Abstract
Sexual Citizenship and Queer Post-feminism offers much-needed insight into how queer young women and nonbinary people perceive and access health services outside of major metropolitan cities. Grant argues that in Australia presently, discourses of sexuality and gender (non)conformity are constructed against the backdrop of ongoing anti-queer culture wars, and a legislative legacy of ‘tolerance’ that has created the façade of a post-gay world where being same-sex attracted is simply no longer a big deal (of course, terms and conditions apply). This is particularly pertinent for Tasmania, where this research was conducted; a largely regional/rural island jurisdiction that decriminalised homosexuality less than 25 years ago yet returned higher-than-average support for same-sex marriage following the national Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey in 2017. In her appraisal of the current sociopolitical context, Grant provides a compelling justification for revisiting sexual citizenship with a distinct queer lens.
For the young women and nonbinary people Grant speaks to, a neoliberal, post-gay, post-feminist ethic is observed in the ways they articulate their identity and live their lives. They are drawn to fluid identifiers to distance themselves from ‘normativising protocols’ (Muñoz, 1999, 11) that they feel constrain their individual ideas about their gendered embodiment. Many of these young people see themselves as unremarkable, ‘normal’ individuals, and do not place great importance on their sexuality, ‘disidentifying’ from a queer identity politics to suit a heteronormative, rural setting. At the same time, they articulate experiences of marginalisation in schooling and health care settings that reveal how heteronormativity constrains their full citizenship. Grant uses ‘queer post-feminist sexual citizenship’ to draw attention to the ways that young people simultaneously embody and challenge neoliberal individualism and homonormativity. Chapters 1 and 2 of this book articulate Grant’s theoretical framework and offer valuable analysis of the concept of ‘identity politics’ at a time where that term is nebulous and selectively deployed. Additionally, these first chapters provide a very useful synthesis of ongoing theoretical tensions concerning a perceived post-gay streak in the proliferation of nonbinary or fluid gender identity.
In chapter 3, Grant cleverly selects sex education to illustrate how institutional constraints on gender identification and embodiment are internalised by queer young people. This analysis draws attention to the way that sex and risk is perceived and acted upon by queer post-feminist sexual citizens, and how content related to relationships, ‘safe’ sex, risk, health are highly heterosexualised. Importantly, Grant argues that contemporary sex education leaves young queer women with a set of heteronormative sexual scripts, including a ‘socially constructed notion of immunity’ (p. 91); a perception that relationships between women are immune from risks, in terms of health, safety and respect. In chapter 4, Grant analyses how these sexual scripts influence attitudes and decision-making concerning sexual health for these young queer women and nonbinary people. Young queer women demonstrate disidentification from their ‘normal’ neoliberal sexual citizenship as ‘the heteronormativity of safe-sex discourse renders queer safe sex unintelligible’ and actively confuses them (p. 102).
In the fifth chapter, Grant explores the – both structural and conceptual – (in)accessibility of health services in Tasmania. In addition to a lack of practical access to general practitioners (GPs) who are perceived as safe and competent for LGBTIQA+ people, these participants avoided seeking health care, particularly related to their sexual health, because of ‘anticipated, internalised and enacted stigmas’ (Whitehead et al., 2016). Here, we are guided back once more to the concept of queer post-feminist sexual citizenship to explain how access to health services is navigated by young queer women and nonbinary people. While many participants enacted a post-gay, post-feminist ethic in their claims of being ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ in their day-to-day lives, their experiences of a lack of access to affirming health care problematises these claims. Further, Grant’s analysis here demonstrates multiplicity in her research design. Upon identifying accessibility of health care as a theme in her data, she spoke to Tasmanian GPs to gain their perspective on service provision for queer young people. Her analysis of their narratives reveals the barriers to affirming health care for queer youth, which include few opportunities for education, and such issues being afforded a low priority in rural settings, where, due to a lack of available specialists, GPs are burdened with a requirement to be able to provide care for a wide range of complex health concerns. We are provided a fuller picture as a result.
Throughout the book, Grant looks to a future research agenda that embraces intersectionality in spirit and in substance; one that examines the lived experience of young queer people who are non-white, and who live in rural areas with comparatively low socioeconomic status. In her analysis, Grant consistently picks up on the relative privilege of the young women and queer people in her research to lead the lives they do, articulate their identities in the way they do, and navigate their access to resources in the way they do. As an example, the logical solution for many of the people Grant spoke with is to exercise mobility and either travel or relocate to capital cities with better resources and infrastructure, mirroring traditional narratives of rural exodus. The simultaneous recognition of structural problems with care provision and the passive acceptance of individualised solutions reiterates the usefulness of queer post-feminist sexual citizenship as a framework. The insights offered within this thoroughly researched book are particularly useful for any researcher examining queer youth, who are increasingly ‘disidentifying’ from perceived constraints of sex, gender and sexuality labels, despite being subject to the limits of heteronormativity as much as ever.
