Sexual Citizenship Research Articles

Retraction statement: “Right to Space: Moving Towards Sexual Citizenship Beyond the Nation State” by Zebracki, M.

AntipodeVolume 46, Issue 2 p. 592-592 ErratumFree Access Retraction statement: “Right to Space: Moving Towards Sexual Citizenship Beyond the Nation State” by Zebracki, M. This article corrects the following: Retracted: Right to Space: Moving Towards Sexual Citizenship Beyond the Nation State Martin Zebracki, Volume 45Issue 4Antipode pages: 785-788 First Published online: April 19, 2013 First published: 26 December 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12079AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat The above article, published online on 19th April 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the author, Antipode Foundation Ltd, and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to unattributed prior publication of a substantially similar version of this article in Dutch in Agora, Volume 29, Number 1, 2013 (“Recht op ruimte” by Martin Zebracki & Valerie De Craene). Reference Zebracki, M. (2013), Right to Space: Moving Towards Sexual Citizenship Beyond the Nation State. Antipode, 45(4): 785– 788. doi: 10.1111/anti.12022 Wiley Online LibraryWeb of Science®Google Scholar Volume46, Issue2March 2014Pages 592-592 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Citizenship across generations: struggles around heteronormativities

This article argues for the importance of attention to intergenerational relations in understanding the conditions for access to citizenship rights and recognition for non-heterosexual people. The case of Italy, where individual entitlements and responsibilities are largely structured around intergenerational dependence, underlines the salience of intergenerational relations in relation to sexual citizenship. Drawing on a study of the families of origin of self-identified young gay men and lesbians carried out in Italy, this article explores how access to citizenship rights and the construction of the identities that can claim recognition are mediated by processes of mutual disclosure and negotiation within families. Beyond a shared notion of family ties as defined by unconditional love, a diversity of narratives are detected, linked to differences in gender, class and family cultures. It is especially when family narratives are informed by the middle-class ideology of the democratic family as a space for the development of authentic selves that access to rights becomes conditional upon compliance with the obligations of a ‘good child’, and the conditions for the reproduction of heteronormative citizenship are set.

Work that body: Distinguishing an authentic middle-aged gay self

Abstract Theorizing gay men’s sartorial tastes as a distinguishing marker from heterosexual men has neglected the way midlife gay men differentiate themselves through self-presentation from other gay men and how they respond to ageing and gay ageism. Based on interviews with gay men living in Manchester and observation sessions in its ‘gay village’, I examine what midlife gay men’s body management practices say about the construction of ageing and the discourse of ageism in local gay culture. I focus mainly on moral claims to bodily authenticity, which differentiate midlife gay men from younger or older gay men and indicate the multidirectional operation of gay ageism. Claims to authentic midlife self-presentation and sexual citizenship work in three ways: first, through reproducing ageism, especially a reverse ageism; second, by introducing ambivalences that indicate negotiation with gay ageing and ageism; and third, using resources of ageing like ‘ageing capital’ and at times age-related ‘technologies of the self’, ageism is subverted by critiquing it and re-claiming the value of age.

Gay fathers, gay citizenship: on the power of reproductive futurism and assimilation

Edelman's new ethics of queer theory is focussed on the all-pervasive image of the child, which he argues provides the foundation for the hegemonic politics of ‘reproductive futurism’ (L. Edelman, 2004. No future: queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). His searing criticism raises important questions for sexual citizenship, and particularly for the gay parent as citizen. Edelman's argument that queers should abandon accommodation and instead embrace their position as the figure of negativity offers a challenge to all those gay men that seek to be fathers. In this article, I critically engage with Edelman's arguments and explore the implications of a queer rejection of reproductive futurism and parental privilege through an empirical investigation of young gay men's stories about the possibility of becoming fathers. I argue that whilst Edelman's uncompromising stance serves to open a space for gay men embracing the jouissance that is increasingly being abandoned through an assimilationist desire for citizenship, it also, more problematically, closes down possibilities for gay men and thus further reinforces present inequalities in citizenship. Is negativity the only option in the face of the onslaught of reproductive futurism or might there be a dialectical solution that is at once radically queer but also reflective of the variety of claims for sexual citizenship?

