The neat concept of sexual citizenship: a cautionary tale for human

rights discourse
Angelia R. Wilson

University of Manchester, UK
The growing interest in human rights discourse is a welcome development for strategic
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism and the appropriation of such a
global signier continues to move LGBT political claims into the mainstream. However,
such language appropriation or strategic deployment opens debate as to its meaning and the
limits of its descriptive power. For example, the popularity of citizenship discourse in
the early 1990s led to an array of commentary from social and political theorists sketching
the contours of epistemological meaning and potential policy outcomes. In the wake of this,
queer social theorists ponticated on the meaning of sexual citizenship. Citizenship was
the new black and everyone was wearing it. Citizenship was interesting because it had, and
still has, purchasing power within a liberal democratic tradition. Human rights discourse is
interesting for similar reasons. This articles cautionary tale addresses the twofold concern:
what is at stake in focusing on human rights? and how can such a strategic linguistic
shift be explained by political and sociological theories? In raising these concerns, the
article encourages those articulating human rights to be mindful of the potential variety of
frames readings and strategic or competing activists and academic agendas within
which this discourse might be used or, potentially, abused.
Keywords: citizenship; welfare; LGBT rights; sexual citizenship
Introduction
The growing interest in human rights discourse is a welcome development for strategic lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism on a global stage and for the discipline of
theorizing about politics. The appropriation of such a global signier continues to move
LGBT political claims into the mainstream. However, such language appropriation or strategic
deployment opens debate as to its meaning and the limits of its descriptive power. Many of the
recent debates surrounding the use of human rights rhetoric and analysis by LGBT activists and
scholars of sexuality have their roots in an earlier and related academic discourse on sexual
citizenship. The popularity of this discourse in the early 1990s led to an array of commentary
from social and political theorists sketching the contours of epistemological meaning and poten-
tial policy outcomes. In the wake of this, queer social theorists ponticated on the meaning of
sexual citizenship. In doing so, I maintain here, they manipulated its meaning in a range of
contortions appropriate to ideological or research interests. Citizenship was the new black and
ISSN 1356-9775 print/ISSN 1469-3631 online
# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569770802674220
http://www.informaworld.com

Angelia R. Wilson is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Manchester. Her research explores the
intersection between feminist political theory, queer theory and policies regulating sexuality. This has taken
two forms recently. First, she is completing a study entitled Why Europe is Gay Friendly (and Why
America Never Will Be) (forthcoming 2009), exploring the European and American differences in politics,
cultures and social values underpinning divergent policies regulating the lives of lesbian and gay citizens.
Second, she is nishing a project on the US Christian Right in the 2008 US presidential election, which
builds on themes from her book Below the Belt: Sexuality, Religion and the American South. Email:
[email protected]
Contemporary Politics
Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2009, 7385
everyone was wearing it. Their creations did make interesting academic discussion often for very
specic purposes, but in offering this detailed reading here, I argue that, for some, their specic
research trajectory moved the discourse too far away from discussions of citizenship relevant to
the political strategic frame that gave it meaning. Citizenship was interesting because it had, and
still has, purchasing power within a liberal democratic tradition. Human rights discourse is inter-
esting for similar reasons. My cautionary tale here addresses the twofold concern, what is at
stake in focusing on human rights? and how can such a strategic linguistic shift be explained
by political and sociological theories?; the rst and second questions are outlined in the intro-
duction to this volume. In raising these concerns, I encourage those articulating human rights to
be mindful of the potential variety of frames readings and strategic or competing activists and
academic agendas within which this discourse might be used or, potentially, abused. Speci-
cally, the discussion highlights how different interpretations of citizenship created dissonance
between signier and the liberal democratic frame in which it held purchasing power. My
worry is that popularizing human rights discourse in LGBT studies may lead to (mis)interpreta-
tion or (mis)communication and allow space for disconnection between the signier and the
liberal democratic frame. The more strategic articulations should negotiate the complexity of
sexual politics within this frame for example, balancing a right to sexual freedom and concerns
of harm and in doing so reect a nuanced, multisectoral understanding of power.
Framing citizenship
Citizenship, like human rights, is a compelling signier in the nexus of grammars of social
relations. According to contractual liberal conception, citizens are regarded as autonomous indi-
viduals who make choices, as individuals who are bound together by a social contract, rather
than as friends and neighbours united by common activity (Conover et al. 1991, p. 802;
see various discussions of social contract theory from Rawls 1971 to Dietz 1987, 1998).
