Sexual identity,citizenship and medical power of attorney: case illustrations from Northern Ontario,Canada1

Current analyses of sexual identity and citizenship offer complexity to debates about what it means to be a citizen in liberal democratic societies. However, thus far there is limited inclusion of ethnographic, narrative‐based research that addresses how lesbians and gay men experience and negotiate citizenship in their everyday lives. In this paper, I argue that attitudes about medical power of attorney are a lens through which we can examine how lesbians negotiate and experience citizenship in their daily lives and in medical settings. My analysis demonstrates how normative citizenship structures are experienced, reinforced and challenged by four lesbians living in a community in Ontario's Near North region, Canada. In providing case illustrations, I argue that the inclusion of lived experiences strengthens and deepens textual, historical and political analyses of citizenship.     

Sexual Citizenship in the European Union

This article examines two different uses of the language of citizenship: in the context of the 'sexual citizen', and the transnational 'European citizen' of European Union politics. It begins with an exploration of how the concept of citizenship has been constitutively built on a set of binary constructs of in/exclusion and can prove a disciplining and regulatory concept. Yet, simultaneously, citizenship can have an active and democratic potentiality. The article interrogates these two faces of citizenship by considering the mobilization of lesbians and gay men through the International Lesbian and Gay Association Europe (ILGA Europe), and the engagement of ILGA with the institutions of the European Union. The article concludes that European and sexual citizenship underscores the tension, not only between active and passive citizenship forms, but more generally, between identity and difference. This tension demands, in turn, a reappraisal of identity-based thinking, in favour of a more coalitional, affinity-based politics .     

Immigrant sexual citizenship: intersectional templates among Mexican gay immigrants to the USA

Existing literature on sexual citizenship has emphasized the sexuality-related claims of de jure citizens of nation-states, generally ignoring immigrants. Conversely, the literature on immigration rarely attends to the salience of sexual issues in understanding the social incorporation of migrants. This article seeks to fill the gap by theorizing and analyzing immigrant sexual citizenship. While some scholars of sexual citizenship have focused on the rights and recognition granted formally by the nation-state and others have stressed more diffuse, cultural perceptions of community and local belonging, we argue that the lived experiences of immigrant sexual citizenship call for multiscalar scrutiny of templates and practices of citizenship that bridge national policies with local connections. Analysis of ethnographic data from a study of 76 Mexican gay and bisexual male immigrants to San Diego, California, reveals the specific citizenship templates that these men encounter as they negotiate their intersecting social statuses as gay/bisexual and as immigrants (legal or undocumented); these include an ‘asylum’ template, a ‘rights’ template, and a ‘local attachments’ template. However, the complications of their intersecting identities constrain their capacity to claim immigrant sexual citizenship. The study underscores the importance of both intersectional and multiscalar approaches in research on citizenship as social practice.     

From Identity to Queer Politics: Shifts in Normative Heterosexuality and the Meaning of Citizenship

This essay argues that there is occurring in the United States something of a shift from identity to queer politics, which is paralleled by changes in the social patterns of normative heterosexuality. I consider some of the implications for thinking about sexual citizenship. In particular, I comment on the ambivalent relationship of a queer politics to a politics of citizenship.     

The post-migration sexual citizenship of Latino gay men in Canada

The Cuéntame! study interviewed 25 Spanish-speaking gay and bisexual men in Toronto. Their migration experiences are traversed by economic rationales, security concerns and the embodied experiences of race, gender, culture and sexuality. Most express narratives of empowered opportunity in distancing themselves from restrictive sexual regimes of their place of origin, but at the same time, many migrants trade a new sense of social acceptance as gay for marginalized statuses defined by diminished social and economic capital. The social participatory rights of citizenship are particularly affected by sexuality and social class. The need and desire to establish social and sexual connections in a new environment often characterized by economic vulnerability shape experiences of social capital and citizenship rights.     

Boundary riding: Cross‐cultural analysis,national cinema and genre

This paper addresses the relation between rhetoric and politics through a reading of the term ‘queer’ as it circulated in three different communities in the 1990s: the activist group Queer Nation; the (American) field of study now known as Queer Theory; and an underground queer‐punk press (fanzines'). Reflection on the specific uses of the term ‘queer’ indicates widely divergent and conflicting meaning‐making processes. For some people, the term ‘queer’ signifies all people outside of normative heterosexuality, while for others, the term only refers to lesbians and gay men. Within both Queer Nation and Queer Theory, a metaphorical association is established among ‘queers’ and ‘lesbian/gays’. By contrast, queer‐punks employ the term catachrestically, as a metaphor for which no literal referent exists. Rhetorical theory can clarify these different employments of the same term. Theories of metaphor and catachresis help us to understand how relations of association are established among queers and lesbian/gays, and how particular rhetorical strategies relate to specific political agendas.     

