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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1 Making Sexual Citizenship
Introduction
Studying sexuality and citizenship in the Global South and the Global North
Use of terms and the politics of naming
Thematic structure of the book
PART I RETHINKING SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP
2 What is Sexual Citizenship?
Introduction
Mapping sexual citizenship
What do we mean by ‘sexual rights’?
Critical framings
Conclusion
3 Limits to Sexual Citizenship
Introduction
Constructing sexual citizens
A citizenship of choices?
The non-choosing citizen-subject
Deterritorializing sexual citizenship
Spatialized norms of inclusion
Conclusion
4 Sexualizing Citizenship: Now You See it, Now You Don’t
Introduction
Beyond (hetero)sexualized citizenship?
After ‘equality’?
Conclusion
PART II TRANSFORMING CITIZENSHIP? SEXUALITY, GENDER AND CITIZENSHIP STRUGGLES
5 Global Influences on Sexuality and Citizenship
Introduction
Scales of (sexual) citizenship
De-territorializing (sexual) citizenship: making and stretching the borders of (sexual) citizenship
Constituting sexual politics
Conclusion
6 Sexuality, the State and Governance
Introduction
A brief outline of neoliberalism
Neoliberal transformations?
Sexuality, neoliberalism and activism
Conclusion
7 Materializing Sexuality
Introduction
Redistribution and recognition
Dominant framings?
Sexual economics
Sexuality and citizenship in times of precarity and austerity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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For Jane
Sexuality and Citizenship
Diane Richardson
polity
Copyright © Diane Richardson 2018
The right of Diane Richardson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1424-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
This book represents a process of research and thinking and writing about sexuality and citizenship over many years. My first thanks are to the Leverhulme Trust for granting me a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. Writing, like friendship, needs the commitment of time and thoughtfulness. The Fellowship, entitled Transforming Citizenship: Sexuality, Gender and Citizenship Struggles, provided me with the space from September 2013 to January 2016 to carry out a good deal of the research that informs this book. It gave me both the time and the freedom to think. Without the support of the Major Research Fellowship this would be a very different book and one, I imagine, with a rather different publication date.
I want to thank those involved in the process of making this book. Thanks to my publishing editor Jonathan Skerrett and the production team at Polity, in what was a new publishing relationship, for their very efficient and helpful handling of the editorial and production process. My appreciation also to the anonymous readers for their useful feedback. Some of the ideas in the book were provoked by my engagement with two previous research projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and I would like to thank my colleagues who worked with me on these. Thanks go to Surya Monro and Ann McNulty on the Sexuality, Equality and Local Governance project, and to Nina Laurie, Meena Poudel and Janet Townsend on the Post Trafficking in Nepal: Sexuality and Citizenship in Livelihood Strategies project. I also owe thanks to Shakti Samuha, our research partner in the Nepal project, one of the first anti-trafficking organizations globally to be founded and run by women who have left trafficking situations, and to all of those who took part in both of the studies. I would also like to acknowledge permission granted under open access licence agreement to reproduce some sections from the article ‘Rethinking Sexual Citizenship’ published in Sociology (2015), 51(2): 208–24.
A good deal of the writing was carried out while I was a Visiting Scholar in the US during the academic year of 2014 to 2015. In the first half of the year, I was based at the Centre for the Study of Women (CSW) and the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). I would like to thank staff there for hosting me, in particular Pamela Crespin and other staff in CSW and Gail Kligman and Abigail Saguy in the Department of Sociology, for their support in enabling my visit to UCLA. I also want to thank Evy Blumenberg, Brian Taylor, Jan Lawrence and Russ Worden for their friendship and hospitality. In the second half of the year (wrong way round weather-wise) I was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Gender & Sexuality Law (CGSL) at Columbia University in New York. I would also like to offer my gratitude to staff there for hosting me, in particular to the Directors of the Centre, Suzanne Goldberg and Katherine Franke, and to Cindy Gao for her administrative support.