Alternatively, within debates of modern political theory, advocates of civic republicanism see
citizens as social and political people whose lives are intertwined . . . such communal citizens
share with their neighbors common traditions and understandings which form the basis for their
public pursuit of a common good (Conover et al. 1991, p. 802; see Barber 1984, Sandel 1984).
Political rhetoric relates tangentially to these constructions in its emphasis on the rights and/or
duties of citizenship. Permeating Western democratic political discourse is the assumption that,
to a greater or lesser degree, the state has obligations to citizens. From Beveridge (1942) to
Hayek (1944), there runs a tiny common thread of belief that the state has some responsibility
to create opportunities for citizens to fare well. Of course, a common thread does not result in
the same cloak of state provision or the same translation of political signiers. For example,
one comparative study of how people in the UK and the USA dened rights of citizens found
that all four American [focus] groups focused overwhelmingly on civil rights: freedom of
speech, freedom of religion, freedom of movement . . . in the British groups, by contrast, the
emphasis was equally clearly on social rights . . .[articulated by a participant as] the basic
rights that all human beings should have a roof over their heads, food in their bellies,
clothes on their backs and an education for their children (Conover et al. 1991, p. 807). So
while rights and duties associated with citizenship are contextual, there remains a fairly stable
grammar within liberal democracy in which citizenship refers to the power relationship
between the state and the individual. Citizenship is given meaning within that frame of reference.
The same can be said for literature, emerging in the 1990s, linking citizenship discourse and
sexualities discourse that reected the then popular citizenship rhetoric in UK and European
Union (EU) politics (see Lister 1990, 1991, 1998, Taylor 1991, 1992, Cooper 1993, Meehan
1993, Kofman 1995, Isin and Wood 1999, Waites 2005) and a growth in academic research
74 Angelia R. Wilson
on the welfare of LGBT and queer citizens. Of the latter, some focused on welfare provision
(Bell 1995a,b, Carabine 1995, 1996, Wilson 1995, 2005, 2007a,b,c, Richardson 1998,
2000a,b,c, 2004, Bell and Binnie 2000) and others on welfare needs (Palmer 1993, Mason
and Palmer 1996, McFarlene 1998, John and Patrick 1999, Bloomfeld and Barnet 2004). In
noting the rise of citizenship discourse, Bell and Binnie observe: with its mobile combinations
of the political, the economic, the social, the legal and the ethical, citizenship seemed to be a neat
concept for articulating (and agitating) the eld of sexual politics generally (2000, p. 2).
Human rights is similarly a neat concept. However, I offer below a close reading of two
key articulations of sexual citizenship and in doing so demonstrate that not everyone
worked with similar political or ideological agendas or within the frame of liberal democracy.
The result of this attests to the need to be mindful of risks taken in the fashionable appropriation
of language.
The return of the political construction of sexual citizenship
According to Jeffrey Weeks (1998, p. 35), the sexual citizen refers to a hybrid being of our
most intimate life and our involvement in the wider society where the moment of citizenship
coincides with the claim to rights of citizens (see Plummer 2003). Such a creature comes
into being because of the new primacy given to sexual subjectivity in the contemporary
world and this claim to a new form of belonging . . . arises from and reects the remaking
of self and the multiplicity and diversity of possible identities that characterize the late, or
post-, modern world (1998, p. 35; my italics). The emergence of sexual citizenship is due to
ever accelerating transformations of everyday life, and the social and political implications
that ow from this (1998, p. 35). His observation reects other sociological literature denoting
shifting understandings of intimate relations: Giddens The Transformation of Intimacy (1992),
Beck and Beck-Gernsheims The Normal Chaos of Love (1992), and Jamisons Intimacy (1998),
to note but a few. In their inuential study, Same-Sex Intimacies, Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan
(2001), draw attention specically to the way in which such social transformations have opened
up new possibilities for public recognition of non-heterosexual relationships. They argue that the
lesbian and gay movement, as well as queer politics, claims inclusion, acceptance of diversity
and a recognition and respect for alternative ways of being a broadening of the denition
of belonging (2001, p. 196). This, they write, is the moment of citizenship: the claim to
equal protection of the law, to equal rights in employment, parenting social status, access to
welfare provision, and partnership rights and same sex marriage (2001, p. 196; my italics).
In this denition, then, citizenship is equated with the belonging desired when non-heterosexuals
articulate a claim to economic, legal and social rights.
Such constructions of sexual citizenship and rights claims profess to build upon T.H.
