Sexuality and Citizenship

Diane Richardson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781509514212, 9781509514205
• eBook ISBN: 9781509514243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Sexual citizenship has become a key concept in the social sciences. It describes the rights and responsibilities of citizens in sexual and intimate life, including debates over equal marriage and women's human rights, as well as shaping thinking about citizenship more generally. But what does it mean in a continually changing political landscape of gender and sexuality? In this timely intervention, Diane Richardson examines the normative underpinnings and varied critiques of sexual citizenship, asking what they mean for its future conceptual and empirical development, as well as for political activism. Clearly written, the book shows how the field of sexuality and citizenship connects to a range of important areas of debate including understandings of nationalism, identity, neoliberalism, equality, governmentality, individualization, colonialism, human rights, globalization and economic justice. Ultimately this book calls for a critical rethink of sexual citizenship. Illustrating her argument with examples drawn from across the globe, Richardson contends that this is essential if scholars want to understand the sexual politics that made the field of sexuality and citizenship studies what it is today, and to enable future analyses of the sexual inequalities that continue to mark the global order.

1
Making Sexual Citizenship

Introduction

I first started to write about sexuality and citizenship in the late 1990s. My route into this was in part due to feminist work that critiqued citizenship conceptually, examining how citizenship is a gendered and raced concept, and in terms of the limits and limitations of a politics of citizenship. It also came out of the meeting of feminism with queer theory while I was conducting research in the US in the early 1990s. I was particularly interested in the rejuvenated interest in both feminist theory and ‘new’ queer writing around the institutionalization of heterosexuality within society and culture, in particular the ways in which heterosexuality encodes everyday life. This led to an edited collection, Theorising Heterosexuality (Richardson, 1996), whose aim was to invite a radical rethinking of many of the concepts used to theorize social relations. This echoed the call in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory to interrogate what Michael Warner (1993: xxi) termed the heteronormativity in social theory: ‘heterosexual culture’s exclusive ability to interpret itself as society’. At the same time, within social and political studies, citizenship was the new black. It was impossible to ignore, coupled with the fact that citizenship was increasingly becoming the lingua franca of political activism around sexual inequality and discrimination. The stage was set.

The concept of sexual citizenship was introduced in 1993 by David Evans in his book Sexual Citizenship, in which he argues that sexual citizenship is materially constructed through the dynamics of late capitalism, in particular through practices of consumption. My early work on sexuality and citizenship had a different focus, in being concerned with analysing citizenship as a key site of heteronormativity and the ways in which different models of citizenship are informed by heteronormative assumptions that reproduce sexual inequalities and privileges (Richardson, 1998; 2000a). However, I was not only concerned with the processes whereby sexuality infused constructions of citizenship, and the social, cultural, economic and political implications of this. I was also interested in examining the relationship between sexuality and citizenship from the reverse direction, in terms of how ideas about citizenship were increasingly shaping debates around sexuality and sexual politics.

At the time, I referred to the idea of sexual citizenship as ‘work in progress’ (Richardson, 2000a: 86). This is still the case today. Two decades later, the literature on sexuality and citizenship has rapidly expanded to become an important area of study across a number of disciplines, encompassing a complex set of debates over the impact of contemporary sexual politics on the reconfiguration of citizenship, including: the transformative power of civic inclusion to change meanings of citizenship and sexuality both at the level of social institutions such as marriage and family (e.g. Calhoun, 2000; Weeks et al., 2001; Stacey, 2012; Barker, 2013; Heaphy et al., 2013) and at the level of individual subjectivities (e.g. Bech, 1997; Richardson, 2004; Seidman, 2005); the potential exclusionary effects of processes of ‘sexual democratization’ (e.g. Warner, 1999; Butler, 2004); questions of nationalism and national border-making connected with ideas about modernity and tolerance (e.g. Puar, 2007; Bhattacharyya, 2008; Mepschen et al., 2010; Ammaturo, 2015; Kahlina, 2015; Dreher, 2017); the relationship between forms of neoliberal governance and the politics of sexuality (e.g. Duggan, 2002; 2003; Richardson, 2005; 2015a); processes of commodification and consumerism (e.g. Evans, 1993; Bell and Binnie, 2000); and the ways in which western-centric constructions of sexual citizenship constitute neo-orientalist and colonial practices (e.g. Altman, 2001; Binnie, 2004; Massad, 2007; El-Tayeb, 2011; Sabsay, 2012).