This book has taken me away from family and friends, both literally in some cases and metaphorically in others, and I want to express my gratitude and love to them for continuing to be a source of support in a myriad of ways that contributes to what I can accomplish and who I am and have become. I thank especially Cynthia Chicken-Usher, Jackie Davis, Megan Foster, Loren Fox, Chris Hagar, Nina Laurie, Hazel May, Lillian May Fox, Sue Mitchell, Jane Pollard, Vicki Robinson and Rachel Woodward.
Abbreviations
CEDAW
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
ESRC
Economic and Social Research Council
GAATW
Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women
HRC
Human Rights Campaign
IDAHOT
International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia
ILGA
International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association
INGO
international non-governmental organization
IOM
International Organization for Migration
IRRRAG
International Reproductive Rights Research Action Group
LGB
lesbian, gay and bisexual
LGBT
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
LGBTI
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex
LGBTQ
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer
LGBTQQI
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning and intersex
NGO
non-governmental organization
SOGI
sexual orientation and gender identity
UNHRC
United Nations Human Rights Council
UNAIDS
United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
VDCs
Village Development Committees
1Making 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, therefore, challenges an uncritical approach to various terms in the literature and highlights the problematic nature of their use more generally, as well as within the covers of this book.
We might start with asking what is meant by the terms sexuality and citizenship. Citizenship can be understood in a variety of different ways. Within liberalism, citizenship has traditionally been understood in relation to the rights and responsibilities of citizens within a given nation state. This classic model of citizenship is associated with the work of T. H. Marshall (1950), a British sociologist who defined citizenship in terms of three stages of sets of rights: civil or legal rights, political rights and social rights. Civil or legal rights are institutionalized through the law and include things such as the right to own property; freedom of speech, thought and faith; liberty of the person; and the right to justice. Political rights are institutionalized in parliamentary political systems and councils of local government, and include the right to vote and participate in the exercise of political power. Social rights include the right to a certain level of economic welfare and security as well as rights that are institutionalized in the welfare state, for example unemployment benefits, and provision for health and education.
The other traditional model of citizenship has been characterized as the ‘town hall’ model, which emphasizes the participation of citizens in civil society, and is linked to communitarianism (which emphasizes the responsibility of the individual to the community) and republicanism (where, in a republic, the head of state is not a monarch). In contrast to the traditional liberal conception of citizens as autonomous individuals who make choices, advocates of civic republicanism see citizenship as communal, where citizens are people whose lives are interlinked through shared traditions and understandings that form the basis for the pursuit of the ‘common good’ (Delanty, 2000).
More recent theorizations of citizenship have led to a broadening out of the concept beyond formal citizenship as a member of a nation state, to include considerations of belonging and associated practices of citizenship that go beyond traditional rights-based understandings. This has led to analyses of new types of citizenship, such as cultural citizenship, corporate citizenship, ecological citizenship, consumer citizenship, digital citizenship, economic citizenship and global citizenship. These concepts have emerged at the same time as definitions of citizenship as national identity have increasingly been brought into question in the face of social and political changes that have challenged traditional boundaries of nation states on a global scale (Fraser, 2008; 2009a; 2009b; Roseneil, 2013). This has prompted debate about the need to think about citizenship developing within the context of larger forms of social membership than nation states, especially in relation to human rights (Nash, 2009). Also associated with these developments is the emergence of new scales of thinking about citizenship (Yuval-Davis, 1999; 2007), such as concepts of cosmopolitan and post-national citizenship (Delanty, 2000; Sassen, 2002; Benhabib, 2008) and citizenship theorized as less a form of individual status and recognition and more a mode of political belonging (Isin, 2008; Isin and Nielsen, 2008; Tonkiss and Bloom, 2015).
Like citizenship, sexuality is also a complex concept. The answer to the question ‘What is sexuality?’ has changed considerably over the years as scholarship has developed and different theoretical approaches have led to different understandings of sexuality and, closely connected with this, gender. During the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, sexuality was conceptualized in a very narrow way. The theories of biologists, medical researchers, psychologists and sexologists dominated understandings of sexuality and gender as universal categories ordained by nature, where heterosexuality is thoroughly naturalized as ‘normal’ mature development of a pregiven sexual ‘instinct’ or ‘drive’. This is an imagined natural order, sexuality conceived as outwith the social, that relies on interrelated notions of sexual and gender dualism/binaries: all human beings are male/female; heterosexual/homosexual; masculine/feminine (see Prosser 1998; Monro 2005).
