Making Feminist Sense of the "Free Speech Wars" in Britain

The Higher Education Act (Free Speech Bill) 2023 was passed this year with relatively little fanfare. Entreating Universities to not only defend, but also ‘promote’ free speech, the Bill is one of the more recent manifestations of what is being characterised as the ‘Free Speech Wars’ in Britain. The main protagonists in this altercation seem to be a mix of politicians, conservative media pundits, and liberal academics, seeking to defend unfettered free speech, on the one side, and a coterie of youthful student ‘snowflakes’ and ‘woke’, left-wing intellectuals, allegedly trying to restrict it, on the other. The discursive terrain on which this dispute is being played out is overwhelmingly a centre-right/liberal construction with only a smattering of left-wing academics choosing to join the fray and ally with the ‘snowflakes’. Moreover, the ‘free speech wars’ often fail to meet any of the standards that the promoters of free speech set down for the conduct of good deliberation. Marked by a propensity to reproduce a-theoretical, a-political and a-historical platitudes, much of the content and form of these heated exchanges belie careful reasoned argumentation, conceptual clarity and, sometimes, even basic civility. In this paper, I draw on feminist insights into subjectivity and harm, the multiple sources of knowledge formation, and the role of reason in public deliberation (and how power shapes all three) to rethink free speech. I argue that simply reducing the debate about free speech to a matter of what is permissible to say, or what is not, misses fundamental questions, not only about structural inequality, and how it operates through deliberative practices, but also about who we are, how we learn and what this means for how we can ‘connect’ across deep differences.