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.