This was to change dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century, when a new canon of feminist theorizing and sociological work on sexuality and gender emerged that critiqued earlier ‘essentialist’ modes of thinking, and signalled a move away from biologically based accounts of sexuality towards social analysis. This shift from naturalizing to social constructionist accounts of sexuality and gender opened up analysis through contesting and pluralizing the meanings associated with both sexuality and gender. This included expanding the use of the terms ‘sexualities’ and ‘sexuality’ beyond sexual attraction, desires, practices and related identities, in recognition that sexuality shapes many aspects of our lives, relationships and societies including health and welfare, religion, securitization, markets, nationalism, our sense of belonging, and so on. From this perspective, we can think about the social construction of sexuality at a number of intersecting levels:
structure
: sexuality institutionalized as a particular form of relationship, family structure and practice traditionally based on heterosexual, monogamous marriage;
social and cultural meaning
: how sexuality encodes and structures the socially and culturally available ‘scripts’ available to us that inform shared understandings and knowledge about sexuality;
everyday interactions and practices
: how we socially interact with each other, live and experience sexualities;
subjectivit
y: our sense of ourselves, which includes our sexual and gendered identities.
In this chapter the aim is not to provide an account of how sexuality has been variously theorized at different scales of analysis. For more detail on the development of sociological thought on sexuality and gender, see Jackson and Scott (2010a); Rahman and Jackson (2010); Weeks (2012); Connell and Pearse (2014); Dunk-West and Brook (2015); and Richardson (2015b). Rather my focus in this book is on recognizing how changing constructions of sexuality impact on debates about equality and sexual citizenship. For example, the social construction of heterosexuality and gender binarism (the assumption that there are only two sexes and genders: male and female, man and woman) as foundational (or natural) means that other sexual and gender categories and associated identities have been seen as at best ‘alternative’ or at worst ‘abnormal’ or ‘deviant’, fuelling homophobia, biphobia and transphobia and impeding the equality of LGBT people. As will be evident from this book, appeals to scientific accounts of ‘homosexuality’ continue to play a significant role in debates over sexual citizenship and the rights of LGBT people (see, for example, Kuhar, 2015). In this respect it is important to recognize theoretical differences in conceptualizing sexuality in terms of both historical changes and cultural variation in analyses of sexualities and genders.
Historically, it has been theories from the Global North, in particular North America and Europe, which have dominated approaches to understanding sexuality and gender. This has led to criticisms that theories largely based on western understandings have colonized ideas in so far as they are extended to non-western contexts in ways that erase local understandings and cultural meanings. Connell (2007) makes this point in arguing for the need to recognize social theory from societies in the Global South, which are often ignored or marginalized. The Global South is a relational concept that emphasizes unequal forms of power relations, both historically (colonial regimes, for example) and contemporaneously, between the North (the West) and South (the ‘rest’). In this binary way of thinking ‘the Global South’ can be understood as an umbrella term comprising a particular set of countries or continents, typically many countries in Africa, Central and Latin America, and parts of Asia. Once again we need to be alert to the difficulties in the use of terminology. As various writers have argued, a binary view of the Global North/South is overly simplistic, and in particular we should think critically about the use of the term ‘Global South’ if we are to avoid the dangers of overgeneralization and of reproducing western-centredness in analyses of genders and sexualities (Connell, 2007; Brown et al., 2010).