Género y sexualidad en las universidades públicas mexicanas.

El artículo presenta una reflexión sobre el papel de la academia en la construcción de la democracia y en el ejercicio de la ciudadanía sexual a partir de los hallazgos de una investigación en el campo de la enseñanza de la sexualidad y el género en instituciones de educación superior en México. La metodología utilizada en este estudio combinó la comparación de planes y programas de estudio, así como estadísticas de instituciones que trabajan estas temáticas. Se realizaron también entrevistas semi-estructuradas con docentes-investigadores de instituciones de educación superior en la ciudad de México y los estados de México, Jalisco, Michoacán, Chiapas y Yucatán.

Critiquing the heteronormativity of the banal citizen in New Zealand's mediated civil union debate

This article extends Billig's (1995) landmark thesis on banal nationalism by considering how processes of national deixis circumscribe the boundaries of citizenship and forms of belonging within nation-states. Drawing on critical analyses of sexual citizenship, the article provides a discursive analysis of the debate over civil union in the New Zealand mainstream press during 2004–2005. It argues that this mediated debate represented an historical moment where the routine deictic flagging of the nation, and the correlated flagging of the ‘banal citizen’, fundamentally broke down, thereby allowing this unmarked and ‘ordinary’ process to be systematically examined. Four major discourses are identified in press coverage: ‘Homosexual’ subjects as abnormal and disordered, tolerance, equality and human rights, the sanctity of marriage and the preservation of the family (and the social order). Although the passing of the Civil Union Act does mark a (faltering) step forward in sexual equality, we argue that the presence of these discourses suggests that forms of both ontological and cultural heterosexism persist in New Zealand society. Despite the Act conferring new legal rights, ultimately we conclude that the four discourses act to restrict the extent to which ‘homosexual’ subjects are considered ‘valid’ and ‘legitimate’ citizens. In continuing to structure the public politics of sexual citizenship in New Zealand, these discourses have influenced recent debates over legislative moves towards ‘marriage equality’ in ways that raise concerns over the continuation of heterosexist norms, as well as exclusionary forms of homo-nationalism. More generally, this research demonstrates the effectiveness of Billig's work as a valuable and productive analytic lens to explicate concerns over the exclusionary nature of citizenship itself.

Queer Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State: Interrogating Sexual Investments in Punishment

This article examines the changing relationship between sexual politics and the carceral state. While sexual and gender nonconforming people have been historically punished for transgressing social norms, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in Europe and North America have begun to invest in the state punishment of others. Whether supporting hate crime legislation, calling for more police in gentrifying neighborhoods, or participating in police recruitment campaigns, organisations that formerly fought against criminalisation trends now actively support expanding forms of state violence and punishment. Focussing on examples from the British and US context—and drawing from the concept of ‘queer necropolitics’—this article considers how the carceral state has shifted from a key target of queer protest to celebrated guardian of sexual citizenship. Arguing that this process constitutes more than just another story of queer assimilation and co-optation, the article suggests this shift reflects a deeper reconfiguration of sexual politics, where citizenship norms and practices are increasingly infused with a chillingly punitive and deathly logic.

Social movements and sexual citizenship in southern Europe

Social movements and sexual citizenship in southern Europe

Regulating Latina Youth Sexualities through Community Health Centers

This article examines the regulation of Latina youth sexualities in the context of sexual and reproductive health care provision. In-depth interviews with health care providers working in two Latino-serving community health centers are analyzed for how they interpret and respond to the sexual and reproductive practices of their low-income Latina teen patients. The author finds that providers emphasize teenage pregnancy as a social problem among this population to the exclusion of other dimensions of youth sexualities and encourage Latina girls’ adherence to a life course trajectory that conforms to middle-class, heteronormative ideals as a solution to this problem. By relying on such understandings, providers construct meanings of sexual citizenship that require participation in bourgeois heteronormativity. These findings suggest that Latino-serving community health centers, their providers, and their teen patients could benefit from questioning the assumptions that inform providers’ appraisals of Latina youth and developing a more inclusive approach to Latina youth sexualities beyond a discourse of pregnancy prevention. Such efforts could allow community health centers to actively participate in disrupting the structural inequalities that shape their young patients’ lives.

From a wonderful story to the no-nonsense facts: affect, knowledge and sexual citizenship in pedagogical texts for young children and their parents

This paper performs a textual analysis on three popular children's picture books that describe the ‘facts of life’. It positions the books, published over a 60-year period, as components of a broader pedagogical apparatus incorporating texts, parents, children and experts in particular spatial and temporal locations. It traces movements of affect, rationality, scientificity and sexual citizenship through and between the picture books, and considers how these textual components of the pedagogical apparatus construct young children as particular subjects and objects of knowledge in sex education.

Treatment is Prevention

The past 15 years have seen the waning of both cultural analysis and activism dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention, especially in relation to the enduring epidemic in the United States. However, current mutations in the American HIV prevention landscape, driven by the biomedical promise of a ‘Test and Treat’ strategy, are producing potentially destructive outcomes for vulnerable and dispossessed communities, a situation that demands renewed investment from cultural critics. The aim of this article is to mobilize a specific strand of biopolitical theory (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito) to examine recent federally orchestrated prevention measures dedicated to a scale-up and integration of HIV testing, treatment and ‘linkage to care’, in order to move beyond their reductive approach to the preservation of life and advance a more capacious, politically engaged prevention model rooted in communal rather than individual forms of immunity. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, MD, I attend to ways in which local HIV prevention initiatives are courting the city's precarious Ballroom community – a kinship system of black queer youth structured around competitive dance and performance – in an attempt to materialize their ‘target population’ for testing purposes. Previously neglected by governmental and medical institutions, members of the Ballroom community now find themselves addressed as responsible sexual citizens who are expected to protect their bodies by getting tested and, if tested positive, start treatment. Yet, this emphasis on the medical rights and responsibilities of HIV positive youth threatens to abandon large groups of youth who have managed to stay uninfected. I conclude by locating this problem in the incongruity between the biological life protected by current ‘Test and Treat’ strategies and the forms of life that allow the Ballroom community to persevere under often dire circumstances, constituting an indigenous resource for an alternative take on HIV prevention

Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation after the Sexual Revolution

It has become common for couples to live together outside of marriage—and the seeming acceptance of this trend masks a long history of social and legal discrimination. Elizabeth H. Pleck provides a comprehensive study of cohabitation from the 1960s onward. Her book documents “a failure of beliefs, laws, and policy to keep up with changing reality,” as cohabitation has served as grounds to deny people housing, public assistance, custody, and privacy (p. 4). Popular discourses have deemed cohabitation a sinful practice that undermines families and that breeds violence, poverty, and instability. The stigmatization of unwed couples, Pleck claims, stems from a persistent “culture of marriage promotion” strengthened by the 1970s emergence of the New Right, currently evident in debates over same-sex marriage and government programs that promote marriage as a solution to poverty (p. 5). Pleck views cohabitation as a matter of “sexual citizenship,” which includes the right not to marry and to have one's family form recognized (ibid.). Her study ponders the legacy of the 1960s, when cohabitation became visible and central to public debate.

Passing and the State in Junot Diaz's "Drown"

This essay presents Junot Diaz’s 1996 short story “Drown” as an important discussion of passing that not only spans racial and sexual identities but also tracks state strategies for managing racial and sexual difference. “Drown” describes a post-Fordist overlap between long-standing, ghettoizing state racism and the later, apparently orthogonal state strategy of closeting and homophobia analyzed by Margot Canaday in The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2009). While teachers, the police, and the Army are still glaringly white in this story’s 1990s Dominican immigrant neighborhood, state goods such as higher education and military service have now become the benefits of a “sexual citizenship” (Canaday 256) that premises individuals’ access to modern state benefits and resources on heterosexuality and that defines suspected homosexuals as “anticitizen[s]” (9), beyond the state’s care or concern. The coincidence of these two systems of exclusion means, of course, a doubled burden for the story’s nameless narrator, a ghettoized young Dominican American man with some queer sexual experience. However, it also demonstrates the state’s appropriation of passing for its own biopolitical ends. Passing-for-white was an interstitial tactic of African American resistance to state-sponsored racism, but in the homophobic “straight state,” passing-for-straight becomes the normal condition of full citizenship for everyone. Moreover, for racial minorities, the imperative to pass for straight reinforces existing spatial and geographic forms of institutional racism. “Drown” responds to “sexual citizenship” with a “move to guard the margin” (Spivak 132), marking and maintaining a gap between state and self, discourse and speech. The narrator’s calculated silences preserve ethical possibilities that the state cannot enact, predict, or regulate. I begin here with a prologue recounting Canaday’s major claims, her use of the term passing, and the potential I see for expanding her analysis beyond its original, white-normative conditions of existence. I go on to close-read “Drown,” explicating its narrator’s (self-aware) collaboration with state strategies of racist ghettoization and homophobic exclusion, and then explore theoretical means for imagining an end to such collaboration. Finally, I discuss implications, based on Diaz’s and my analyses, for a more general project of reading race and sexuality together.