Marshalls (1950) characterization while recognizing the gaps and interconnections of class,
race, nationality, gender and sexuality (Weeks et al. 2001, p. 196; see also Weeks 1998).
Of course, Marshalls conceptualization of citizenship was directly connected to the evolution
of welfare capitalism. His functionalist perspective resonates with most modern political theor-
ists in that citizenship is only meaningful when seen as operating within a system of rights and
obligations recognized by the state. Making rights claims against the state is a crucial part of the
process. But such claims are only part of the story. Formal citizenship, within political theory,
does not refer to recognition of belonging by society. It refers to recognition of belonging by the
state. Articulating a desire, or making a claim, for citizenship does not make one a citizen.
Weeks sociological construction of sexual citizenship refers to the moment of public articula-
tion of a rights claim, but such acts are signiers of a socio-political awakening that may lead to
acceptance within socio-political conversations, and this may engender a sense of belonging. But
Contemporary Politics 75
such articulations are not signiers, or guarantees, of citizenship. Within the liberal democratic
frame, citizenship implies an obligation on behalf of the state to recognize rights claims. Articu-
lating claims to citizenship, or human rights, falls short of a broader strategic goal. As Phelan
notes, full citizenship requires that one be recognized with legal acknowledgement by the
state, and such endorsement must include active willingness to defend those rights, claims,
authority, and status, it must include a willingness to recognize, honor, respect in public
(2001, pp. 1516). Mere visibility, continues Phelan, is not enough (2001, p. 16).
Alternative accounts of sexual citizenship suggest the importance of articulating the poten-
tially oppressive dynamics of power (for a discussion of how questions of citizenship, identity
and power are intertwined, see Lister 1990, Roche 1992, Waites 2005, Smith 2007). For
example, Bell and Binnie (2000, p. 3) argue that the modern understanding of citizenship invol-
ving rights and duties reects a compromise with normalizing power that must be treated with
caution. Similarly, Richardson (2004) warns against accepting blindly the normal citizenship
on offer by the state. While I return to these works in more detail later, what sets them apart from
Weeks is their understanding that when analysing citizenship and the rights claims contained
within it, one is referring inherently to the power dynamic between, at the very least, the state
and the citizen. To understand social belonging, or the claim to it, as citizenship may articulate
the performativity of citizenship (Butler 1990, Smith 2001) or recent transformations of inti-
macy (Giddens 1992), but, as such, it falls short of usefully highlighting the normative frame
of citizenship or the power dynamic at work in the conferring of citizenship by the state.
Collapsing the distinction between social belonging and claims of citizenship broadens the
denition to the point of undermining the utility of citizenship as a political signier. If citizen-
ship refers to any/every sense of belonging, then it refers substantively/politically to nothing.
This is another, but related, reason why my criticism of Weeks construction of sexual citizen-
ship is important. Shifting the focus to a sense of belonging leaves little analytical space for
exploring the pervasiveness of power in the hands of the state and capital. In his latest work,
The World We Have Won, Weeks (2007) eshes out the argument about the importance of under-
standing the radical journey of (homo)sexual politics. He is dismissive of those, namely, Fiona
Williams (2005) and Diane Richardson (2004), who offer an analysis of civil partnerships as a
part of a process of neo-liberalism. Weeks warns (2007, p. 192, my emphasis): We must be
careful not to try to t everything together too neatly into a preordained explanatory frame-
work.. . .The legalization of same-sex relationships as a process has many roots in different
late modern societies, and cannot be reduced to an adjunct of wider socio-economic processes.
Weeks wants to explain the world we have won as culminating from a struggle for recog-
nition (2007, pp. 1012, 172), and to contrast this directly with Williams and Richardsons
contextualization of policy changes within the rise of neo-liberalism. While, I agree with
Weeks that it is important not to underestimate the power of resistance, my own reading of
Williams and Richardson does not locate either of them as construing citizens as passive
victims of neo-liberalism (see Lister 1997a, p. 35; for a similar discussion of consumerism
within sociology, see Isin and Wood 1999).
One can appreciate fully the radical journey, as I am sure these feminist do, and still give
voice to the pervasiveness, interconnectedness and contingency of powerful normative forces.
Bell and Binnie (2000, p. 2) aptly note, to understand the sexual citizen . . . we need to under-
stand the conditions that give rise to the possibility (even, we might argue, the necessity) of such
a gure. Articulations of citizenship must engage with the powers at work setting the
parameters of denition.