A good example of this is the term ‘sexual and gender minorities’, which is problematic for a number of reasons. As a number of scholars have pointed out, the concept of ‘minority’ is defined in relation to an assumed ‘majority’ that, it is argued, represents a ‘condescending, othering discourse of “minorities”’ (Petchesky, 2009: 109). There has been an historical tendency for scholarship about sexual ‘minorities’ to focus on lesbians and gay men, and scholarship about gender ‘minorities’ on ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’. This is highly problematic on a global level as these terms limit the range of categories used by people to describe their minority sexualities and gender identities. There is a very wide range of sexual and gender cultures across the world that have their own terminologies and vocabularies. For example, in Thailand ‘toms’ refers to masculine women who transgress gender norms and ‘dees’ to feminine-identified women who have relationships with women. Gender pluralism also incorporates a wide range of categories beyond ‘trans’, including, for example, hijras, who are recognized as ‘third gender’ in India; travesti in Brazil, a term linked to feminine-looking male prostitutes; kathoey in Thailand, referring to men who dress as women and ‘feminize’ their bodies; and berdache or ‘two-spirit’, used by some indigenous North Americans to describe gender-variant people (Plummer, 2015a).
A further concern is that this ordering of populations into ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ groups suggests a fixity of these relative categories that reinforces the idea of the status quo as the natural social/ sexual order. As noted above, a crucial contribution of sociological analyses of sexuality has been its problematization of the categories ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ as ahistorical and a universalizing discourse. John D’Emilio, for example, argues that the origins of homosexual identities and communities in the US were associated with processes of capitalist development over the last two hundred years. What follows from this, he claims, is that lesbians and gay men ‘are not a fixed social minority composed for all time of a certain percentage of the population. There are more of us than one hundred years ago, more of us than forty years ago. And there may very well be more gay men and lesbians in the future’ (D’Emilio, 1983: 109, original emphasis).
Feminist writers have made similar arguments in their analyses of gender and sexuality, rejecting the language of minorities to describe same-sex relationships and questioning the privileging of heterosexuality coded as ‘majority’. For example, Sheila Jeffreys alludes to this when she states that:
It is difficult to imagine at this point what shape any relationship between different sexes would take when such a relationship was a free choice, when it was not privileged in any way over same-sex relationships and when it played no part in organizing women’s oppression and male power. In such a situation, when heterosexuality was no longer an institution, we cannot yet be sure what women would choose. (Jeffreys, 1990: 316)
In other words, understandings of sexual relations are mediated through dominant heterosexual and gendered norms, which include conceptualizations of ‘desire’. Central to this has been the notion of desire as desire for ‘the other’, where desire is conceptualized in terms of attraction to difference, where gender is constituted as the key marker of difference. Thus, female sexuality has traditionally been defined as different from, yet complementary to, male sexuality. Following on from this, women and men are commonly referred to as opposite-sex partners, whereas lesbian and gay relationships are defined as same-sex. In so far as this categorization stems from and reinforces gendered and heterosexualized constructions of difference, delimiting understandings of sexualities and collapsing differences into (oppositional notions of) gender, the use of these terms ‘same-sex’ and ‘opposite-sex’ can also be considered to be problematic.
A similar yet distinct problem arises in relation to concepts of ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’. ‘Sexual orientation’ is commonly used to describe the gender of the person/people desired by a person/people and may imply that the ‘direction’ of desire is fixed or essential (Waites, 2009a). This idea that there are certain types of person who are ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ as part of the human condition has been extensively critiqued. Anthropological and historical studies support the view that homosexuality is a social and historical construction. Thus, while same-sex relations are a phenomenon ‘common to almost every culture, one occurring throughout recorded history’ (Blasius and Phelan, 1997: 2), the ways in which this is socially constructed and the extent to which it is linked with identities (such as the relatively recently developed identity categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ)) vary widely. Michel Foucault’s (1979) work has been immensely important in highlighting the historical process through which these categories have been constituted in certain parts of the west. Foucault argued that in taking sexuality as their object of study, medicine and psychiatry played a significant role in producing an artificial unity termed ‘sexual desire’. This fictional unity, which Foucault claims does not exist naturally, is then used to explain sexual behaviour and sexual identity. Writing before Foucault, sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon (1973) gave a symbolic interactionist account of sexuality that also challenged biological determinism, and advanced a similar argument in their early work on sexual scripts (see Jackson and Scott, 2010b). From this perspective, sexual orientation is not some attribute that attaches to a person, but an idea specific to certain cultures and historical periods that has been productive of social categories such as heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, bisexual and so on. Although there is some disagreement between writers as to precisely when the idea of the homosexual person emerged, the general belief is that in Europe at least, this is a relatively recent notion, having its origins in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Foucault, 1979; Weeks, 2012).
