Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship

Peter Aggleton, Rob Cover, Deana Leahy, Daniel Marshall, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Peter Aggleton, Rob Cover, Deana Leahy, Daniel Marshall, Mary Lou Rasmussen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351214728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: LGBT-Studien

Sexual citizenship is a powerful concept associated with debates about recognition and exclusion, agency, respect and accountability. For young people in general and for gender and sexually diverse youth in particular, these debates are entangled with broader imaginings of social transitions: from 'child' to 'adult'and from 'unreasonable subject' to one 'who can consent'. This international and interdisciplinary collection identifies and locates struggles for recognition and inclusion in particular contexts and at particular moments in time, recognising that sexual and gender diverse young people are neither entirely vulnerable nor self-reliant.

Focusing on the numerous domains in which debates about youth, sexuality and citizenship are enacted and contested, Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship explores young people's experiences in diverse but linked settings: in the family, at school and in college, in employment, in social media and through engagement with health services. Bookended by reflections from Jeffrey Weeks and and Susan Talburt, the book's empirically grounded chapters also engage with the key debates outlined in it's scholarly introduction.

This innovative book is of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality, health and sex education, and youth studies, from a range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds, including sociology, education, nursing, social work and youth work.

Section 1

Kinsip

Chapter 1

Family, kinship and citizenship

Change and continuity in LGBQ lives

Brian Heaphy

Introduction

Historically, lesbian, gay bisexual and queer (LGBQ)¹ relationships have been constructed as the antithesis of ‘good’, ‘healthy’ and ‘legitimate’ family and kin. Indeed, family and kin have played a key role in regulating LGBQ lives (Altman 1979, Bozett and Sussman 1989, Calhoun 2003). Often in the interests of protection from stigma, LGBQ people have been ostracised by or have distanced themselves from their family of origin (Davies 1992, Patterson 2000, Saewyc et al. 2006). From the 1970s onwards studies have explored LGBQ ‘alternative’ families that were made up of friends, partners, other associates and children (where they existed) (Macklin 1980, Allen and Demo 1995, Buell 2001). These were often conceived as ‘replacement’, ‘surrogate’ or ‘fictive’ kin that provided material, emotional and social resources in the absence of support from biological and legal kin.

By the 1990s, the language of ‘chosen’ families had entered the lexicon of research on LGBQ life (Weston 1991, Weeks et al. 2001). Chosen families were viewed less as necessary replacements for families of origin, but more as self-defined elective kin that could include friends, partners, ex-partners, accepting families of origin and children that were conceived both within and outside of heterosexual relations. These families, together with demands for the protection of same-sex partners’ next-of-kin, parenting and caring ‘rights’, became the basis of what some viewed as a (radical or conservative) turn to intimacy in LGBQ politics (Seidman 2001, Weeks 2007). This, in turn, contributed to what some deemed to be the moment of LGBQ ‘equality’ (Blasius 1994) or ‘sexual citizenship’ (Weeks 1995).

Against this backdrop, this chapter considers the difference that more recent sociocultural and legal developments have made for LGBQ experiences of family, kinship and citizenship in Britain. British developments are thought to be amongst the most globally advanced in terms of LGBQ ‘rights’ and experiences in this context provide a point of reference for the possible implications of similar developments elsewhere. Specifically, the chapter examines the personal narratives of family and kinship as told by LGBQ people who were in their 20s and 30s in the mid-1990s and in 2009/2010. These narratives, as explored by two different studies of LGBQ relational life that I will discuss,² formed part of the cultural context in which two separate cohorts of LGBQ youth entered their mid-teens and early 20s in Britain. They can be conceived as generationally specific narratives of experience that have provided young people with a sense of the possibilities of living and relating as LGBQ.

The first study focussed on the personal narratives of family and intimacy told by self-identified LGBQ people in the mid-1990s. The analysis here focusses on the narratives of those who were in their 20s and 30s at the time of the interview. The second study focussed on the personal narratives of couples and individuals who entered into a civil partnership³ between 2005 and 2010. The focus here is also on the narratives of those who were in their 20s and 30s at the time of interview. The chapter explores ‘strong’ and ‘weaker’ personal narratives of family and kinship that contributed to cultural understandings of LGBQ life at the time that they were told, and how generation and formal partnership status structured them. To do this, it focusses on interviewees’ personal definitions of family and kin, their accounts of family distance and belonging, friendship and chosen families and the perceived possibilities for parenting. This enables consideration of the ways in which the family expectations of some LGBQ youth can radically change across generations, while such expectations remain unchanged for others.