What is interesting about Weeks initial articulation of this new form of belonging as a
sexual citizen is the tone of his criticism. One example is the dismissal of Richardson and
Williams analysis, which has materialist roots (Weeks 2007, 1998). In relation to materialist
76 Angelia R. Wilson
concerns, Weeks remarks that one criticism of his commentary on sexual citizenship might
question its relevance in the broader political world (1998, p. 39):
The majority of people on a global scale still have to struggle with getting their daily bread, against
the exigencies of extreme poverty, famine, drought, war, authoritarian governments, corruption and
violence. Compared to these questions, concerns about sexuality and the body and a sense of self
may seem fairly trivial when most people have to struggle just to survive, the worries of the bien
pensant educated middle class rather than the preoccupations of the embattled majority.
He argues that we must understand why issues of sexuality t into the mapping out of issues
he regards as central to post-millennial politics. These issues are familiar to sociologists:
achieving a new settlement between men and women, elaborating new ways of fullling
needs no longer met by the family, denaturalization of the sexual, balancing difference and
common purpose, and living with diversity (1998, p. 49). These are interesting, for Weeks, in
that they all stand in relation to state-sanctioned heterosexual normativity. But he sets this inter-
est in sexual citizenship in contrast to explorations of global poverty, etc. He sees the importance
of such macro issues, but he maintains that sexual citizens offer a new agenda for Western
democracies that is of crucial importance to addressing micro issues (1998, p. 48). This split-
ting between macro and micro reinforces the possibility of perceiving issues of sexuality as
trivial and discounts the importance of the integral relationship between, to use his signiers, the
macro and the micro. Bell and Binnie (2000, p. 5; see also Bell 1995a, 1995b) make a similar
point that Weeks approach perpetuates a public/private divide and that this is a big risk to be
taken in stressing the private is the proper home of sexual citizenship Such splitting fails to
recognize the complexity and interrelatedness of sexual politics. Rights claims embedded in
liberal individualism run a similar risk of constructing debates in isolation of broader concerns.
A similar worry about the deployment of a paradigm of citizenship that implicitly depo-
liticizes social relations is expressed by Cooper (1993, p. 163; see also Lister 1991, Phillips
1991). A personal encounter with a same-sex couple in a long-term relationship, for example,
may have a positive effect on heterosexual attitudes to them as a couple. Arguably, the more
personal encounters of the positive kind, the more people are out, the greater is the likelihood
of a shift in social attitudes (Overby and Barth 2002, Wilcox and Norrander 2002). According to
Weeks, however, that appears to be the end of the story; the moment of citizenship is when a
partnership is articulated publicly. But the fact that one can articulate a same-sex partnership
publicly without danger, or with legal protection, is related less to the ability to speak and
more to the ability to speak without fear (for a similar distinction regarding conceptualizations
of autonomous choosers and the ability to choose, see Dworkin 1983a, 1983b). And it is those
last two words that signify a political shift. As Cooper (1993, p. 165) writes, if we dene pol-
itical membership broadly to mean making an impact on political processes and social relations,
then it does not follow that marginalized sections of the community lack such membership . . .
what people lack legally enforceable rights and the ability to exercise power, for instance
does affect their levels of political activity. It is the many roots of the socio-economic
processes that have led to a transformed sexual citizenship a sexual citizenship without
fear. Cooper here reinforces an essential element of citizenship the importance of recognition
by, and possible protection of, the state.
In summary, as I have argued elsewhere (2007b), what Weeks (2007) refers to as micro
transformations are possible in part because of macro issues. Specically, welfare capitalism,
as it manifests itself in Western democracies, needs differently sexual citizens to transform into
more publicly active consumers and more active carers. In extending adoption and fostering
rights to same-sex couples, for example, states widened concepts of the family, that is, potential
carers, and as a result reduced the states burden of care. This understanding does not discount
the many and varied articulations claiming the rights of citizenship, or take away the debt owed
Contemporary Politics 77
to those shouting those claims in the face of personal danger. However, equating citizenship with
a sense of belonging or articulation of desire does not inspire debate about forces of power within
liberal democracy or why it is possible to witness a transformed sexual citizen who can (to a
greater extent) make claims against the state without fear. In short, Weeks interpretation of citi-
zenship appears too broad for strategic deployment within the frame of liberal democracy. The
following section considers a signicantly narrower interpretation of sexual citizenship from
David Evans Sexual Citizenship, which gives us insight into how macro-structural processes
have shaped sexual citizenship and subsequent rights claims.