Objections to the use of the term ‘homosexuality’ stem from the fact that it derives from western science and is a medicalized term, defined in relation to an assumed heteronorm of sexual development and associated with negative accounts of same-sex attraction as pathological, immature or abnormal (Terry, 1999). Challenging these kinds of beliefs about homosexuality was a key aspect of the sexual politics that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in the US and parts of Europe (Weeks, 2007; D’Emilio and Freedman, 2012). Associated with the emergence of the women’s and lesbian and gay movements was a rejection of what was seen as a highly negative medical hand-me-down category ‘the homosexual’, in favour of selfchosen terms that represented new, positive meanings for same-sex desire and relationships and associated identities: ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’. Critiques of the use of the terms ‘homosexuality’ and ‘gay’ were also made in the 1970s by lesbian feminists, who argued that these were male-dominated terms and it was necessary to use the word ‘lesbian’ in order to recognize and make visible women’s experiences and issues. The dominant trend in analyses of sexual citizenship that focus on access to rights has been a gender-neutral approach, focusing on ‘lesbian and gay’ or LGBT struggles for equality rather than, say, specifically analysing lesbian citizenship, thus failing to differentiate lesbians from ‘gay men’ or within the LGBT acronym. In making no distinction between lesbians and gays the concern is not simply that possible differences in the experience of social exclusion and discrimination are at risk of being ignored, but that lesbians themselves are subsumed under the category ‘gay’. This is particularly salient given that, in many countries, such rights movements are associated historically with demands for the decriminalization of ‘male homosexual’ offences, in particular age of consent and anti-sodomy laws. Similar issues come up in relation to the more recent claims that ‘gay rights’ are human rights (see chapter 5).
Since the 1990s, terms such as ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning and intersex’ (LGBTQQI) have been adopted and are used in the US and elsewhere, although the acronym LGBT is also commonly used. There are, however, difficulties with the use of these acronyms, not least because they collapse differences across and within the L, the G, the B, and the T and the Q and the I. In particular, these terms elide sexuality and gender, which is problematic (see Richardson, 2007; Richardson and Monro, 2012). Critiques of these identity categories also argue that they rely on binary assumptions: the term ‘bisexuality’, for example, relies on the idea of gender as a binary, which restricts understanding of (non-binary) lived genders and sexualities that are broader than ‘this or that’ (e.g. Nestle et al., 2002; Monro, 2015). A further criticism is that these are culturally specific concepts that draw upon western assumptions and identity categories in relation to gender and sexuality, concepts that may not translate directly into other languages or be meaningful categories in other cultural contexts (Kollman and Waites, 2009; Petchesky, 2009; Gunkel, 2010). This is a key concern in the literature and has been subject to critical scrutiny as a form of colonialism, which is discussed later in chapters 2 and 5. (There are certain parallels here with critiques of feminism as western-centric and the need to decolonize feminist theory and practice; see, for example, Mohanty, 2003.) This is one reason why some researchers and activists, including human rights organizations such as the UN, prefer the use of ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’, or SOGI for short, to ‘LGBT rights’ in an attempt to promote a more inclusive language of sexual politics. That said, as I have outlined above, the terms ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ are themselves problematic in various ways, reinforcing essentialist and universalist understandings of gender and sexuality, and have been extensively critiqued within sociological and feminist literatures (see, for example, Ahmed, 2006; Waites, 2009a).
There are parallels here with the idea of the sex/gender binary, which developed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and provided an important foundation for much ‘second wave’ feminist theory and politics. This idea refers to the distinction between sex conceptualized as a constant feature of human society, a universal aspect of being human, and gender theorized as the cultural interpretation of biologically given sex. This binary has subsequently been challenged by feminist writers who have problematized the differentiation between sex and gender (Butler, 1990/2006; 1993/2011). In this case, however, sexual orientation is assumed to be the universal constant, which finds expression in historically and culturally specific sexualities. From this perspective, it would appear to be a culturally ‘neutral’ concept whose appeals can evade the critique of cultural imposition of sexual norms and categories by one country/state on another. In contrast to the widespread criticism that has been levelled at the use of concepts like gay and LGBT in relation to human rights, few writers (a notable exception is Waites, 2009a) have problematized the use of the categories of SOGI in relation to debates on sexual citizenship and human rights.
