Citizenship and sexual minorities

I argue that there are several reasons why the concepts of sexuality and citizenship were linked in U.S. political theory beginning in the 1990s. Firstly, in the United States minority discourses were ready to hand. These have been very strong in that political culture since at least the 1960s. Another reason is that in the United States “citizenship” has been a strongly normative concept. In the introduction to The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997) Berlant suggests that it was particularly from Reagan’s time onwards that American politics began to pay more attention to intimacy and also adopted an explicit normative stance on these issues.

Another contributing factor was the popularization of the LGBT movement and its involvement in current American politics. This influenced the connection between sex and citizenship. The LGBT movement demanded anti-discrimination laws and strongly advocated the inclusion of LGBT communities into the core of the American society. The question of rights is directly linked to citizenship. For mainstream LGBT organizations the concept of

“citizenship” opened up a language through which they claimed rights. At the same time other crucial questions appeared, namely what defines belonging to the US as a nation, and what it mean to be a citizen of the United States.

During Reagan’s administration, conservative politicians started using the concept of the ideal American citizen (Berlant 1997). For Republicans, citizenship was not only the legal status of US citizen, it became an idealized symbol of the future, of a social paradise of middle

class society with no crime rate. Therefore this citizenship had to be maintained and protected whenever it was threatened and it should be developed when there were opportunities to do so.

In its origin, the concept of citizenship is supposed to be universal and is assumed to include all members of a particular political community. The modern concept of citizenship is formulated on the grounds of individualism and a liberal understanding of rights (Rawls 1998, 56). Moreover, citizenship has, particularly in Europe, often been connected to the idea of nation. Citizenship has been a mark of belonging to the community and supposedly it should not limit the membership in the social community based on the particular qualities of agents. I believe that implicitly this concept always had a normative aspect. Explicitly, citizenship is about being protected by the state and being able to participate in a society on an equal ground with other agents of the same society, for instance everyone with full civil rights has the right to vote in elections and every vote is equally important. Nevertheless, there are norms and values that govern citizenship. Some agents are considered better representatives of the idea of citizenship, whereas some others are not considered to be good examples of citizens.

The issue of gender appears at a very early stage in the concept of citizenship. Many national constitutions provide special protection for families or they mention that the family is a basic unit of society. At the same time, most national constitutions across Europe have paragraphs on non-discrimination. In practice, the representation of an ideal citizen would be a middle class, working, married man with children. The law and cultural codes focus on this representation of citizen. Other agents of society often have to struggle to be included in the picture of the citizen or they have to try to demonstrate that even if they seem to be different, in reality they are very close to the ideal and the differences are meaningless.

The problem of citizenship in relation to sexual minorities appeared in practical politics in the 1960s when gay and lesbians gained some visibility in the United States and they started to be part of the political discourse (mostly conservative but not exclusively). During that time, the issue mainly concerned the protection of LGBT people from violence and from other forms of attack. The HIV/AIDS crisis brought to the fore the fight for equal access to medical care.

Finally, in the 1980s, gay and lesbian activists also began to strongly advocate for the removal of the anti-sodomy law, which until then existed in many states of the US. During the 1990s the issue of gays in the military service was raised. Currently, the struggle for gay and lesbian marriages is what seems to be a key concern of the main LGBT activists in the US.

Evans (1993) has argued that citizenship could not remain to be treated as neutral in a contemporary culture where identities are likened to commodities. The notion of citizenship is crucial to the self-understanding of agents and even to their existence in public space.

Citizenship reflects the majority’s normative view dictating how agents are supposed to be in order to be proper, active, full citizens. The response to this concept of citizenship comes from various theoretical positions. The main LGBT organizations in the United States advocated a broader inclusion of gays and lesbians in the concept of citizenship by giving them, for instance, the right to marry. However, during the 1990s, many academics began to argue that the concept of “citizenship” should be challenged and changed in order to become more diverse and be able to express minority issues. This position was also presented by the activists of Queer Nation (Warner 1993, xx). In Queer Nation’s actions the term “queer” came into a productive relationship with “citizenship” for the first time. From 1993, and coinciding with the publication of Fear of a Queer Planet, the concept of “queer” in academia started appearing in the context of the contestation of the Republican idea of citizenship, and a few years later it was thoroughly theorized. Fear of a Queer Planet brought to the fore the anti-assimilation politics of LGBT communities.

Two authors, who wrote on citizenship from the perspective of queer studies are Lauren Berlant and Shane Phelan. They both use the concept of “queer” as a critical category for their investigation on citizenship. They speak about citizenship from within a sexual minority group.

Their approaches have been highly commented on in recent years and I want to focus on them because they represent two different approaches while sharing similar goals.

In the work of Lauren Berlant, particularly in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997), the concept of “queer” is a means to critically examine and deconstruct the dominant idea of citizenship. In this publication, “queer” functions as a mode of critique that is capable of revealing values, particularities, assumptions and contradictions that are hidden in citizenship. Berlant does not set an agenda for future queer politics, rather her primary analyses revolve around American popular culture and politics.

Berlant focuses on the cultural and symbolic construction of citizenship. She describes citizenship “as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere” (Berlant 1997, 5). Here citizenship means even more than political agency. Citizenship is a set of rights and duties citizens have but, more than that, it is also a set of representations that culturally legitimize a person in the public sphere. It is also a set of symbolic codes that create community and are the basis for the nation. Berlant claims that citizenship is essentially a regulative and oppressive political category: “The populations who were and are managed by the discipline of the promise – women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, homosexuals – have long experienced simultaneously the wish to be full citizens and the violence of their partial

citizenship” (Berlant 1997, 19). For Berlant, citizenship has levels of belonging and can be partial. According to her, full citizenship is rather a phantasmatic border, an ideal, a normative concept that reflects the current political system.

Berlant offers Queer Nation as an example of alternative citizenship. These activists wanted “to change the ways straight and gay people experienced the public spaces of everyday life and the ordinary trajectories of everyday identity” (Berlant 1997, 23). Clearly, for Berlant there is something wrong with the concept of “citizenship”, and through the concept of “queer”

she aims to redefine it. Through its exaggerated and parodic actions in public spaces, Queer Nation aimed to broaden the concept of citizenship to embrace new meanings in order to make it more democratic. Berlant quotes a number of QN posters made in the form of advertisements, such as “I’d start my own cigarette company and call it Fags” or “All you need is a three-dollar bill and a dream” (Berlant 1997, 162). It is based on the U.S. connection between citizenship and being a customer, and, due to their ironic content, QN’s advertisements create resistance to the liberal ideology of the customer-citizen.

According to Berlant, Queer Nation does not have theoretical coherence. “All politics in the Queer Nation are imagined on the street”, and “Queer Nation understands the property of queerness to be a function of the diverse spaces in which it aims to become explicit” (Berlant 1997, 151). In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City and other essays by Berlant, public space is crucial for her theorization of intimacy. The problem with public space is that it is homogeneous and heterosexualized, and for this reason Berlant (in the essay written with Elizabeth Freeman, first published in 1992) claims that it needs to be reshaped. In the case of Queer Nation, her focus is also on public space. “Queer Nation’s infusion of consumer space with a queer sensibility and its recognition of the potential for exploiting spaces of psychic and physical permeability are fundamental to its radical reconstruction of citizenship” (Berlant 1997, 163). It is interesting that in the context of “queer” in Berlant’s theory, the distinction between public and private disappears. Intimacy and sex are also public, and Berlant continues:

“queer citizenship confers the right to one’s own specific pleasures” (Berlant 1997, 163).

To Berlant, queer citizenship would be a political project of reimagining the concepts of public spaces and political agency among others. The point is not to create an alternative to the neo-liberal or a new political system, but rather to resist universalizing and oppressive elements of politics: “We must produce a political transformation of the key concepts, that is, of the concepts that are strategic for us” (Berlant 1997, 167).

I find Berlant’s theorization of queer citizenship important because she opposes utopian ideas of total disidentification with U.S. citizenship. For her, it is not an answer to sexual

minorities in the U.S. Instead, the only reasonable solution is to work to redefine the existing concept of citizenship. This proposition, however, might face criticism from representatives of communities of people of colour. In her article “Funny Boys and Girls” (1995) Gopinath argues that the identification with American citizenship is not possible for many queers of colour, particularly those from diasporas. Her point is valuable, but in the case of citizenship the issue is not so much about identification but rather about being protected by certain rights and having the possibility to exercise them. For this reason marginalized groups in particular need to struggle for recognition and inclusion in the vision of American citizenship because they might potentially need protection from the state and its institutions. I would argue that the contestation of citizenship is a comfortable position that not every person can afford. One can contest citizenship when one is in a situation that is comfortable and one would not need state institutions and law protection, but this is a rare and unique position. I would rather suggest, contrary to Gopinath, that ethnic minorities should be the first who need to fight to redefine the terms of citizenship as they often do not have the luxury of passively contesting the politics.