Abstract
The concept of citizenship is currently in panic. As nations continue to deploy more and more economic and ideological resources into defending territories, borders, and national values, constraints around who might qualify as citizens are tightened. National entry tests, border protection policies and practices, exclusionary marriage legislations and censorious government funding decisions are all current attempts to fix subjectivity to a unitary, naturalized and normative citizen-body, and in doing so to cover the tracks of such urgent political manoeuvres. Arguably, much of the impetus for these nationalist reconsolidations is drawn from the anxieties provoked by the dynamics of globalization. The emerging complexities of transnational flows of capital of all kinds – particularly economic, symbolic and human capital — fundamentally challenge any nation’s existing modes of legitimation.
One nation of notable susceptibility to dynamics of mass migration is France – given such factors as its location within the European Union and its colonial legacy – where in recent years there have been efforts to legitimate the state’s forcible displacement of communities of Sans-Papiers (residents without papers) from temporary settlements, notably in the northern coastal city of Calais. Perceived as an economic threat and less explicitly constructed as a cultural threat, these communities of often long-term residents, workers and tax-payers exist in France as a structural paradox of citizenship: at once necessarily marginalized, due to a lack of official state documentation, and crucial to certain economies which unofficially depend upon their labour and other social contributions. As ‘irregular migrants’, the Sans-Papiers show up the naturalization of conventions of citizenship around arbitrary deployments of administration and understandings of territorial belonging (McNevin, 2006). The Sarkozy administration’s singling out of Roma people for expulsion from France in 2010 created similar controversy. Originating from Bulgaria and Romania, these EU citizens are required to hold a special work permit to reside in France longer than three months. Hundreds of Roma deemed in breach of this regulation were paid to leave the country by the French government who claimed concern with deplorable living conditions, and had their temporary settlements demolished.
The force of biopolitical technologies in organizing and subjugating bodies and populations through discourses of citizenship is employed by government administrations based on differing cultural values and norms. In the Asia-Pacific region, Australian writer, Robert Dessaix, who had been selected to participate in the eighth annual Shanghai Literary Festival as part of an Australian delegation of authors and publishers, had his visa to visit China rejected after declaring his positive HIV status. The theme of the literary festival was ‘true stories’ with writers invited to offer accounts of their personal journeys. For Dessaix, this was to include his sexual orientation. 1 He had been invited by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to participate in the event after Australian novelist, Frank Moorhouse, declined his invitation in protest against the imprisonment of Chinese writers such as Liu Xiaobo. According to journalist Malcolm Knox, Dessaix had no political involvement in matters concerning China, and said Australian officials had told him that although China did not give reasons for the visa refusal, his health status was the issue. 2 As part of his visit to China, Dessaix was also to attend speaking engagements at universities and bookshops in Beijing and Chengdu, including a public interview with Geoff Raby, Australia’s ambassador to China (see Knox, 2010). Ninety writers and artists, led by Charlotte Wood and Michelle de Kretser, signed a letter protesting against ‘a decision founded on ignorance and prejudice’, but the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Canberra stated that the embassy did not provide detailed information in individual applications that had been refused (see Steger, 2010). While China has since lifted the 20-year-old ban on entry for foreigners with HIV/AIDS, such practices raise questions about the ways in which governments discipline and punish the bodies of (foreign) citizens based on health status but also, presumed connections between health and sexuality. 3
A queer critique of citizenship in an era of heightened panic about terrorism and terrorist acts is central to the deconstruction of the workings of racism, and the use of sexual violence as a covert military practice to control and humiliate citizens. In 2004, the circulation of photos of torture including physical, psychological and sexual abuse committed by personnel of the 372nd Military Police Company of the United States Army on prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq contravened the Geneva conventions. Judith Butler (2009: 79) suggests that, it ‘quickly became clear in the months of April and May 2004 that there was a pattern to the photographs and that, as the Red Cross had contended for many months before the scandal broke, there was a systematic mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq, paralleling a systematic mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay’. Sexual violation, coercion and humiliation was central to the technologies of torture employed by some American military personnel in an effort to humiliate and debase prisoners thus breaching the protocols governing the fair treatment of prisoners of war. As Butler (2009: 89) outlines, there were ‘examples of women torturing men, of men and women forcing Iraqi women, Muslim women, to bare their breasts, and Iraqi men, Muslim men, to perform homosexual acts or to masturbate’. Sexual violence was specifically employed to exploit the Muslim prohibition against nudity, masturbation and homosexuality wherein homosexuality is equated with the decimation of personhood (Butler, 2009). Consequently, Butler (2009: 90) argues, the American soldiers who participated in and documented these incidents both engaged the Islamic taboo against homosexual acts, which ‘worked in perfect concert with the homophobia within the US military’. Errol Morris’s documentary, Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2008), features interviews with some of the US military personnel implicated in this case. In addition to the frank and sometimes conflicting accounts of the abuse offered by these men and women on-camera, evidence of a hierarchy of gender dominance and subordination structured by a larger matrix of coercive heteronormative relations emerged, to which homophobic and anti-Muslim abuses were central.