The 1990s, as mentioned in the introduction, saw the emergence of a new queer perspective on sexuality and sexual politics. The term ‘queer’ was put forward as a replacement for labels such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ by activists who critiqued the kind of ‘identity politics’ associated with these terms (Epstein, 1999). Subsequent critiques have focused on contemporary sexual politics that are regarded as assimilationist, where activism is seen as mainstream and focused on LGBT normalization, with some writers arguing that queer has itself been co-opted into these processes (Eng et al., 2005). Queer theory sought to deconstruct contemporary sexual and gender categories, challenging the idea of identity as fixed and stable and instead emphasizing fluidity, openness and fragmentation (Jagose, 1997; Hall et al., 2012). This reflects the intellectual influence of poststructuralist and postmodern theories, which share a critique of the idea of a unified sense of self and reject the idea that there is an essential self or a biological basis to our identities. Instead, subjectivity (our sense of ourselves) is seen as socially constructed; and this includes our gendered and sexual identities. Judith Butler’s work has been enormously significant in advancing such critiques. In her performativity theory of gender, she argues that although we perceive these aspects of our identity as being ‘real’, they are actually constructed by the repetitive processes and discourses (sets of ideas which are tied to social practices and structures) that are part of our everyday lives, whereby ‘identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1990: 25).
As with acronyms such as LGBT, there are issues associated with using terminology originally generated in the west in a global context, and it is important to recognize that ‘queer’ is variously interpreted depending on national context (see, for example, Essig, 1999 on queers in Russia; Arvind and Bhan, 2005 on its adoption by activists in India). Central to the development of queer studies within the academy was a critique of normativity; a key aim was to denaturalize heterosexuality and challenge the social and cultural institutionalization of normative assumptions about sexuality more broadly. Queer scholarship led to the introduction of a number of terms that are now commonly used in discussions of sexuality and sexual politics, including within the sexual citizenship literature, in particular, ‘the heterosexual/homosexual binary’ (Sedgwick, 1990), ‘heteronormativity’ (Warner, 1993), ‘homonormativity’ (Duggan, 2002) and ‘homonationalism’ (Puar, 2007).
Queer theory highlighted how the heterosexual/homosexual binary was a central organizing principle of modern society and culture, as well as of subjectivities. For queer theorists, then, a key focus of critique is to problematize and disrupt this binary (Seidman, 1997; Roseneil, 2002). This notion is famously associated with the work of Eve Sedgwick, who in her introduction to Epistemology of the Closet stated that:
many of the major modes of thought and knowledge in twentieth century western culture are structured by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition. This book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern western culture must be not only incomplete but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. (Sedgwick, 1990: 1, my emphasis)
‘Heteronormativity’ is a term initially associated with Michael Warner (1993), and it is now widely used in many domains by both queer and feminist scholars. Broadly speaking, it refers to the process whereby the normative status of heterosexuality is institutionalized and legitimated through social institutions and cultural norms and practices that naturalize and privilege particular forms of (gendered) heterosexuality as normative ways of living as well as normative sexuality (Jackson, 2006). The analytic focus, in other words, is how the heteronormative ordering of the social is (re)produced through everyday practices, norms, subjectivities, identities, bodies and relationships. Thus, for example, Butler (1993/2011) argues that our understanding of bodies has been bounded by what she refers to as a ‘heterosexual matrix’, which inscribes the meanings attached to both non-heterosexual and heterosexual bodies, identities and relationships (see also Richardson, 1996; 2000a). In other words, heteronormativity regulates the lives of heterosexual as well as non-heterosexual identified people and, I shall go on to discuss, in ways that can make them unequal sexual citizens (see chapter 4).