Family, kinship and LGBQ lives

Family, stigma and social relocation

At the end of the 1970s Dennis Altman (1979, p. 47) claimed ‘straight is to gay as family is to no family’. Prior to that the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto (1971/1978) stated ‘The very form of the family works against homosexuality’. Underpinning these statements was the political belief that family and LGBQ lives were incompatible. This was in large part due to the role the family had played in enforcing compulsory heterosexuality (Rich 1983) through socialisation, regulation and even violence. Indeed, Bruce Voeller (1980, cited in Muller 1987, p. 140) noted: ‘Nowhere has the hostility to homosexuality been more frightening to large numbers of gay men and lesbians than their own families’.

In the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, as in most parts of Europe and North America, ‘compulsory’ heterosexuality implied growing up in families in which heterosexuality was still assumed or ‘enforced’ from birth. The majority of those aged between the mid-teens and mid-20s in the mid-1990s would have grown up in a family context where heterosexuality was viewed as an inevitable outcome. Unsurprisingly, identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual could lead to a sense of personal crisis with respect to self-identity, family and kinship relations. Family responses ranged across a continuum from wholehearted acceptance to confused tolerance to overt hostility and violence (Bozett and Sussman 1989). Sexual difference could lead to ostracism or self-imposed social, emotional and geographical distance between young LGBQ and their ‘given’ kin in a quest to create a non-heterosexual life of their own (Davies 1992).

As Mark Blasius (1994) has argued, one of the defining characteristics of compulsory or institutionalised heterosexuality is that the spaces, places and representations of everyday life are purged of LGBQ visibility. One explicit legal example of this in Britain is what was commonly termed Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which prohibited local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality or gay ‘pretended family relationships’. It also prevented more progressive local government councils from financing educational materials and projects perceived to promote a gay lifestyle. LGBQ sexual identities, lifestyles and practices were deemed to be risky (for example through their association with HIV) and morally dangerous. They carried a high degree of stigma and fear.

It is against the backdrop of stigma, the risks of hostility and of sociocultural (including legal) representations that denigrated LGBQ relationships that we can understand the uneasy relationships between LGBQ youth and their families of origin in the 1980s to the mid-1990s. Coming out at that time often implied coming into new identities and the social relations and communities that supported them as well as geographical relocation to urban areas that were perceived to be more anonymous and accepting of sexual/gendered difference (Cruickshank 1992, Blasius 1994, Weston 1995). These identities, communities and places provided the basis for new support networks, new families and new definitions of kin.

Chosen families, parenting and intimate citizenship

In the 1990s the language of chosen and friendship families had become established in the lexicon of academic and community discourse about LGBQ life (Weston 1991, Nardi 1992, Weeks et al. 1999). In North America, for example, Nardi (1992) was discussing gay friendship families and Weston (1991) was discussing families we choose. Weeks et al. (1999) were also discussing ‘families of choice’ in the UK. Weston’s research and analysis were especially insightful into how LGBQ families were constructed less by need and more by choice: where friends, partners, ex-partners, close associates and accepting families of origin were included in family definitions and practices. At the same time, partly as an aspect of AIDS activism, and partly as a response to so-called lesbian ‘baby-boom’, LGBQ politics had begun to focus more intensely on intimate ‘rights’ (Weeks 1995). This was often focussed on rights to family status through partnership and next-of-kin recognition, parenting and co-parenting rights, pensions, inheritance and so on. Developments in same-sex partnership recognition in a small number of Nordic and European jurisdictions also provided an impetus for focussing on civil unions and same-sex marriage ‘rights’.

Additionally, LGBQ identities, lifestyles, relationships and families began to be increasingly and more widely represented in the culture, and the so-called pink pound had been ‘discovered’ by marketing companies and the media. Combined, these dynamics gave rise to a sense of future possibilities for living openly as LGBQ people and claiming citizenship in law and in everyday life. Citizenship in this sense could be understood as concerning what Plummer (1995) termed ‘intimate citizenship’: ‘the control (or not) over one’s body, feelings, relationships: access (or not) to representations, relationships, public spaces etc.; and socially grounded choices (or not) about identities, gender experiences’ (Plummer 1995, p. 151; emphasis in the original). Thus, LGBQ intimate citizenship is not merely a question of legislative ‘rights’ but goes well beyond those.

Legal equality, family and citizenship

By the end of the first decade of the 2000s the LGBQ politics of relational rights, together with greater cultural visibility of same-sex relationships and changes in social attitudes, as well as a more liberal government in the UK, led to a range of legal and policy initiatives that reflected a notable shift in how LGBQ identities and relations were perceived, including those linked to same-sex partnership and LGBQ parenting (Heaphy et al. 2013, Nordqvist and Smart 2014).

LGBQ youth in the late 2000s were privy to how same-sex marriages were being claimed and recognised in parts of Europe, North America and elsewhere. In the UK, much of the discriminatory legal initiatives of the previous decades had been repealed. In the 2000s alone, the ban on lesbians and gay men in the military was lifted; Section 28 was repealed; discrimination against LGB people in the workplace was made illegal; discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities, services, education and public functions was legally forbidden; transgender recognition was legally enacted; and homophobic abuse was included in the definition of hate crime. In addition, social attitudes to homosexuality continued to change in the direction of greater acceptance (Harding 2017).

Linked to this latter point, it could be reasonably assumed that families of origin were more likely to be accepting and supportive of their children in coming out as LGBQ, and young women and men were less likely to believe that LGBQ lives implied childlessness and stigma (Gabb 2005, Ryan-Flood 2009, Taylor 2009). Thus, the need for geographical and social distance from family of origin, and need to escape the ‘heterosexual world’, was not as likely to be experienced as essential as was previously the case. To come out in the 2000s, was to come into a world where it was a reasonable expectation of many young LGBQ people to continue to participate and have an unaltered sense of connectedness to family of origin. This is the distinctive context in which the latter of the two studies I discuss should be understood.

Generationally situated personal narratives

The personal narratives considered in this chapter were generated by two studies. The first, undertaken by Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan (see Weeks et al. 2001), and funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), was based on a non-age specific sample. It explored the structure and meaning of ‘non-heterosexual’ intimate relationships, including family, friendships, sexual and community relationships. Interviews were undertaken in 1995 and 1996 (see Heaphy et al. 1998 for an account of the methodology). The analysis in this chapter focusses on the narratives of 63 individuals aged under 40 at the time of the interview, the youngest being aged 22. The second study was based on joint and individual interviews with 50 couples (100 partners) in 2009 and 2010. Partners were aged up to 35 when they entered a civil partnership and were aged under 40 at the time of the interview, the youngest being aged 21. The study, also funded by the ESRC, was undertaken with Heaphy, Smart and Einarsdottir (see Heaphy et al. 2013 and Heaphy and Einarsdottir 2012 for accounts of the methodology). Both studies included equal numbers of women and men.

Drawing from this data the chapter focusses on personal discourses of LGBQ families and kin that were likely to have shaped the relational expectations of two cohorts of LGBQ youth: the first, which was aged between their mid-teens and mid-20s in the mid-1990s, and the second, which was aged within the same range in 2009/2010. The different foci and samples of the two studies mean that direct comparisons cannot be made. However, discussing them together provides a way of thinking about how the possibilities open to different cohorts of LGBQ in terms of family, kinship and intimate citizenship have radically changed for some but remain unchanged for others. This can be usefully conceived in social generational terms.

Social generations are linked to cohort experiences, and the constraints and opportunities that shape life chances and world views. Generations do not necessarily share one world view, as they contain internally differentiated ‘generation units’ (what I term generational sub-sectors) (Mannheim 1952, quoted in Edmunds and Turner 2002, p. 9). As far as sexualities and relationships are concerned, there is no ‘one’ generational experience in any given national or legislative context, and within any generation there may be diverse experiences. The experience that most successfully articulates itself as the generational one is the one that is best supported and resourced to do so (cf. Edmunds and Turner 2002). Put another way, in Plummer’s (1995) sociological vocabulary of personal stories, the story that establishes itself as the strongest (or dominant) story of a generation is that which is listened to and reproduced by a range of expert, political, policy, media, everyday listeners and validated by accounts of personal experience.

LGBQ narratives of family in the 1990s

There is a wealth of work on the extent to which self-recognition as LGBQ can be a personally challenging but also an enriching experience. As Davies put it in the 1990s,

the man [sic] in the brink of coming out…inhabits a social matrix, a social structure which assumes, expects and enforces heterosexuality …the individual is faced with a psychic dilemma: the contradictions between the experiences of society...