Sexual citizenship: An analysis of gay men as sexual citizens in non-metropolitan Ireland and England
Aidan McKearney
London Metropolitan University
aidan.mckearney@londonmet.ac.uk
Historically, lesbians and gay men have had ambiguous citizenship status, neither fully accepted nor fully excluded; their place in the national imaginary has been as marginal citizens (Phelan, 2001 in Richardson, 2004). Within a context of an increasingly globalised world which is witnessing much change in attitudes to sexual orientation, there has been a growing academic and political interest in developing a concept around ‘sexual citizenship’. This paper presents early findings from a qualitative study of 42 gay men in rural Ireland and rural England. The study aims to explore and analyse gay men as sexual citizens in the non-metropolitan space. Recent years have seen significant changes in the political, legal and policy context surrounding discrimination against LGBT people with both the UK and Ireland having instituted major reform packages. This study adopts a cross-country perspective but with a specific inquiry into the life and work experiences of gay men in non-metropolitan and rural communities. This paper will present the reality ‘on the ground’ for gay men in these two jurisdictions- where LGB people have achieved full ‘constitutional citizenship’ but where the intersection between (rural) space and sexuality can produce some surprising results from a citizenship perspective. The paper argues that testimonies from respondents indicate that gay men in rural areas are often granted a form of ‘contingent citizenship’ by heteronormative societies, but that increasingly, gay men are bringing change to their rural life spaces through visibility, voice and resistance. Reference cited: Richardson, D. (2004), Locating Sexualities: From Here to Normality, Sexualities, 7:391.
A Paradoxical Growth in Institutionalized Activism: Complications Presented by the Flemish LGBTIQ Movement
Bart Eeckhout
University of Antwerp
bart.eeckhout@uantwerpen.be
For more than a decade, Belgium has been in the top group of European countries extending legal rights and providing social policies for sexual minorities. On ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map of Europe, which compares 49 countries across a range of legal and policy criteria, the country has come to outperform even the Netherlands and all Scandinavian countries by a substantial margin. Belgium ranked second on the list for several years (currently it has dropped to third place). Under these circumstances, one might expect to see – along the lines formulated in the panel abstract – a steady drop in LGBTIQ activism in the country. And yet the reality proves to be considerably more complex and resistant to standard narratives than that. While the Flemish umbrella organization for LGBTIQ activism, çavaria, seemed to be cresting and then starting its slow descent a few years ago, this trend has been reversed again. The paradoxical result is that the organization has never before had such a high number of member groups, operated on such a high annual budget, employed so many paid staff members, and got so many volunteers involved. This situation is conspicuously out of balance, furthermore, with what is the case in the country’s two other main communities, in Brussels and Wallonia. As I have been involved at many levels of çavaria’s operations and have served on its board of directors for more than ten years, I would like to propose an insider’s perspective that can help us complicate and fine-tune the questions that shape the panel and, by extension, the conference. This will force me to engage with a wealth of cultural/political variables and contingencies, but also to ponder theoretical questions about new normativities and the confusing Flemish/Belgian faces of homonationalism.
The Limits of Sexual Citizenship: Towards Sexualised Citizenship – Setting an Agenda
Paul Reynolds
INSEP – International Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics
Edge Hill University
reynoldp@edgehill.ac.uk
This paper will mount an argument that notwithstanding the legal, civil, cultural and political gains in sexual politics and legitimacy in most parts of the ‘global North/West’, the articulation of the concept of sexual citizenship is premature. The gains in sexual politics and legitimacy are uneven in their application, are still accompanied by examples of the politics of hate, violence and subjection in key social and political institutions and in civil society. They are mainly confined to sexual identities, and principally lesbian and gay and transgendered identities. Their political articulation in law has not been matched by a concomitant change in social and cultural norms – ‘hearts and minds’. The nature of this change has been largely assimilationist, conditional and reformist – classical constructed within homonormativity.
Legal, political, social and cultural advances should not be denigrated insofar as they have effected real change for the lives of some, both in some freedoms to express themselves and more freedoms from fear, but the global picture is bleak and the nature of these changes can be often superficial and limited
This paper argues that however the balance sheet constructed in respect of incremental steps towards sexual rights and justice, it was always limited insofar as it lacked a clear notion of what sexual citizenship would be and instead conceived the notion of citizenship as a benchmark of largely legal change that would not subvert heteronormativity nor offer a conceptual alternative to a non-sexual citizenship. More, the identarian nature of the politics of sexual citizenship means that those broadly aggregating under identity categories failed to adequately connect with other sexual (and non-sexual) struggles and their anger and protest was easily dissipated by incremental legal and civil change.
Sexual citizenship should be more than a benchmark of fundamental incursions into and rejections of parts of citizenship in contemporary societies. The latter part of the paper will sketch an alternative conception – sexualised citizenship – that seeks a more fundamental reframing as to what it is to belong as a sensual subject in a civilised society.