As Morris’s documentary also illuminates, the mediation of abuses in Abu Ghraib – indeed the photographic mediation of abuses is itself performatively and strategically abusive – is central to an analysis of the overlapping technologies of citizenship and interventionist foreign policy. The circulation of the images in question offers a gruesome example of the potential of digital media networks to bolster a new globally pervasive imaginary of political belonging and exclusion. In a contemporary moment marked by the intensification of global flows of all kinds of capital, the spread of digital networked media is forcing a rethink of the applicability of existing frames of national belonging and citizenship in a range of social, cultural and political domains. The internet is unsettling territorial sovereignty with major ramifications at the level of legislation, surveillance and regulation and at the level of individual identity, practice and community. In his discussion of these transformations, Mark Poster (2006: 76) questions whether the concept of netizenship might offer possibilities for leaving behind the ‘baggage of connotations from Western history’ carried along with the term citizen that ‘render it parochial in the globalized present’. The characteristics of new media, he continues, might be harnessed to ‘promote new political relations and new political subjects’ (Poster, 2006: 78) and the possibility of a network of global communication that is ‘inherently bidirectional and ungovernable by existing political structures. (Poster, 2006: 84).
The exclusionary basis of citizenship is a well-documented and richly theorized field. Important contributions by writers such as Etienne Balibar, Judith Butler and Engin Isin have emphasized the arbitrary imposition of territorializing frames of national belonging in conjunction with retrospective historicizing of national mythologies which work precisely to identify and contain both ‘alien others’ and ‘immanent others’ (Isin, 2002). Isin (2002) suggests that Othered identities function structurally to constitute the frame of citizenship. To the extent that particular groups of sexual and gendered subjects are frequent candidates for these categories, and that alien and immanent others of various kinds are constructed as Other using marginalizing discourses of sexuality and gender, citizenship has also become recognized as an inherently sexualized and gendered framework. It is not simply, to cite recent political debates in various nations, a question of refusing equal status to some citizens by fixing institutions of marriage and kinship to a heterosexual model. Moreover, some theorists of sexual citizenship (Burns and Davies, 2009; Chasin, 2000; Davies and Burns, in press; Evans, 1993; Sender, 2003, 2004) have uncovered the inherent heteronormativity of those constructions of public space and public discourse and modes of consumption that come to stand in for appropriate expressions of citizenship per se.
Inspired by the work of various theorists of sexual citizenship, including Lauren Berlant, Shane Phelan, Jasbir K Puar and others, contributors to this volume ask how queer theory can be used to reframe existing debates on citizenship. Queer theory has emerged as a set of analytical tools to deconstruct and denaturalize assumed allegiances between bodies and identities, spaces and practices, norms and subjectivities in addition to gender and sexuality. How, then, can a queer critique rethink the possibilities of citizenship? Beyond national and legal restrictions to recognition of sexual subjectivities, what other embodiments (and embodied others) fail to qualify for citizenship? To what regimes, states and ‘imagined communities’ are these other bodies constitutively necessary? In posing such questions, a queer critique opens citizenship to the ‘insurgent’ mode proposed by Isin in his concept of ‘becoming political’: a movement inaugurated by ‘that moment when the naturalness of the dominant virtues is called into question and their arbitrariness revealed’ (Isin, 2002: 275). To denaturalize citizenship is also a movement to reconfigure its positioning of centre and margin, inside and outside. In this way, a critique of how citizenship functions via modes of exclusion may not be sufficient; insurgent queer reframing aims to rethink the very terms of citizenship debates such that the space of immanence produced by exclusionary measures not be taken a priori, not be reified as the normative frame of reference.