It is therefore timely to take stock of this burgeoning field both to understand how the concept of sexual citizenship has developed and, more importantly, to assess critically the implications of this legacy for future conceptual and empirical development, as well as for political activism. Another important reason for a strategic overview is to consider the aims and trajectory of this field of study in the context of the political present, where the transformations in access to citizenship that have taken place in many parts of the world over the last two decades might on the face of it appear to trouble, some might even say counter, the assumptions and ambitions of earlier work. This prompts the question of what the priorities for future research are, and, related to this, how we might reconfigure the concept of sexual citizenship in changing sexual and gender landscapes. Consideration of this entails recognizing the need to develop understandings of sexuality and its relationship to citizenship that theorize cultural variation as well as historical changes in sexuality and sexual politics. It is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to analyse sexual citizenship in the context of the ‘Global South’. These are all compelling reasons for writing a text such as this. However, for someone who has been a part of the development of this field, there was more.

Part of my motivation for writing this book is that I had become increasingly critical of the trajectory of research and scholarship on sexual citizenship and the contradictions that this raised. This is not to say that I was uncritical from the start. Unlike others, I did not advance a concept of sexual citizenship and saw the theoretical and political shift towards sexual citizenship as problematic (Richardson, 2000b; 2004). Nevertheless, as a term, it has undoubtedly proven productive. Increasingly, since the mid-1990s, scholars, social movement and activist organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, politicians and policy-makers have embraced the concept of sexual citizenship (Epstein and Carrillo, 2014). However, while it is increasingly used by more and more people, its meaning has become less and less clear. Consequently, especially in a context of growing international debate and disagreement over citizenship rights in relation to sexuality, it is important to analyse the ontological development of this term ‘sexual citizenship’ and reflect on what this might mean for its continued use in the future. Also, although theories of sexual citizenship are now more complex and diverse, it is a concept that is increasingly used uncritically in ways that risk depoliticizing social relations. One of the reasons I was cautious about the development of a concept of sexual citizenship in my earlier work was that I saw the potential for it to become reified as a noun, a descriptor, moving away from an analytic focus on the processes whereby sexuality and citizenship co-constitute each other. Sexual citizenship is some thing(s), of course, in the sense that it refers to specific rights granted or denied to individuals and groups, and I would not want to underestimate the significance of these. However, the risk is that it becomes consolidated in this way as an accumulator of rights rather than as a dynamic process of public and personal orientation towards certain practices, values, bodies, relationships. A further, related, concern was how sexual citizenship might come to overdetermine the terms through which sexuality and sexual subjectivity are conceived and by which sexuality can be thought of as political.

This is a concern that has been raised more recently by other writers. Leticia Sabsay (2012: 608), for example, argues that the notion of sexual citizenship has led to the ‘formation of new sexual rights-bearing subjects as if they were already existing entities. This reification of the sexual rights-bearing subject presumes that gender and sexuality are universal entitlements rather than specific outcomes of social and political struggles.’ This is an important point when one considers how the sexual citizenship discourse emerged from critiques of the notion of citizenship itself, and how discourses of citizenship (re)produce particular sexualized, gendered and racialized versions of normative citizens. For all these reasons, I am in agreement with those scholars who suggest that the theoretical construction of sexual citizenship needs ‘serious rethinking’ and a more nuanced approach (see, for example, Robson and Kessler, 2008: 571; Wilson, 2009).

This introductory chapter begins by outlining key concepts and use of terms, and contextualizes the contribution the book makes to the study of sexuality, gender and citizenship, as well as to wider debates in the social sciences more generally. In suggesting ways forward, this book is about much more than sexuality and citizenship. It connects with a number of key issues and debates in the social sciences including, for example, understandings of identity; processes of individualization, intersectionality and difference; knowledge relations and exchange between the Global South and the Global North; the reframing of democracy through non-state narratives; equality and diversity; neoliberalism and governmentality; and the bringing together of material and cultural analysis. Illustrative examples from a range of countries including the UK, the US, Nepal, India, Singapore, Russia and China, and from parts of Latin America and Africa, are used to illustrate the argument, and the book draws on material from empirical studies conducted in both the Global South and the Global North. The rationale for including the UK and Nepal is more than illustrative, as these are places where I have conducted collaborative research on political activism around the making of new forms of citizenship. I draw on material from these studies at different points of the book to provide illustrative case study examples of some of the key issues and debates that are addressed in the analysis of the relationship between sexuality and citizenship. Finally, the chapter concludes with a brief overview of how the book is structured.

