Vol.
13 No. 12 (December 2003)
GOVERNING
SEXUALITY: THE CHANGING POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP AND LAW REFORM. By Carl
F. Stychin. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003. 162pp. Cloth ₤30. ISBN
1-84113-267-5
Reviewed by
Judith A. Baer, Department of Political Science Texas A&M University
Email: j-baer@tamu.edu
"Sexual citizenship."
This phrase may startle the American constitutionalist who takes the public-private
distinction for granted. But the notion of the sexual citizen, familiar
to students of identity politics, is central to Carl Stychin's analysis
of sexual politics and law reform in Britain, Continental Europe, and the
European Union. Although Stychin offers no precise definition of the term,
he identifies sexual citizenship as that status which European homosexuals,
qua homosexuals,
still lack and now claim. "Sexual citizenship articulates sexuality in the
public sphere through claims for rights and participation, while also cultivating
(and claiming a right to) separate spaces for subcultural life" (p.17).
The closest
analogy I can think of in American constitutional jurisprudence is a "religious
citizenship" inferable from the First Amendment. As Sandra Day O'Connor
put it, the Establishment Clause prohibits "mak[ing] religion relevant to
a person's standing in the community" (WALLACE v. JAFFREE, at 52), while
the Free Exercise Clause guarantees freedom of religious association. Nevertheless, scholars like Stephen Feldman (1997) have argued
that American law, religiously neutral on its face, in effect privileges
Christianity. Minority and
feminist scholars have made similar arguments about whiteness and maleness.
Mutatis mutandis,
sexual citizenship would entail the absence of sexual orthodoxy, full membership
in the community, and protection of group life within the community.
Some students
of gay politics have suggested that "with the gaining of equality we will
witness 'the disappearance of the modern homosexual' as same sex sexualities
becoming nothing more than minor deviations which lose much of their political
and cultural significance" (p.140). But surely the protection of group life
implied by the concept of sexual citizenship militates against such an outcome.
As Stychin's well researched, well argued, and insightful book makes clear,
a more likely, and equally problematic, result of full equality is homosexuals'
duplication of heterosexual models of behavior.
"Historically,"
Stychin writes, "citizenship has been constitutively built on a series of
exclusions made possible through a number of theoretical, binary divisions"
(p.7). Indeed, for there to be citizens there must be non-citizens, and
some variable or variables must be chosen as the bases for the distinction.
One of the more entertaining observations in GOVERNING SEXUALITY is Stychin's
remark that "the figure of the illegal alien provides a useful analogue
to the homosexual. . . .In both anti-immigration and anti-gay discourses,
we find tropes of bodily production and waste, in/visibility, the threat
of penetration of borders, the power to 'pass' undetected" (p.99).
Sexual preference
was a relative newcomer to the list of exclusionary categories, since the
concept of the homosexual did not exist until modern times and the voluntary
self-identification of homosexuals has become common only in the last generation.
The inevitable ignorance and misinformation produced by this situation continues
to frustrate progress toward inclusivity. It was still possible, in 2000,
for an MP to announce in the House of Commons that "I do not think I have
met half a dozen homosexuals in my life" (p.33). In impoverished post-Communist Romania,
"homosexuality has served as one of several scapegoats and symbols of a
difficult and slow transition" (p.116).
But Parliament
did abolish legal distinctions based on sexual preference, and Romania decriminalized
in 2002. Indeed, "a remarkably rapid development of a range of ways in which
same sex identities and relationships has come to be recognized" has occurred
in EU states "much more quickly than I would have expected 10 years ago"
(p.138). Stychin's book clarifies the ways this has happened and the forms
it has taken, and asks "what a European homosexual family might actually
look like as it
develops in EU law and politics in the years ahead" (p.139, emphasis original).
Gay rights
advocates have not won all the time-for example, in 1998 the European Court
of Justice upheld an employer's refusal to grant travel concessions to the
same-sex partner of an employee. But more often exclusionary traditions
are overcome, if not overwhelmed, by the combined effects of dramatic social
changes in attitudes toward homosexuals, powerful coalitions of interest
groups, and, perhaps most important of all, the often unnoticed but omnipresent
effect of economic development. In Romania, for example, the possibility
of eventual entry into the European Union had at least as powerful an effect
on legal change as did the desire to eradicate the oppressive legacy of
the Ceausescu regime and the influence of law reform elsewhere in Europe.
Stychin perceives
a definite, but reconcilable, tension between the concept of sexual citizenship
and the European Union's concept of the "transnational 'European citizen'"
(p.7)-any gainfully employed national of a member state. While the EU has
traditionally "refrained from intervening in what are seen as controversial
matters of sexuality and gender relations" (p.18), its conceptualization
of citizenship in economic terms makes sexual preference irrelevant to a
person's standing in the community, and its protections of human rights
foster individual and group claims. Since homosexuals do not constitute,
or even overlap with, a "class" in the economic sense, they are not easy
to relegate to a disadvantaged economic position. Stychin's book supports
the common generalization that economic development and globalization are
incompatible with exclusion based on sexual preference, bearing out Dennis
Altman's prediction (1982) that economic growth and development will facilitate
the integration of homosexuals into modern society.
Yet, the prime
importance of economic factors does not make politics and culture irrelevant.
Even if it were true that economics trumps everything else, the forms
that social change takes, the arguments made for and against change, and
the premises on which these arguments are based, are all quite important.
A recurring theme of GOVERNING SEXUALITY is the extent to which the integration
of homosexuals into society depends on their adopting familiar heterosexual
lifestyles-monogamous marriage, the conventional nuclear family, and the
like. If this trend continues, what might be lost? Stychin's discussion
of legal reform in the "New Britain" of Tony Blair's Labour government identifies
several assumptions that were frequently invoked as "facts" in parliamentary
debate: notably, "sexuality is fixed by age 16 and once people know who
they are, they want to engage in responsible sexual relationships" (p.46).
But sexuality may not be fixed for everyone, all the time; bisexuality is
both a hotly contested issue within the gay community and a possibility
supported by casual empirical evidence. Furthermore, what do "responsible"
sexual relationships mean in the context of New Labour's rhetorical emphasis
on the family? Will the heterosexual-homosexual dichotomy merely be replaced
by a division between families and non-families? Carl Stychin's book encourages
the reader to ponder these questions.
REFERENCES:
Altman, Dennis. 1982. THE HOMOSEXUALIZATION
OF AMERICA: THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE HOMOSEXUAL. New York: St. Martin's
Press.
Feldman, Stephen. 1997. PLEASE DON'T WISH
ME A MERRY CHRISTMAS: A CRITICAL
HISTORY OF THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. New York: New York University
Press.
CASE REFERENCE:
WALLACE v.
JAFFREE, 472 U.S. 38 (1985).
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Copyright
2003 by the author, Judith A. Baer.