Retracted: Right to Space: Moving Towards Sexual Citizenship Beyond the Nation State

<i>Retracted</i>: Right to Space: Moving Towards Sexual Citizenship Beyond the Nation State

Asexuality: from pathology to identity and beyond

This article draws attention to the constitutive mechanisms of asexual identity. It identifies a shift in expert discourse: a move away from pathology towards recognition of asexual identity. While this discursive shift, propelled by recent research in psychology and sexology, could pave the way for the inclusion of asexuals in public culture, it also reaffirms dominant terms and formations pertaining to sexuality and intimacy. The article argues that the discursive formation of a new asexual identity takes place through a process of objectification and subjectification/subjection at the interface between expert disciplines and activism. The recognition of identity is constitutive of subjects that are particularly suitable for self-regulation within the parameters of (neo)liberal citizenship. Yet, at the same time, the discursive shift also makes room for critical intervention akin to queer critique of naturalised gender and sexuality norms. The recognition of asexual identity could serve to destabilise the sexual regime (of truth) that privileges sexual relationships against other affiliations and grants sexual-biological relationships a status as primary in the formation of family and kinship relations. The article concludes that asexual identity encourages us to imagine other pathways of affiliation and other concepts of personhood, beyond the tenets of liberal humanism – gesturing instead towards new configurations of the human and new meanings of sexual citizenship.

Are we there yet? Queer sexual encounters, legal recognition and homonormativity

In 2010, Portugal became the eighth country worldwide to approve same-sex civil marriage. Such legal change is a recent addition to the achievements that have put Portugal at the forefront of sexual citizenship rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Europe. This article investigates the political path of LGBT rights in this Southern European, majority Catholic, and post-dictatorship country, exploring the role of the Portuguese LGBT movement in contributing to change. This research highlights how the state is willing to compensate – via legal recognition – queer sexual encounters to the extent that they willingly embrace the dominant values of respectability and normalcy. In this respect, the approval of same-sex marriage offers the opportunity to discuss issues of agency, citizenship, recognition, and normativity. The paper begins by contextualizing sexual citizenship in democratic Portugal, providing an analytical account of the LGBT movement. In the second section, I suggest that a ‘politics of containment’ has characterized much of recent public discussion about sexual and reproductive rights, and I provide some examples. In the last section, I discuss the political and cultural implications of same-sex marriage law, with a particular focus on issues of normalization and homonationalism – that is how the state can actively contribute to the creation of the acceptable ‘normal gay’ with the compliance of LGBT activism.

Building Respectful Relationships Early: Educating Children on Gender Variance and Sexual Diversity. A Response to Damien Riggs

This article, which is a response to Damien Riggs' article, ‘Heteronormativity in Online Information about Sex: A South Australian Case Study’, focuses on three main areas relevant to children's early education in this area. Firstly, it is important to increase parents’, educators’, and children's awareness of gender variance or gender diversity in children's and young people's lives. Gender variance is becoming increasingly visible, including in schooling, with some children and young people experiencing hostile reactions to their gender transgressions from their peers and also from some adults. Secondly, it is vital that the development of children's sexual citizenship and building respectful relationships starts early in children's lives through open and comprehensive sex and sexualities education in online, schooling, and family contexts. Attempts to include the development of knowledge and skills in building and maintaining respectful relationships and exploring the factors that influence gender and sexual identities in children's early education are hindered by discourses of childhood innocence. The third main area discussed is, in order to effectively address sex and sexualities education in children's lives, there is a need to address these issues in a collaborative manner between early childhood educators and families.