Studying sexuality and citizenship in the Global South and the Global North

In addition to my theoretical work on sexuality and citizenship, recent empirical research provided an impetus to address many of the themes and questions addressed in this book. To a large extent this was because the studies I was involved in enabled analysis of the differences and similarities, as well as the complexities and contradictions, in theorizing sexual citizenship in different global contexts. The UK study, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and carried out in collaboration with Surya Monro, examined the implementation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equalities initiatives in local government in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It was conducted between 2007 and 2010, at a time when rapid changes had taken place concerning sexualities, citizenship and democracy. It highlighted the importance of implementation mechanisms in driving forward the equalities agenda in relation to LGBT people, and identified barriers and patterns of resistance that affect implementation and access to citizenship. A key research finding was that despite legislative and policy shifts extending rights to sexual and gender ‘minority’ communities, sexualities equalities work was unevenly spread and in some places far from becoming normalized. Rurality, political hostility, lack of local authority interest and associated stigma attached to these particular equality and diversity issues were limiting factors. Specifically, the research showed the importance of understanding not only implementation processes, but also barriers and resistance to change, for policy debates about the delivery of equality measures in relation to sexual citizenship. For more detail of the study, including the methodology and discussion of the findings, see Monro and Richardson (2013; 2014) and Richardson and Monro (2012; 2013).

The Nepal study, which was carried out in 2009-12 and also funded by the ESRC, was a project carried out in collaboration with Nina Laurie, Meena Poudel and Janet Townsend. Like the UK study, the research was conducted during an important period of democratic transition, in the context of the construction of the emergent nation state in the ‘new’ Nepal ‘post-conflict’ following a decade of civil war that ended in 2006 (Richardson et al., 2016). A key focus was on the relationship between gender, sexuality and citizenship and the meanings associated with having – or not having – citizenship. In this case, the focus was on the rights demands of a different ‘minority’ group from those in the UK study: women who had been trafficked and, post-trafficking, were beginning to organize around rights to sustainable livelihoods and to lobby actively for changes in citizenship rules which discriminate against women. The research was carried out through an innovative collaborative partnership with Shakti Samuha, one of the first anti-trafficking NGOs globally to be founded by posttrafficked women, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Nepal. Most work on trafficking addresses its causes and characteristics, feeding into policy frameworks targeting the ‘rescue’ of those experiencing diverse trafficking situations. Post-trafficking starts when these scenarios end and describes the processes and practices associated with remaking lives, identities and livelihoods after leaving trafficking situations (Laurie et al., 2015a).

The Nepal study brought trafficked women’s voices into policy development and implementation in relation to human rights, which is significant because post-trafficking issues shape access to citizenship. The underpinning research demonstrated that trafficked women typically experience forms of gendered and sexualized stigma (such as being labelled as prostitutes and/or ‘HIV carriers’) and, associated with this, social rejection from their families and communities. In the Nepal context, lacking family support makes it difficult to access citizenship and ensuing rights as citizenship is conferred by kin rather than the state. For more detail of the study, including the methodological approach and key findings, see Laurie et al. (2015a; 2015b) and Richardson et al. (2016).

The Nepal project examined transformations of citizenship in a rather different sense to the kind of transformations that have been happening in western neoliberal democracies. Nevertheless, here we have ‘moments of transformation’ occurring in countries in the Global South and the Global North, where we see evidence of new citizenship subjectivities emerging alongside ‘older stories’ of forms of intolerance, stigma and discrimination. In the UK, equality initiatives have been rolled out under neoliberal forms of governance, where decentralization to local government has occurred and apparent tensions exist between a shift towards a politics of individual rights and away from an emphasis on collective rights of specific groups, and between equality and diversity. In Nepal political organizing by trafficked women via NGOs such as Shakti Samuha has enabled the articulation of a collective identity as a stigmatized and marginalized group. Nevertheless, there are interesting parallels as well as contrasts in thinking through how stigma associated with sexual and gender norms can make becoming a (full) citizen difficult and how it informs the process of the ‘making of new citizens’ in these two very different contexts. This will be illustrated in later chapters, which draw on the findings from these studies.

Use of terms and the politics of naming

This section outlines the terminology used in the book, and explains the meanings of key concepts. This is important because certain terms are highly contested and may be understood in different ways by different people. There are other reasons, however, why issues of terminology concerning sexuality and gender are important beyond clarifying the terms of reference for the forthcoming chapters and discussion. What I am referring to here is not merely a question of terminology, but the politics of naming. The language that is used in debates over sexuality and gender is itself part and parcel of the political struggles and conflicts that are a key focus of this book. The terms we use come with historical and cultural ‘baggage’ that can be a force for change or an obstacle to understanding and responding to political demands for sexual and gender democratization. Drawing on his analysis of historical trends in the naming of lesbian and gay organizations and activism, for instance, Amin Ghaziani (2011: 106) argues that naming is important because language shapes our sense of reality; it affects ‘how we experience the world: what we think about it, how we perceive it, and how we live in it’. More specifically, he observes that as expressions of collective identity, names ‘create contingencies for who is represented … and how the group is perceived’. The following discussion, therefor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Making Sexual Citizenship
• PART I RETHINKING SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP
• PART II TRANSFORMING CITIZENSHIP? SEXUALITY, GENDER AND CITIZENSHIP STRUGGLES
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement