When feminist theorists first began writing about citizenship and democracy, they emphasised on the gendered division between private and public domains of life. This included the ways in which women’s positions in private life made it arduous for them to participate in the public domain, the ways in which public life was established as a space for men, and how this uncoupling of spaces was viewed as normal rather than a product of human societies. This opened up avenues for scholars to recognise that the entire political system, in particular the distinction between public and private, is based on a system of dominance and subordination that reveres the lives of some and draws resources from the lives of others.
For example, Carol Pateman, in The Sexual Contract discusses the origin of modern political rights and the manner in which they are constituted on the subjugation of women. She argues that the ‘myth of the social contract’ dominating much of liberal democratic theory assumes that those in the position of subordination are there by choice. The preservation of this myth is what glosses over the patriarchal underpinnings of the category ‘individual’ itself.
A significant contribution of feminist and critical race theorists has been to highlight the ways in which decisions about families, intimate life, and sexuality interwoven with public life are made on the basis of political power. This power also delineates what deserves to be brought into the folds of the imagination of communities and Nation-states and what does not. As critiques of traditional definitions of ‘respectable intimacies’ were being developed, it became evident that one had to interrogate not only individual cultures, family law and policy, but the entire structure of liberal democratic political systems that rested on the continual preservation of many of those divisions. Traditional notions of citizenship and the relationship between citizens and the state had to be rethought by calling into question their androcentric, heterosexist, classist, and racist underpinnings. Furthermore, the extent to which the political system depended upon the economic subordination and unrecognised labour of women and many different groups, required a radical rethinking of the relationship between public, economic, and intimate life.
Judith Butler in Merely Cultural, engages with the relationship between heterosexism and capitalism as a response to what she calls the ‘conservative left drift’ for brushing aside issues of heterosexism as merely cultural ones, undeserving of serious academic attention. She argues that the reproduction of the false distinction between the ‘cultural’ and the ‘economic’ is not an upshot of Marxism but Capitalism itself. Non-normative sexualities are not simply ‘left out’ of the social order, but their suppression is essential to maintain the heteronormative order of societies, inherently linked with the economic realities of people. The issue therefore, is of a particular ‘mode of sexual production and exchange’ in service of maintaining the stability of gender which naturalises family and desire. She argues therefore, that the disadvantages due to one’s gender and sexuality are inherently material and not ‘merely cultural’ in nature.
Take, for instance, those instances in which lesbians and gays are rigorously excluded from state-sanctioned notions of the family (which is,according to both tax and property law, an economic unit); are stopped at the border;are deemed inadmissible to citizenship;are selectively denied the Status of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly;are denied the right, as members of the military, to speak their desires; or are deauthorized by the law to make emergency medical decisions about dying lovers, or to receive the property of dead lovers,or to receive from the hospital the bodies of dead lovers-don’t these examples mark the ‘holy family’ once again constraining the routes by which property interests are regulated and distributed? Is this simply the circulation of vilifying cultural attitudes or do such disenfranchisements mark a specific operation of the sexual and gendered distribution of legal and economic entitlements?
Nancy Fraser differs in her analysis of the same. She argues that capitalism as understood by Butler reinforces an ‘overtotalized’ view of the capitalist society as a monolithic ‘system’ of interlocking structures of oppression that seamlessly reinforce one another. This view misses various ‘gaps’ between the economic order and the kinship order as well as those between the individual and the family. Citing Eli Zaretsk, she itirates that the capitalist society now permits significant number of individuals to live through wage labor outside of heterosexual families and at times even sees advantage in doing so. The principle opposition to gay and lesbian rights according to Fraser comes from cultural and religious groups and not multi-national corporations, precisely because the former are concerned with status and the latter with profits.
Amidst this progressive sexualisation of modern capitalist societies, David Evans attempts to make sense of ‘citizenship of developed capitalism’ in his work Sexual Citizenship. Building upon a Foucauldian and interactionist perspective, he argues that Capitalism encourages us to ‘purchase’ our sexual identities and lifestyles and impels us to believe that we are right in doing so. The State in response, concedes relative and partial rights to ‘deviant’ sexual minorities; investing them with particular, limited forms of gender-consumer power. For Evans, sexual citizenship refers to a particular form of neoliberal citizenship under which subversive sexualities, irrespective of how subversive they are, can be co-opted, as long as they perform the role of an ideal consumer.
