Abstract
To say that a great deal has happened in the field of sexualities since the first issue of this journal was published would be something of an understatement. We have witnessed the making of ‘new’ coalitions that include LGBTQI identities through a process of representational claims-making at local, national and transnational levels. This is a model of activism for social change based on seeking access to equal rights, with recognition of same-sex unions or ‘Love Rights’ taking centre stage. Sexualities is also, increasingly, a discourse of human rights with growing global concerns over ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ (SOGI) issues. 1 Along with this has come a professionalization and scaling up of political organizing and activism that, to varying extents, can be seen to chime with neoliberal state agendas prompting debate over constituency representational image-making as ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’ citizens who ‘qualify’ to belong (Paternotte and Tremblay, 2015).
During this time, a new body of work on sexuality and citizenship has emerged that, at least in part, reflects these shifts in the political landscape of gender and sexuality, and the fact that citizenship, expressed primarily as demands for formal equality, has become the dominant language of sexual politics in many countries. It was around the time of the launch of Sexualities that I first started to write about sexuality and citizenship (Richardson, 1998, 2000a, 2000b), in the company of scholars such as David Bell and Jon Binnie (2000); Lauren Berlant (1997); David Evans, (1993); Shane Phelan (2001); Ken Plummer (2003); Carl Stychin (2003) and Jeffrey Weeks (1998). A key focus was on analysing how sexuality (like gender and race) informs constructions of citizenship, and also how ideas and practices of citizenship were shaping debates around sexuality and sexual politics.
One of the reasons I have continued to work in this field of study, and why I have chosen sexual citizenship as my focus here in reflecting on Sexualities over the course of the last 20 years, is that it has become a vibrant area of research and scholarship. Within sexuality studies, despite the diversity of theorizing and research over this period, it has undoubtedly been a dominant presence. This is a body of work that not only speaks to long-standing issues of identity, belonging, and exclusion, but also encompasses a complex set of new debates and conceptualizations that have been agenda-setting. These include the effects of civic inclusion on meanings of sexuality both at the level of social institutions such as marriage and family and at the level of individual identities and subjectivities such as, for example, the notion of being ‘post-gay’; the emergence of an analytical focus on ‘homonormativity’; the potential exclusionary effects of processes of ‘sexual democratization’ and the ways these function in the (re)production of boundaries of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (sexual) citizens 2 and associated citizen subjectivities; a new focus on sexuality and national border making, connected with ideas about modernity and (in)tolerance, that has led to concepts of homonationalism and homocolonialism; processes of commodification and consumerism and their interface with access to rights of citizenship and forms of belonging; and the relationship between neoliberalism and the politics of sexuality. From this list alone it should be clear that this is a body of work that extends beyond sexuality (and citizenship) studies, and connects to a wide range of issues that are central to contemporary social and political theory including understandings of identity and community; equality and diversity; neoliberalism and governmentality; processes of individualization; nationalisms; human rights and globalization. Hardly surprising, then, that over the last two decades the literature on the interrelations between sexuality and citizenship has rapidly expanded to become an important area of study across a number of disciplines. Associated with this, the concept of sexual citizenship has become a key concept in the social sciences.
However, while sexual citizenship is used by more and more people in more and more contexts, it is a term that is increasingly voiced uncritically. This is also part of my reason for deciding to focus on this burgeoning field. It is time for a critical evaluation of the notion of sexual citizenship that includes consideration of implications for its future conceptual and empirical development, as well as for political activism. This is particularly salient, reflecting back over the years since the journal’s inception to the political present, where transformations in access to citizenship in many parts of the world might (at face value at least) appear to unsettle some of the assumptions of earlier work. Where are we with sexual citizenship now? Do the same arguments about the sexualization of citizenship apply? Who … or is it what … constitutes the normative (sexual) citizen?
While not wanting to underestimate the significance of legislative and social change in relation to sexualities equalities, more especially LGBT rights, viewed through a ‘success discourse’ it might suggest that equality has been achieved and that, in some parts of the world at least, we are post-(sexual) citizenship, bringing into question the future of LGBT politics (Ball, 2016), as well as analytic struggles. Yet it is clear that this is far from the case. As recent reports have highlighted, within Europe the pace of legislation and practice in relation to LGBT rights is very uneven (FRA, 2016; ILGA, 2016). In addition, research carried out after legal equality suggests that despite advances in policy there remain many challenges in progressing equality (Colgan and Wright, 2011; Richardson and Monro, 2012). We are in any case surrounded on a daily basis with examples that testify to continued discrimination and inequalities in terms of sexuality: attacks on women’s sexual and reproductive rights including so-called ‘honour’ killings of women who marry against their family’s wishes; the trafficking of women and children on a global scale; plans in the USA to reinstate a military ban on transgender people; reports of the abduction, torture and killing of men ‘suspected’ of being gay in the Russian republic of Chechnya, where a campaign has also been launched to force divorced heterosexual couples to ‘reunite’ on the basis that this is a key cause of social problems; and so the list goes on.
But that’s not all. There are other pressing reasons why we need to re-vision the concept of sexual citizenship. Analysis of the normative assumptions underpinning notions of sexual citizenship has received scant attention in the literature. Such considerations require us (at least) to problematize the territorial framings of sexual citizenship in terms both of the field of analysis and areas of knowledge it covers and at various scales of belonging. Crucial to this is analysis of the limitations of a European–North American historical configuration, in order to advance understandings of how sexual citizenship operates both in the Global South and North. For instance, the centrality of the individual (sexual) citizen who chooses in the literature marginalizes and obscures sites of struggles over sexuality where constructions of selfhood are experienced differently, as constituted within the social relations of kinship, family and community for instance, and cultural contexts where the primary focus is on collective rights (Plummer, 2005; Richardson, 2017a, 2017b).
There are some positive indications in the literature that a re-visioning of sexual citizenship is taking place and that, despite its Anglophone origins, sexual citizenship is gradually becoming a multi-site concept that incorporates studies of regimes of sexuality and models of citizenship of non-western sites: see, for example, the special issue of Sexualities (2017) on the local specificities of sexual citizenship in the Asia-Pacific region. In arguing for the need to examine sexual citizenship in non ‘western-centric’ ways, it is also important to highlight the importance of a multi-scalar approach to analysing citizenship struggles over sexuality at local, urban, national and transnational levels. Historically, the dominant focus within the literature has been at the level of a person’s status as a (sexual) citizen of a particular nation state. Recognition of universal human rights in relation to sexuality represents a changing spatiality of understanding sexual citizenship; a process of de-territorialization of particular aspects of sexual citizenship that represents a partial move towards conceptualizing sexual citizenship as a multi-scalar process (Kollman and Waites, 2009). Finally, it is important to acknowledge the constituencies and areas of citizenship that have shaped the development of constructions of sexual citizenship. In the main, it is studies of lesbian and gay citizenship (with some BTI) that has informed the literature, with a dominant emphasis on relationship-based rights claims. Analyses of sexual citizenship that are multi-themed incorporating a diverse range of claims and struggles over rights of citizenship and forms of belonging, as well as the intersectional aspects of these, will provide more nuanced understandings of the interrelations between sexuality and citizenship. These are just some of the issues to be addressed in re-visioning sexual citizenship: a process that will surely continue to be advanced through future editions of Sexualities.