Applying Functional Grammar: A Discourse Analysis of Sexually Explicit Stories Written in Adult Magazines

A number of studies have addressed the relationship between sexual orientation and its effect on erotic discourse. Taken together, these studies provide limited evidence that heterosexuals in general may talk less explicitly and less candidly about sexual matters. Adopting the tools of Halliday's functional grammar, I undertake a discourse analysis to compare and contrast two erotic stories published in mainstream sexually explicit adult magazines. These two texts include depictions of: (1) cross-sex sexual activities written for heterosexual men; and (2) male same-sex sexual activities written for gay men. I analyze the mechanisms employed by the narrators for the purposes of thematic development, the representation of the processes, participants and circumstances, and the establishment of interpersonal relationships between the stories' narrators and the readers. I provide evidence that the narrators exploit parallel linguistic devices. I argue that this is not surprising given that the texts' purposes are similar: to provide erotic pleasure to those readers who choose to read them. The linguistic means of deriving erotic pleasure is thus not so much argued to be a function of sexual orientation, but rather personal sexual preferences that vary from individual to individual within the heterosexual and gay male communities.     

The Politicization of Marriage in Contemporary American Public Policy: The Defense of Marriage Act and the Personal Responsibility Act

The sexuality politics terrain in the United States is currently marked by a complex and contradictory set of developments‐non-traditional family structures are becoming more common, popular opinion is moving in a more tolerant direction, and the lesbian and gay rights movement has enjoyed some victories, but conservative family values and patriarchal heterosexual marriage have been vigorously promoted by influential right-wing social movements and more deeply institutionalized through important public policy initiatives and court decisions. This article considers the theoretical implications of these developments with respect to the conceptual approaches to citizenship and sexuality. It then analyses two major pieces of federal legislation in depth: the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Personal Responsibility Act (PRA). DOMA effectively encourages the states to ban same-sex marriages. The PRA is generally considered as a welfare 'reform' law that imposes compulsory 'workfare' schemes and time limits for benefit recipients. It nevertheless has a significant sexual regulation dimension. Both the religious right's campaign against same-sex marriage and the welfare reformers' attack on the rights of single mothers contribute to a reactionary politicization of marriage. In conclusion, the article contends that it is only insofar as lesbian and gay rights issues are understood more broadly as but one aspect of sexual regulation and citizenship rights struggles that we can develop more effective ways of advancing the sexual liberation movement as a whole.     

Civil Society and Political Action in Democratized Korea: Revamping Democratic Consolidation from a Participatory Perspective*

This essay aims to re-evaluate the quality of democratic consolidation in South Korea from a participatory democracy perspective. In order to do so, I, drawing on Barber's theory of strong democracy, redefine democratic consolidation in terms of the active citizenship and political dynamism that it breeds rather than in terms of stability, which overly prefers a liberal-pluralist, yet inherently conservative, civil society to a more vibrant and sometimes intractable form of civil society. Understanding democratic consolidation as an open-ended, non-teleological, and perennial struggle for citizenship, I then focus on the Koreans' collective response to the deaths of two teenage girls struck by a US military vehicle in 2002 to explore how Koreans critically re-evaluate their collective identity and actively repossess citizenship in civil society through the inculcation and practice of ch?ng, the Koreans' familial affectionate sentiment. I conclude by presenting “affectionate citizenship” as the most practicable model for Korean democracy.     

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.     

A Difference-Centred Alternative to Theorization of Children's Citizenship Rights

The “rights revolution” has become a central feature of modern political consciousness and has resulted in a proliferation of theories about children's rights. Yet mainstream liberal theories in which children's rights are theorized rarely take children's rights as citizens seriously, due to the normative stance of liberal theories that construct children in terms of “not-yet-citizens”. This article argues for a difference-centred theory of children's citizenship rights by situating the analysis within feminist, anti-racist, gay, lesbian and transgendered theories of citizenship that are difference-centred. It discusses an alternative, difference-centred, articulation of children's citizenship rights through an analysis of their rights of liberty and equality. Through a broadening of liberal, normative notions of liberty defined around exercising individuated autonomous decision-making or the participation in citizenry duties, the article re-defines children's rights of liberty in relational terms that addresses their agency and acknowledges their presence as participating subjects in the multiple relationships in which they interact. It also re-articulates their rights of equality from a mainstream liberal interpretation of “equality-as-same” to one that treats children as “differently equal” members of the public culture in which they are full participants. Normative social institutional practices and assumptions become the focus of the analysis, which concludes that these have to change as they act as barriers that exclude and marginalize children's citizenship rights on the basis of their difference (real and constructed) from an adult norm assumed of citizens.     