The term however, cannot be one with a singular definition, keeping in mind the difference in temporality and spatiality of the kind of ‘late capitalism’ Evans has in mind. In recent years, the ‘sexual’ in ‘sexual citizenship’, such as other qualifying prefixes on which the definition of citizenship depends began to be used as other such itself In recent years, scholars began to use it to study a wide range of aspects linking sexuality and citizenship. Jeffrey Weeks, Diane Richardson and Ruth Lister for example, use Sexual citizenship to discuss the new kind of ‘sexual subjectivities’ emerging via new social movements in the first world. At the heart of this scholarship is the acknowledgment that ‘all citizenship is sexual’i.e. The rights bestowed upon individuals and groups by the State and the responsibilities expected of them towards others ‘and’ the State are guided by certain hegemonic normativities centred on the notion of ‘respectability’. This results into complex, messy and polymorphous realites of sexualities and gender being forced into “legible” kinship structures.
The second key area of study in the literature of sexual citizenship is the progressive sexualisation of market economies and the constant reorientation of the categories of sexualities and their relationships with the idea of ‘respectability’ along with the changing nature of global politics. Neoliberalisation’s commodification of sexuality has repercussions not just on how one understands the politics (or lack of) of a consumer but also of an ideal citizen, especially when the former becomes an archetype for how the latter is evaluated. Thirdly, scholarship on sexual citizenship is concerned with rights based claims made for citizenship. Here, the ‘sexual citizen’ becomes an active category which challenges what has traditionally been seen as a separate set of spheres i.e. the public and the private, recognising its deep interconnectedness.
Sexual citizenship then, becomes a sensitising concept and a method to politicise ‘the intimate’ where the body, its sexuality, its needs and pleasures; all play a significant role in rearticulating what is considered relevant to citizenship. At the same time, it concerns sexuality as a determining factor in the allocation of the conventional triad of civil, political and social rights associated with citizenship.
The first key argument made in the sexual citizenship literature is the heterocentrism of citizenship. This means that heterosexuality, whether or not explicitly stated, is the norm of citizenship. In the West, especially in the post war welfare States, citizenship was built around the framework of an ‘Oedipal family’ i.e. a kinship form defined by blood relations or marriage, sustained by the division of labour between men and women. This arrangement was also central to the idea of nationhood, including in post colonial States where the Oedipal family and its emphasis on the chastity of women became a defining feature of national honour. Almost all nation States have at some point or another criminalised homosexuality, with some going even further to profile, sort and expel sexual minorities from public services.
The United States and Canada provide the best example for this where the cold war acted as a rationale to ……. In any case heterosexuality over the years was made to be the cornerstone of citizenship. This meant that even if there were no laws criminalising the existence of sexual minorities, there was no space in the text of the law, in the bureaucratic infrastructure and in the society for those who lied outside the heterosexual matrix to exist in ‘respectable posistions’ or to avail State benifits without hiding their identities.
Some theorists also point out that it is ‘normative heterosexuality’ that needs to be analyzed and critiqued across a variety of policy areas, since not all heterosexualities are normative. For example, scholars discuss the ways in which African-American women in particular are labeled as non-normative even when they are heterosexual. Coontz, in work describes the accounts of ‘Freudians and social scientists’ who insisted on notions like the ‘double emasculation’ of Black men, first by slavery and later by the economic independence of their women.This is best exemplified in a 1965 report by the US Department of Labor titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The report describes ‘Black matriarchy’ at the center of a tangle of pathology afflicting Black families, leading to a cycle of poverty. The report states, “In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole”.
A particular kind of hegemonic heteronormativity therefore, one that was characteristic of majoritarian White cultures, made its way into how the State was to set in motion its developmental, regulatory and disciplinary agenda. One’s membership in the State and on this account, the resources one would avail by virtue of that membership was to directly depend on the certain matrices of acceptability. Consequently, heteronormative sexual citizenship is also a means by which ascriptive hierarchies are reproduced. So where hegemonic sexual citizenship is mostly ‘white’, ‘non-whites’ are much more likely to be seen as sexual deviants, and thus as target sites for state sexual regulation. Davis argues that the history of the birth control movement and its racist sterilization programs necessarily make the issue of reproductive rights far more complicated for Black women and other women of color, who have historically been the targets of this abuse.
Angela Davis in her essay Racism, Birth control and Reproductive Rights traces the interconnectedness of the twentieth century reproductive rights movement with the Eugenics movement, an openly racist approach to population control based on the slogan -‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit’. According to eugenicists, those unfit to bear children were the mentally and physically disabled, prisoners, and the non-white poor. So, while the reproductive rights movement for White women meant their ‘right’ to abort, Black women and other women of colour were to interpret the same as their ‘duty’. This pretext has been observed by scholars in population control schemes across the world who debunk its scientificity and unearth its imperialist, racist, classist and casteist roots. In India for instance, Connolley demonstrates how various population control measures were based on the colonial and thereafter nationalist ideology of population ‘quality’.