‘Heteronormativity’, then, does not just refer to traditional norms in relation to sexuality and gender. It connects to heterosexuality as an organizing principle of social organization as well as personal life, reproduced through social institutions and social policies (Peake, 2013; see also Jackson, 2006 on how heteronormativity is not synonymous with heterosexuality as an institution). In this sense, heteronormativity not only upholds normative sexual and gender binaries, it also operates as a normalizing process. This is the distinction between heteronormativity as an assumed norm and heteronormalization as a process of governance of conduct that fits with prevailing norms.
As will be seen from the discussion in chapter 4, the concept of heteronormativity was important in shifting away from an analytic focus on homosexuality/heterosexuality, to the specificities of certain sexual/social orders that incorporate a range of assumptions about ‘good’ sexual citizens who embody normativity and who may be heterosexual or homosexual. That is, normative heterosexuality ‘not only establishes a heterosexual/homosexual hierarchy but also creates hierarchies among heterosexualities’ that constitute ‘hegemonic and subordinate forms of heterosexuality’ (Seidman, 2005: 40). Heteronormativity is thus a concept that is distinct from heterosexuality; marginalized non-heteronormative identities and practices include not only particular ‘homosexualities’ but also ‘deviant’ heterosexuals.
The emergence of an analytical focus on homonormativity, a term usually associated with Lisa Duggan’s (2002; 2003) work on sexuality and neoliberalism, refers to the normalization and assimilation of certain kinds of lesbians and gay men into mainstream culture. In an earlier use of the term, Lauren Berlant and Warner (1998: 548) sought to clarify how the concept is distinct from heteronormativity in that ‘it has no parallel, unlike heterosexuality, which organizes homosexuality as its opposite. Because homosexuality can never have the invisible, tacit, society-founding rightness that heterosexuality has, it would not be possible to speak of “homonormativity” in the same sense.’ Analysis of homonormativity has pointed to the exclusionary effects of sexual citizenship and the costs of recognition as well as the benefits, highlighting the ways in which the extension of social and legal rights has benefited some LGBT people and further marginalized others across diverse groupings. This includes work that considers the intersecting significance of class, race and gender in new forms of sexual citizenship that have occurred through state recognition (e.g. Kandaswamy, 2008; Taylor, 2011a). More recent work on homonormativity has critiqued the term for being too allencompassing and rigid, leading to yet another binary way of thinking and reifying heteronormativity/ homonormativity in ways that narrow down the field of analysis, in particular by privileging lesbian and gay as ways of being non-heterosexual/non-heteronormative. This has led some writers to suggest the need to decentre homonormativity as a framework for analysis in order to think ‘beyond homonormativity’ and consider broader intersectionalities and diversity within, and alternatives to, homonormativity (e.g. Brown, 2009; 2012; Podmore, 2013).
‘Heteronormativity’ and ‘homonormativity’ are now commonly used terms in debates about sexuality and sexual politics, and in the sexual citizenship literature. More fundamental critiques of the analytical vocabulary of queer theory have also been articulated recently, problematizing the centrality of normativity and its oppositional stance (Castro Varela et al., 2016). Scholars who advocate moving away from an antinormative approach in queer theory argue that, paradoxically, the very process of challenging and opposing dominant norms, in being ‘against, against, against’, helps to project fixity and stability onto normativity and maintain binary ways of thinking (Wiegman and Wilson, 2015: 12; Castro Varela et al., 2016). In other words, a focus on antinormativity reinforces a queer/heteronormative binary and in doing so delimits analysis and understanding of sexualities that are outwith this conceptual framing. This has led some to introduce the terms ‘non-heteronormative’ or ‘non-normative’ as a way of de-linking from heteronormativity, opening up potential for conceptualizing sexuality and gender in non-binary terms. (One might think about parallels here in the use of the term ‘decolonial’ as distinct from ‘postcolonial’.) Ken Plummer (2015a: 8) in his work on cosmopolitan sexualities makes a similar point, though from a different stance of critical humanism, highlighting the importance of norms, differentiating what he calls open sexualities from closed sexualities, ‘which bundle our sexualities into a tightly restricted code’.