Commodication of sexual citizenship
The relationship between the needs of capitalism and the emergence of sexual citizenship for
David Evans (1993) is key to the Material Construction of Sexualities. In this text, Evans makes
three important contributions to the understanding of the relationship between capitalism and
sexual citizenship. First, writing in the early 1990s, Evans unapologetically dismisses discursive,
social interactionist, and psychoanalytic conceptions of the self as rendering the self unable to
engage substantially with the state. In particular, he worries that any non-materialist-based
understandings of the self will fail to acknowledge adequately the power of capitalism to
commodify sexuality. Second, Evans recognizes that the creation of economic space for the
commodication of sexuality simultaneously creates a socio-political space for the construction
of a community based on sexuality. Third, he conveys the incongruent and occasionally
politically antagonistic need for capitalism to expand through the commodication of sexuality
and the need for the state to maintain control via moral, gender and sexual normativity. The
tension, for Evans, is between the appetite of capitalism and the responsibility of the state to
avoid anarchy in order to continue to support capitalism. I maintain that, while Evans interpret-
ation of sexual citizenship engages with power dynamics at work within the liberal democratic
frame, his approach is too narrow and limited in two substantive ways. First, Evans equates
materialism with consumerism in a position that consists of little more than a neo-Marxist
economistic pessimism (Waites 1996, p. 144). Second, because of this positioning, he con-
structs the state as little more than a monolithic protector of capitalism. Below, I outline each
of these ideas, beginning with his materialist citizenship, which I nd compelling, if limited.
Centrality of materialist understanding
Evans (1993, p. 35) argues that the sexualisationof modernsocieties cannot be fullycomprehended
without attention being given to the material dynamics of late capitalism and their repercussions
upon the state and the material relations through which populations relate to both. His account
of discursive, symbolic interactionist and psychodynamic approaches leads him to note that
all three construct sexuality as autonomous in a different and negative sense, as discretely separate
from material relations and hierarchies of control . . . sexuality is inextricably tied to capitalisms
requirements for reproduced labour of different values, the buoyant consumerism of the metropolitan
economies and as with all capitalist social relations, sexualitys material construction is effected not
only directly through the market, but also mediated through the states formal machineries and prac-
tices of citizenship, and in all these arenas sexuality is albeit attenuated, a channel of class relations.
(Evans 1993, p. 36)
For Evans, sexual citizenship is materially constructed through the dynamics of capitalism and,
particularly, consumerism. While I disagree with his exact account of Foucaults project, Anna
Marie Smith offers a similar but more accurate reading that is helpful in moving beyond
this particular epistemological divide: Foucault tends to err on the side of insisting upon the
78 Angelia R. Wilson
irreducibly plural nature of bio power forces. Distancing himself from the strand of Marxist
analysis that regards cultural phenomena as determined by the class struggle, he maintains
the power relations never take the form of domination. In my view, his position amounts to
an overcorrection. I certainly agree that we cannot regard sexual politics as a straightforward
product of the class struggle; there are simply far too many instances in which gender and
sexual antagonisms, to say nothing of race and nation, cut across the class struggle to accept
that sort of excessive reductionism (Smith 2007, p. 44; see also Smith 1994, 2001). I share
with both Evans and Smith a lamentation of the move away from an informed analysis of the
powerful role of capital (Wilson 1997, 2006, 2007b). However, Evans approach is reductionist
and not attuned to the multiplicity of power relations. I return to this point later.
Consuming sexual citizenship
Arguably, Evans most important contribution is in noting the rise of consumer sexual citizen-
ship: the material construction of sexualities within consumerism lies at the very heart of the
modern eras instrumental self-interest (1993, p. 45). Evans highlights two bodies of evidence
for this. First, with increasing importance being given to non-procreative sexuality, the sub-
sequent individualism allows for the growing commodication of sexualities. Individual,
private immediate gratication are all fetishised consequences of consumerists alienation
where both market and sexual values are united in the ultimate fetishisation of the individual
as a unique being where the individuals most intimate self is s/told to nd expression
through sexuality that is concurrently commodied (1993, pp. 4748). Evans continues
(1993, p. 51), the legalisation of previously illegal and thus non-consuming sexual status
groups, for example, most spectacularly, male homosexuals, thus [releases] considerable consu-
mer power and enabling the development of considerable specic minority commodity markets.
Sexual citizenship, writes Evans (1993, p. 64), involves partial, private, and primarily leisure
and lifestyle membership. Sexual citizenship rights are chiey expressed through their out
participation in commercial private territories (Evans 1993, p. 64).