Critiques of normativity within queer politics, culture and identity have formed a very strong strand of queer theory in recent years; the concept of ‘homonormativity’, proposed by Lisa Duggan (2003), provides one notable example. Building on the implications of this concept, we can also ask to what degree ideas of citizenship as a more general mode of appropriate belonging can apply to communities of gendered and sexual subjects, for instance communities of gays and lesbians. To what degree are structures of exclusion and figures of alien and immanent otherness mapped on to the imagined communities of queer subjects? How might such a queer critique of gay and lesbian cultures, modes of consumption and identity politics produce an understanding of what David Bell and Jon Binnie have termed ‘good’ and ‘bad’ gay and lesbian citizens (Bell and Binnie, 2000)? How might ‘western’ gay and lesbian identity politics impose a hegemonic framework cross-culturally in such a way that assumes modes of belonging and norms of identification under an imperialistic umbrella of global sexual citizenship? And how might certain framings of queer sexuality function to further alienate those already othered by various regimes of subordination, as Butler (2009) has argued is the case with victims of torture?
This special issue of Sexualities opens with an investigation of the social construction of a figure that proves constantly troublesome to existing frames of citizenship, particularly when understood as a category of sexual subjectivity. Kerry H Robinson unpacks conventional tropes of innocence and protection as they apply to the presence of sexuality in and around children, and especially in educational and legal contexts. The difficulties of sexual knowledge among children – as not-quite or future citizens – draw attention to the tacit and uneven qualifications to citizenship based on heteronormative sexual arrangements. Following Robinson’s contribution, two articles place performance at the centre of the production of counter-discourses on citizenship. Cristyn Davies analyses the subversive interventions of performance artist Holly Hughes, whose work draws explicit attention to the gendered, sexualized and racialized constructions of American nationality, and to Hughes’s own contentious position within the legal challenges, moral panics and politicking that characterized government funding of arts and cultural production in the USA throughout the 1990s. Davies makes an argument for performance art as a strategic queering of the body politic and of the various stagings of the idealized citizen body. Turning her attention to the staging of nationality in Australia, Margaret Hamilton uses a reading of the performance art of William Yang to expose discursive and structural continuities between the mediation of HIV/AIDS and of the experience of immigrant communities within Australia. Hamilton argues that Yang’s photographic documentation of social marginalization traces the unevenness of ‘blood-lines’ of national belonging.
Integration and consumption of Otherness provides a thematic focus for the article by Kellie Burns, who proposes a critique of the ‘global queer world-building’ project of cosmopolitan sexual citizenship. Also in the context of Australianness, but very much with a view to the projection of this discourse to international audiences, Burns makes a case study of the opening ceremony of the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney to demonstrate the role of normative consumptive and identity-building practices within the staging of queer tolerance and solidarity. Critique of global taxonomies of queerness is also at the centre of Judith Halberstam’s contribution, in which theoretical and anthropological constructions of transgenderism and gender variance are read alongside important film representations, ultimately questioning the ‘parochialism’ that works to impose hegemonic models of global queer citizenship. Also engaging with questions of transgender, Anita Brady identifies something necessarily queer in the heteronormative heartland of New Zealand’s metonymic masculine subject. In this final article of the special issue, Brady analyses the function of humour in a famous local advertising campaign to produce an unlikely gender-variant disturbance of heteronormative nationalism.
In addition to the these contributors, several people deserve acknowledgment for their efforts in bringing this special issue to fruition. Not least, we thank Agnes Skambalis and Ken Plummer at Sexualities for their guidance and support, as well as the scholars who were kind enough to offer their time and expertise in anonymously reviewing articles.