In 1940, the Indian National Congress in its National Planning Committee, commissioned a report from a working group under Radhakamal Mukherjee, known for his “concern about lower-caste and Muslim fertility”. He warned in his report against the ‘gradual predominance of the inferior social strata’ and suggested removing barriers to intermarriage among upper castes(only) as well as directing birth control propaganda at the rest of the population to prevent ‘deterioration of the racial makeup.’ The report estimated that eight million insane and feeble-minded people were ‘at large and producing abnormals and subnormals”. To add to that, precedents were cited from the United States and Europe, including Nazi Eugenic courts, while calling for ‘selectively sterilising the entire group of hereditary defectives.’
Future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the chair of that committee, although acknowledged the need for broad-based economic progress as the only long term solution, backed fertility limitation, cheaper contraceptives, and, as part of a ‘eugenic programme,’ removal of barriers to inter-caste marriage along with sterilization of epileptics and the insane.To this date, the Hindu nationalist obsession with a uniform civil code and a population control law has ‘less to do with gender justice and more to do with an agenda to discipline its minorities’.
This would entail different expectations from different groups. At times it would mean ‘partial’ endowment of citizenship status to deviant sexualities as long as they demonstrate their ability to ‘pass’ as ideal sexual citizens. At times, it would mean well orchestrated schemas to obliterate certain forms of kinship structures by regulating intimate aspects of their lives. At times, this would also mean assimilation of deviances into heteronormative cultures when the former decides to replicate the latter’s ideals. Lisa Duggan calls this phenomenon ‘homonormativity’ i.e. “uncontested reproduction of heteronormative ideals in homosexual culture, identity and politics”. This is perhaps best exemplified through gay marriage,…… Clearly, this would mean that absorption of certain forms of deviances would come at the cost of creation of new subalterns and new dissidents.
Another key area of study in sexual citizenship literature is the simultaneous privatization and commodification of sexuality. In Evans’s formulation, this process is a product of late capitalism, where sexuality becomes the object of market forces. So the burdens of intimate life, relationships, and sexual citizenship become individualized, the responsibility of the individual citizen, at the same time as sex becomes more commodified. He argues with the case of post 1980s Britain, that citizenship has become a major preoccupation of major political parties and public figures. One cannot ignore that the moral and ideological running made by the Conservative Party runs parallel to a steady decline in social or welfare rights. Interestingly though, rather than waging an ideological offensive that would confine women within the domestic sphere, thereby uniting the woman with the family, Thatcherism was concerned with a much larger unit – “the family as the anchor of the new right’s anti-statism and economic liberalism”. Citizenship was to be realised not through social and political participation of people but through their role as consumers.
Thatcherism therefore, did not formally reverse the existing rights and freedoms of sexual citizens outwith the conventional family but rather engineered an “elaborate panics around their moral difference and threat, to confine them socially, economically and morally”. Its strategy has been to make the family as a moral bulwark and an economic barricade against State dependence. Consumerism therefore, was tied to moral conformity and in so doing formalised degrees of citizenship according to categories of sexual difference. This is especially significant for understanding the precarity of sexual minorities in modern late capitalist societies, while the so called amoral market creates new avenues everyday for various diverse identities as long as they have the purchasing power to do so, the State in nexus with the same market consolidates itself around the narrative of ‘risk management’ and ‘responsibilisation’ which requires citizens to behave as per certain prescribed norms. Given the ideal hegemonic nuclear family continues to be the benchmark against which responsible risk management is measured, the neoliberal discourse of responsibilisation contradicts its own accommodationist claims and acts as a justification for its policies of exclusion.
This is important to understand the process of discourse production itself. From the politics of medical sciences to the semiotics of terminologies, capitalism has engendered and appropriated the sphere of sexualities like never before. Nivedita Menon in Sexualities talks about what she calls the global ‘AIDS-Industrial complex’ which ensures that certain scientific narratives working in favour of the pharmaceutical industries are not challenged by those holding contrary views. For example, Vimochana….
Additionally, the concept of sexual citizenship was developed to make a set of claims about rights, and to critique sexually regulatory policies that produce second-class citizens. To quote Lister, “Such rights can be claimed by men as well as women, heterosexuals as well as homosexuals, but, among heterosexuals, it is primarily women rather than men who have had cause to lay claim to them and it is ‘sexual minorities’ for whom they hold a particular significance under conditions of heteronormalcy”. Proponents of sexual citizenship do not argue against or deny the existence of old agendas directly concerning the survival of people. They do not suggest that inequalities, injustice and violence around poverty should be superseded by sexual subjectivities at the centre of attention.
Instead, they argue that the very link between the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ issues that our conventional understandings have neglected needs to be bridged. While politics will still be concerned with macro issues about the economy and welfare, it can no longer ignore the so-called micro issues. At the same time, there needs to be an enlightenment project towards detaching sexuality from the label of micro issues, as discussed in the previous section.