Similar worries about individuation and the commodication of private sex life can be found
in the press and the academy (Leonard 1997, Bunting 2004, Jacques 2004). For example, in
Queers, beers and shopping, Short (1992, p. 18) questions that gays are the last untapped
market of capitalism, arguing that such a myth is built upon a media image that in socio-
economic terms apparently were all As and Bs. He added that, in the 1990s, many of us
dene our sexuality by our lifestyle, and this lifestyle often involves spending money. . . We
are what we spend our money on. . . We are forced to prove we exist by projecting a gay
image or lifestyle (Short 1992, p. 20). In the purchase of a gay image, we construct a public
self where consumables signify sexuality that can be identied, identiable. Sexuality is
consumable, consumed and the consumer.
Second, with such economic power unleashed, these new consumers can take advantage of
the sexualities tolerated by the state in locating one another for further market participation. In
doing so, Evans (1993, p. 113) argues, this commodication of the homosexual constructs a
community as an economically active force: there clearly is specically homosexual
consumption in a global gay market and it is largely in this sense that the international gay
community with common norms and values exist. Historians Jeffrey-Poulter (1991) and
Weeks (1981, 1989) document the rise of gay economies and subsequent gay (and lesbian)
political activism in post-Wolfenden Britain. Pointedly, DEmilio (1993) argues that the mech-
anisms specic to capitalism made possible the emergence of gay identity and homophobia. For
example, a similar analysis has been offered by sociologists and geographers mapping the emer-
gence of the international gay tourist industry and the purchasing power of gay consumers (see
Contemporary Politics 79
Hennessey 1995, Pritchard et al. 1998, Puar 2000). This resonates with the observation of Isin
and Wood (1999), who call attention to Lash and Urrys (1994) notion of consumer citizenship
whereby social agents increasingly constitute themselves as citizens by virtue of their ability to
consume goods and services (1999, p. 139).
Evans argument for a more robust materialist approach to understandings of self and
sexuality is persuasive in demonstrating the conceptual mileage in recognizing the context,
and pervasive power, of capitalism. This, in Escofers (1997, p. 131) words, hyper-commodi-
cation has enabled some political headway in which the economic vitality of contemporary
lesbian and gay communities erodes the ability of conservatives to reconstruct the closet.
While it may be true that the potential of the gay market sets the libertarian and the morally
conservative right at odds with one another, the existence of active gay and lesbian consumer
lifestyles does not necessarily work as a political tool leading to acceptance. Bell and Binnie
(2000, p. 6) refer to the commercial presence and power of gay men and lesbians as the
pink economy where consumer citizens voice their politics through their spending, and can
therefore make rights claims as consumers (see also Gabriel and Lang 1995). Similarly,
Evans (1993, p. 50) notes that sexual minorities benet from fetishization but the resulting
legal rights and freedoms are offset by the mobilisation of core moral values to achieve ideo-
logical integration, outside of which these newly legalised sexual citizens emphatically remain.
Morgan (1998) raises questions, though, about the political uncertainty at the heart of the pink
economy: Gay businessmen identify with the gay community in so far as this is the source of
their income. But politically they may identify with quite right-wing ideas of the market, free
enterprise, cuts in public spending, the need to tax business less. While Evans makes the
case for questioning the relationship between consumer capitalism and sexuality, his strict mate-
rialism shuts down other points of enquiry into power relations.
There are fundamental questions about whom such sexual citizenship includes. For
example, Lee Badgetts (1997, 1998, 2007) growing body of work consistently calls for a
more detailed and nuanced consideration of the economic placement of lesbians and gay
men. She specically questions the myth of gay and lesbian DINKs (double income, no kids)
with larger-than-the-average-heterosexual amount of disposable income (Badgett 2001). Pre-
sumably, it is just as economically inaccurate to assume all gays can afford to go on cruises
as it is for British people to assume that all Americans are wealthy from the number of tourists
in London in any given summer. This is not just a concern about economic statistical accuracy.
The citizenship literature, generally speaking, posits a conception of the active citizen (Dietz
1987, Lister 1995, 1997a, 1997b). Considering active citizenship alongside Evans prioritization
of consumerism begs the question: if one is not actively consuming sexual citizenship, can one
be a sexual citizen? If a gay man has never bought a Judy Garland album, or a lesbian has never
shopped at IKEA, are they sexual citizens? Evans work highlights the importance of capitalism
in the dynamic of citizenship, but the reduction to consumerism ignores a larger eld of enquiry
regarding the power interplay between capital, the state, welfare and other intervening agendas.
