77-88.

^[15] Vicky Iglikoswki-Borad. 2023. “The Origins of Section 28.” The National Archives.

^[16] Gillian Prior. 2023. “Britain’s Attitudes towards Moral Issues Have Become Much More Liberal.”

National Centre for Social Research.

^[17] Muir, Hugh. 2005. “How Newts and the Loony Left Became Standard Issue.” The Guardian. The

Guardian.

^[18] Ibid.

^[19] Anna Marie Smith. 1994. New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality. Cambridge University Press.

^[20] Thatcher, Margaret. 1987. “Speech to Conservative Party Conference.”

^[21] Forgacs, David. 1988. A Gramsci Reader. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

^[22] Juan Nicholls. 2021. “Growing up in Silence - a Short History of Section 28.” 26PMX.

^[23] Forgacs. 1988. A Gramsci Reader.

^[24] “Local Government Act 1988.” 2021. Legislation.gov.uk.

^[25] Andersson, Jasmine. 2019. “LGBT Teachers Who Taught under Section 28 Still ‘Scarred’ Report

Finds.” Inews.co.uk.

^[26] “The Local Government Bill: The ‘Section 28’ Debate.” 2000. Web.Archive.org. National

Archives.

^[27] Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan

Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

^[28] Ibid.

^[29] Ipsos. 2000. “Public Attitudes to Section 28.”

^[30] Allen, Amy. 1991. Solidarity after Identity Politics: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Feminist

Theory. Vol. 25/1. Philosophy & Social Criticism.

^[31] “Stonewall in Section 28.” 2015. Archive.org.

^[32] Godfrey, Chris. 2018. “Section 28 Protesters 30 Years On.” The Guardian.

^[33] Ibid.

^[34] Ibid.

^[35] Foucault. 1977. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books.

^[36] Ibid.

^[37] Ibid.

^[38] Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Stellar Classics. 35-56.

^[39] Ibid.

^[40] Amy Allen. 1996. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Power, Chapter: 2.1.” PhD Thesis, Northwestern

University. 41-62.

^[41] Ibid.

^[42] Severs. 2025. “No Promotion of Homosexuality.” History & Policy.

^[43] National Education Association. 2023. “What You Need to Know about Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ and ‘Don’t Say They’ Laws, Book Bans, and Other Curricula Restrictions.”

^[44] “Country Policy and Information Note: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression.” GOV.UK.

2025.

^[45] Hallam, Mark. 2026. “Hungary: Orban-Era LGBTQ Rules Breach EU Laws, ECJ Finds.” Dw.com.

Deutsche Welle.

^[46] Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London:

Routledge.

^[47] Nye, Joseph S. 2011. The Future of Power. 1st ed. New York: Public Affairs.

^[48] Mao Zedong, cited from Power in World Politics 2026 Course Syllabus by Dr. Kai Hebel.