Sexuality And Citizenship

Sexual citizenship has become a key concept in the social sciences. It describes the rights and responsibilities of citizens in sexual and intimate life, including debates over equal marriage and women's human rights, as well as shaping thinking about citizenship more generally. But what does it mean in a continually changing political landscape of gender and sexuality? In this timely intervention, Diane Richardson examines the normative underpinnings and varied critiques of sexual citizenship, asking what they mean for its future conceptual and empirical development, as well as for political activism. Clearly written, the book shows how the field of sexuality and citizenship connects to a range of important areas of debate including understandings of nationalism, identity, neoliberalism, equality, governmentality, individualization, colonialism, human rights, globalization and economic justice. Ultimately this book calls for a critical rethink of sexual citizenship. Illustrating her argument with examples drawn from across the globe, Richardson contends that this is essential if scholars want to understand the sexual politics that made the field of sexuality and citizenship studies what it is today, and to enable future analyses of the sexual inequalities that continue to mark the global order.

Sexual citizenship is a powerful concept associated with debates about recognition and exclusion, agency, respect and accountability. For young people in general and for gender and sexually diverse youth in particular, these debates are entangled with broader imaginings of social transitions: from ‘child’ to ‘adult’and from ‘unreasonable subject’ to one ‘who can consent’. This international and interdisciplinary collection identifies and locates struggles for recognition and inclusion in particular contexts and at particular moments in time, recognising that sexual and gender diverse young people are neither entirely vulnerable nor self-reliant. Focusing on the numerous domains in which debates about youth, sexuality and citizenship are enacted and contested, Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship explores young people’s experiences in diverse but linked settings: in the family, at school and in college, in employment, in social media and through engagement with health services. Bookended by reflections from Jeffrey Weeks and and Susan Talburt, the book’s empirically grounded chapters also engage with the key debates outlined in it's scholarly introduction. This innovative book is of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality, health and sex education, and youth studies, from a range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds, including sociology, education, nursing, social work and youth work.

This provocative book provides a new grounding for the understanding of sexual rights. It examines the ways in which sexuality is constructed, with reference to the rights and lack of rights of homosexuals, transvestites, children and others.

This book brings together a diverse range of critical interventions in sexuality and gender studies, and seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about the connections and tensions between sexual politics, citizenship and belonging. The book is organized around three interlinked thematic areas, focusing on sexual citizenship, nationalism and international borders (Part 1); sexuality and "race" (Part 2); and sexuality and religion (Part 3). In revisiting notions of sexual citizenship and belonging, contributors engage with topical debates about "sexual nationalism," or the construction of western/European nations as exceptional in terms of attitudes to sexual and gender equality vis-à-vis an uncivilized, racialized "Other." The collection explores macro-level perspectives by attending to the geopolitical and socio-legal structures within which competing claims to citizenship and belonging are played out; at the same time, micro-level perspectives are utilized to explore the interplay between sexuality and "race," nation, ethnicity and religious identities. Geographically, the collection has a prevalently European focus, yet contributions explore a range of trans-national spatial dimensions that exceed the boundaries of "Europe" and of European nation-states.

Offers a more democratic way to think about families, politics, and public life. Public policy often assumes there is one correct way to be a family. Rethinking Sexual Citizenship argues that policies that enforce this idea hurt all of us and harm our democracy. Jyl J. Josephson uses the concept of “sexual citizenship” (a criticism of the assumption that all families have a heterosexual at their center) to show how government policies are made to punish or reward particular groups of people. This analysis applies sexual citizenship not only to policies that impact LGBTQ families, but also to other groups, including young people affected by abstinence-only public policies and single-parent families affected by welfare policy. The book also addresses the idea that the “normal” family in the United States is white. It concludes with a discussion of how scholars and activists can help create a more inclusive democracy by challenging this narrow view of public life.

This book is an innovative and critical contribution to the study of the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people in the context of Europe. Combining legal and Foucauldian approaches, it investigates the ways in which current discourses about LGBTIQ rights in Europe are tightly bound to contemporary debates about national and trans-national citizenship. The author defines and analyzes the concept of 'multisexual citizenship' to illustrate new, flexible forms of sexual and gendered citizenship that could radically transform practices of citizenship and the current human rights framework in Europe. She does this by combining critical deconstructions of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights with ethnographic observations and sociological analysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal to sociologists, lawyers and researchers of gender and LGBTIQ rights.

This enthralling and provocative book provides a new grounding for the understanding of sexual rights. It argues that all varieties of sexuality under capitalism are materially constructed out of the complex interrelationship between the market and the state. The examples of different sexual rights and lack of rights that it examines include the experience of male homosexuals, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexualists and children. Meticulous, focused and challenging, it will be required reading for anyone interested in modern human sexualities.

The notion of citizenship, with its balancing of rights and responsibilities, has become a dominant way of articulating sexual politics today. In The Sexual Citizen, David Bell and Jon Binnie critically explore the notion of sexual citizenship as a way to think through the ever-changing political, legal, social and cultural landscapes of sexuality. The book examines sexual citizenship in a number of key sites of contemporary sexual politics (the market, marriage, the military, the city, the family) and focuses on a number of key theoretical debates on sexuality in relation to consumption, space and globalization. Critiquing existing theories of sexuality and citizenship, and drawing on a wide range of theoretical perspectives, The Sexual Citizen addresses both the promises and limitations of using the discourses of citizenship in the context of contemporary sexual politics. The Sexual Citizen will be of interest to students and academics in lesbian and gay studies, politics, legal studies, sociology, cultural studies and geography