Constraints of the state
Evans (1993, p. 63) approach focuses on exposing the dynamics of capital and in doing so offers
only a monolithic construction of the state as a constraining force on capitalism. He notes the
important function of state authority to legitimately police civil society to ensure that freedoms
granted do not contaminate the moral community and that the state is required to constrain the
markets eagerness to exploit these segregated commercial and commodity settings. Relying on
Bauman (1988), he posits that civil society is colonised by the state to the ends of reproducing
consumers (Evans 1993, p. 64). Evans materialist analysis limits his ability to construct the
80 Angelia R. Wilson
state as anything more than a constraint on market forces using civil society to ensure moral
hegemony. Bell and Binnie (2000, p. 15), for example, worry that because Evans posits
sexual citizenship within the space of consumerism, this leaves the state relatively uninterro-
gated . . . [and] allow[s] no real space for dissidence outside the market. In order to sketch
the cultural context of British socialist thought during the time Evans wrote Sexual Citizenship,
it is worth noting a similar article in International Socialism Journal in which Norah Carlin
(1989) links sexuality and capitalism: the struggle against gay oppression is therefore a struggle
to end capitalist society and its particular distortions of sexuality and gender.. . . Today, gay lib-
eration has become just as essential to the struggle for socialism as socialist revolution is for any
meaningful sexual liberation. This type of construction of the state limits a more holistic picture
of the power dynamics at play in the extension of social rights to lesbian and gay citizens.
First, Carlin, like Evans, does not assume that the heterosexual nuclear family has always
existed but locates it, and the states promotion of it, in direct relation to the rise of a particular
version of capitalism. Feminist writers such as Fiona Williams (1992), Barrett and McIntosh
(1982), and Wilson (1977) have argued that the post-war British welfare state was established
on the basis of promotion of the nuclear family, nationalism and the needs of capitalism. So,
in some respects, Evans materialist approach resonates easily with both liberal and socialist
feminism of his contemporaries. The debate can be seen to reect a dichotomy between capit-
alisms need to commodify and the states need to facilitate capitalism through policies promot-
ing the efciency of the nuclear family model. This construction posits the state as primarily a
facilitator of capitalism. One could evidence this, as Evans does, by highlighting the commodi-
cation of sexual citizenship and the historic centrality of gender norms and the nuclear family.
However, this conceptualization of the state as a constraining force perhaps fails to recognize
the complexity of the states limited ability, or inability, to constrain market forces. While the
state may attempt to navigate the balance of social morality and capital hedonism, this is not
always a reactionary push against capitalism with negative outcomes for lesbian and gay citi-
zens. Occasionally, the state seems to push for change where capitalism has not clearly
expressed a need. For example, in Evans recognition of the importance of the family to
state/capital relations and the impact on women, he skips over the potential for this family
to disrupt heterosexual normativity or even for it to come to represent lesbians and gay men
as couples/families what Kath Weston (1991) has labelled families of choice. Those that
express concerns about assimilationism also acknowledge the potential for an expanded de-
nition of family to provide real economic and social benets for some gay and lesbian citizens
(and their children) as well as disrupt the heterosexual monopoly on family policy (Ackelsberg
and Plaskow 2004, Josephson 2005). Evans construction of the state fails to fully appreciate the
responsibilities of the state to citizens welfare and the potential for more positive outcomes that
extend sexual citizenship beyond his commodication model.
Second, Evans limited notion of the state as the constraint on capitalism fails to recognize
adequately other forces at play in cultural, political and economic terrains. Anna Marie Smith
(2001, p. 112) eloquently reminds us of the uidity of power: The relation between capital
and hegemonic ofcial discourse on sexuality is contingent: while the regulation of sexuality
is certainly shaped by prevailing economic relations, it is never fully determined by it. While
chastising liberalism and identity politics for bracketing questions relating to economic
justice she argues for situating our cultural analyses of identity politics within political
economy contexts and that it is absolutely crucial to the radical democratic project that we con-
sistently emphasize a multisectoral approach to human rights (Smith 2001, p. 103). Specically,
Smith (2001, p. 111) draws attention to the relatively autonomous dimension of intervening
institutions, which were, historically, never perfectly harmonized with the interests of
capital. For example, conservative Christians and/or the voluntary sector assist the state in
Contemporary Politics 81
fullling its responsibilities to citizens and in doing so impact upon the political agenda
regarding sexual citizens. Considering the roles and power of such institutions/groups moves
analysis beyond Evans materialist approach towards a more multisectoral understanding of
the framing of sexual citizenship.