Queering Institutions?: Sexual Identity in Public Education in a Canadian Context

In April 2010, a series of proposed changes to the Ontario sex education curriculum for publicly-funded institutions within the province was announced. Within three days of that announcement, then premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, put a hold on the proposed changes, stating that consideration of the multicultural and religiously diverse needs of the population was required before any changes were to go into effect (“McGuinty”). Since then, the Accepting Schools Act (regarding policies of nondiscrimination in publicly funded schools) has been introduced and hotly debated across the province, and a slightly revised curriculum was implemented in 2010 (to a lesser extent than originally proposed). I use the curriculum debate as an entryway to think about whether it is possible to queer public institutions, specifically asking whether we are capable of queering publicly funded education. Although much contemporary identity theory, and queer theory in particular, pushes boundaries of identity conformity and offers nuanced and complex pictures of the ways people live out their gendered and sexual identities, the gap between this cutting-edge research and the lived reality (here for youth) is demonstrated by ongoing negative responses to sexual or gender diversity. I argue that the consternation sexual and gender diversity elicits when introduced into sex education curriculum is a reflection of the resistance to destabilizing sexual identity within the institution of education. Incorporating Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of becoming and Brenda Cossman’s work on sexual citizenship, sexual identity destabilization within public education is critical because youth are in the process of becoming sexual citizens; and yet it is the space of becoming and of being in progress that elicits moral panic and resistance to this destabilization. Although identity theory and queer theory continue to push boundaries and ask challenging questions about what “normal” is and how “the normal” is continually redefined, there is still a large gap between these theoretical insights and the lived experience of identity difference. Surveys among youth in Canada, for example, regarding the experience of Queering Institutions?: Sexual Identity in Public Education in a Canadian Context

Putting ethical sex into practice: sexual negotiation, gender and citizenship in the lives of young women and men

When young people begin to explore their sexuality they are often subject to particularly strong surveillance from adults and the institutions of the state. How young people become ethical sexual citizens is not well understood. In recent years an increased focus on comprehensive sexuality programmes that include violence prevention have led to the development of a number of education programmes targeting young people. This article will draw on quantitative and qualitative responses of a three-phase (pre-group, post-group, follow-up) impact evaluation from 153 young women and men from Australia and New Zealand who participated in the Sex and Ethics Violence Prevention Program from 2009 to 2011. The Program encourages young people to explore alternative approaches to gender and sexuality and learn skills in ethical negotiation which they can utilise in ‘real life’ situations. This includes developing a reflexive ethical stance to consider how sexual choices impact on themselves and others. The primary aim of the Program is to reduce pressured, coerced sex and sexual assault in intimate relationships. Despite gender differences women and men were able to move toward behavioural change, explore alternative approaches to gender relations and increase their skills in sexual negotiation as ethical sexual citizens.

Young sexual citizens: reimagining sex education as an essential form of civic engagement

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) pose a significant threat to the health and well-being of populations worldwide, and to young people in particular. Des]pite empirical evidence that comprehensive sex education is an important tool for prevention, the legitimacy and content of sex education in schools continue to be challenged by conservative narratives within society. This paper argues that sex education should be re-imagined as a form of civic training for children and recognised as an important corollary to public health efforts aimed at reducing the rate of STIs. The author's claim builds on notions of sexual citizenship, which consider sexuality to be an essential aspect of citizenship and a form of civic engagement. Sexual citizenship can make three important contributions to the advancement of sex education. First, the model can lead to greater acceptance of the idea of sex education by challenging conservative notions about children and sexuality, which are at the root of the classic objections to sex education. Second, it can help shape the content of sex education by eliciting parallels between civic participation and sex education. Finally, by emphasising how sex education can address some of the social phenomena underlying the spread of STIs, the model can be used to facilitate the incorporation of sex education into public health agendas. Although the author uses sex education in Canada as the principal case study, the paradigm may be equally helpful in other countries.