The Effect of Requiring Private Employers to Extend Health Benefit Eligibility to Same‐Sex Partners of Employees: Evidence from California

Health disparities related to sexual orientation are well documented and may be due to unequal access to a partner's employer‐sponsored insurance (ESI). We provide the literature's first evaluation of legislation enacted by California in 2005 that required private employers within the state to treat employees in committed same‐sex relationships in the same way as employees in different‐sex marriages with respect to ESI. Our analysis uses data on sexual orientation, partnership, and health insurance from the 2001 to 2007 California Health Interview Surveys (CHIS). Prior to the reform, partnered gay men and lesbians were significantly less likely to have ESI in someone else's name than partnered heterosexuals. Pooling data from 2001 to 2007, we find that the reform had no effects on differences in insurance outcomes between gay and straight men. We find some evidence that the reform increased partnership, reduced full‐time employment, and increased health insurance coverage among lesbians relative to heterosexual women. The increases in insurance coverage for lesbians are consistent with a role for expanded dependent ESI, suggesting that such policies may reduce sexual orientation‐based insurance disparities among women.     

Gender symptoms,or, peeing like a man

A number of books and articles have been published on the relative merits of queer vs gay and lesbian, on the collisions and coalitions of queer, lesbian and feminist, on queering this and that; more has been written on the meaning of queer, its shifting semantic boundaries, its radical inclusiveness or assimilationist tactics (depending on the point of view), its role in the postmodern global market's commodification of sexuality. This paper, a contribution to social semiotics, does not contribute to the debate on queer, but continues the critical project of rethinking sexuality and gender.     

Ethnicity,citizenship and reproduction: Taiwanese wives making citizenship claims in Malaysia

This paper focuses on the experience of one specific group of Taiwanese women married to Chinese Malaysian men to examine the contestational process of bidding for citizenship status in an ethnicized polity. Positioned within a trajectory of transnational linkages between origin and host countries, they achieve success through making use of networking links with co-ethnic Chinese Malaysian women who are well-positioned within government bureaucracy, while forwarding an argument based on familial ideology and the (reproductive) citizenship rights of their Malaysian husbands. As noncitizens, they nevertheless engage in socially contributive ‘acts of citizenship’ that signify their suitability as citizens, nonthreatening to social cohesion. Furthermore, they enhance their strategy by ethnic boundary-making efforts aimed at distancing themselves from People's Republic of China wives who constitute a stereotyped and stigmatized ‘other.’ The discussion makes a contribution to the literature on ethnicity, citizenship, and gender.     

Rights,bioconstitutionalism and the politics of reproductive citizenship in Italy

The introduction of a restrictive law on assisted reproduction in Italy in 2004 sees the privileging of a conservative model of family relations and a patriarchal conception of society. This law excludes many individuals from full reproductive citizenship. The 2004 Act excludes gay couples, single people and people who are carriers of genetically inherited conditions from access to assisted reproductive technologies. This article examines the manner in which citizen contestation of the law via Court challenges engages what Jasanoff (2011, Reframing rights: bioconstitutionalism in the genetic age, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) has termed a practice of ‘bioconstitutionalism’. Such a practice has led to a gradual judicial reworking of the Act, and demonstrates the power of individuals acting in concert to contest successfully draconian state action. It undoes the imposition of a biopolitical ordering on individuals and allows them, through their own continuous action, to perform a contestatory form of citizenship.     

Activist knowledges in queer politics1

Abstract

This paper examines the politics of knowledge production in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism. It situates the development of LGBT activist research capacity within a broader shift towards evidence-based policy-making. The paper presents case studies of LGBT organizing from the US and Canada to demonstrate how LGBT activists utilize established social science methodologies such as statistics to claim legitimacy and render queer worlds visible in the policy process. The paper argues that this development in LGBT advocacy is marked by struggles over the kinds of queer realities that may be enacted through social scientific inquiry. The paper also explores the deployment of auditing and benchmarking in LGBT activist knowledge production. It demonstrates the way in which LGBT activists are using these privileged modes of knowledge production to produce truths regarding the nature, extent and effect of homophobia and heterosexism. The relationship between such calculative technologies and the emergence of LGBT active citizenship practices is considered. The paper concludes by emphasizing the decidedly mixed political implications of the increasing reliance on social science and calculative practices in queer activism.     

Voices from the Margins: Sadomasochism and Sexual Citizenship

Practitioners of sadomasochism (SM) are currently excluded from full citizenship in the UK. However, in recent years we have seen a growth in stories of sadomasochism and with this a challenge to this exclusion from some within SM communities. Over the last ten years or so we also have witnessed the emergence of feminist, sexual and queer citizens providing radical challenges to mainstream approaches to citizenship. This article explores how SM provides boundary tests for notions of citizenship and how it also occupies a particularly complex position with regard to the relationship between citizenship and transgression and the intersection of gender, sexuality and citizenship. In the light of this, it is argued that it is necessary to engage dialectically with citizenship and transgression as a way of meeting the different needs of community members while continuing to work to transform the sexual citizen.