In summary, then, Evans gets part-way to exploring the conceptual mileage of a materialist
analysis of sexual citizenship. However, because he is unable to pursue a more nuanced con-
guration of the state, he cannot envisage the disruptive, or even positive, implications of
families of choice. In other words, commodication, in the way in which Evans depicts it,
is part of the, but not the whole, story. Likewise, he provides little conceptual space for appre-
ciating powerful political actors outside the logic of the market. Evans pessimism about sexual
citizenship, consumerism and the state informs his equally pessimistic view of the extent of
progress achieved through political activism during the last twenty ve years (Waites 1996,
p. 145). Evans assessment sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Weeks (2007) more
recent and optimistic account of The World We Have Won. So what does this close reading of
Weeks and Evans offer those deploying a human rights discourse?
Conclusion
Cautionary tales are warnings of potential dangers. The difculties alive in Weeks conception of
sexual citizenship are of particular concern. A claim to human rights is not enough. In Phelans
words, mere visibility is not enough. Moreover, if articulated outside a liberal democratic
frame, the claim to human rights has little purchasing power. Deployment of political signiers
makes the most strategic sense when this happens within the frames that give them meaning. The
gap between theorizing and activism can occasionally undermine the legibility of the frame; this
is particularly risky when the readers are political elites. For example, rights claims in the streets
of Soho became much more legible when the activist group Stonewall translated it into equality
and justice in the halls of Parliament. From a very different theoretical space, Evans text was a
welcome and timely intervention as the pink pound gained economic power, facilitated more
open community building, and offered some legitimacy at the intersection of politics, capitalism
and fashionable society. However, Evans pessimism about this process reected an era of
neo-Marxist analysis indicative of much of 1980s British academia. His pessimism dismissed
citizenship as state-manipulated consumerism. In doing so, it failed to offer conceptual
space for understanding other outcomes: that sexual citizenship no good can come of it.
Presumably, there will be some just as dour about human rights.
Cautionary tales may be a directive call to arms. As noted by the editors of this collection, the
rights turn of LGBT organizations (Kollman) has mobilized a movement in the global sphere
and opened doors to international organizations. Kollman argues that this has led to domestic
policy shifts, particularly in the EU countries, because it has informed and socialized elite
policy actors and spawned normative understandings of LGBT rights (2007, this volume). I
would agree that the rights turn has opened particular doors and shifted some debates favour-
ably. However, recent policy successes in Europe and in some American states have emerged
from multiple political parentages. Waites (2005, p. 543) warns elsewhere about the tendency
to optimistically overestimate the potential for new narratives of sexual identity to enter the
public sphere in postmodern times, without sufciently recognising and analysing the systematic
promotion of different perspectives necessary to achieve this. My reading of both Weeks and
Evans speak to the need for an integrated analysis of the micro and the macro aspects of
power and outcomes. Crucial to the development of LGBT human rights discourse is a
complex analysis of welfare provision as well as diverse and divergent outcomes from the
interplay of capitalism and social values. Again, as Smith (2001, p. 103) notes, it is absolutely
82 Angelia R. Wilson
crucial to the radical democratic project that we consistently emphasize a multisectoral approach
to human rights. For Smith, multisectoral refers to the overlapping and integrated analysis of
political, economic and cultural institutions, systems and actors. Human rights discourse may
win friends and inuence people on a global stage. The resulting useful networks may facilitate
local political shifts. However, a thorough multisectoral approach will offer in-depth knowledge
of the complexities of power and resistance, better informing political strategies and utilizing of
signiers within a liberal democratic frame as well as enhancing the power to purchase political,
economic and cultural benets.
Finally, this piece focused on two questions, what is at stake in focusing on human
rights?, and how can such a linguistic shift be explained by political and sociological the-
ories? Taking these in reverse order, my observations here caution political and sociological
theorists to provide a multisectoral analysis of human rights and to remain mindful of the
way in which public transcripts, and trends in academic research, shift over time. What is at
stake in focusing on human rights? There are various answers to this question offered in this col-
lection. In Bell and Binnies words, it is a neat concept. Strategically articulating, and agitating,
such a neat concept calls for attention to detail in denitions, in negotiating complexities of
sexual politics, and in relating rights claims to specicities of liberal democratic power.
Acknowledgements
For their helpful comments on versions of this paper, I would like to thank Jyl Josephson, Tony
Smith, Cynthia Burack, the editors of this volume, Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites, as well
as anonymous reviewers.
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