Rethinking Sexual Citizenship

Jyl J. Josephson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438460499
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1

Sexual Citizenship

Sooner or later, happily or unhappily, almost everyone fails to control his or her sex life. Perhaps as compensation, almost everyone sooner or later also succumbs to the temptation to control someone else’s sex life. Most people cannot quite rid themselves of the sense that controlling the sex of others, far from being unethical, is where morality begins.

—Michael Warner1

I’m talking about a politics where the nonnormative and marginal position of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens, for example, is the basis for progressive transformative coalition work.

—Cathy Cohen2

Central to our thinking, as will become clear, is the notion that all citizenship is sexual citizenship.

—David Bell and Jon Binnie3

The year 1996 was a banner year for conservative hegemonic identity politics in the United States. Twenty years of racist, misogynist “welfare queen” politics resulted in the enactment of a law that repealed the entitlement to social support, meager as it was, for families and children living in poverty. Thirty years of panic over young people and sexuality added abstinence-only sex education into the same law. And a generation of panic over the “homosexual menace” resulted in the Defense of Marriage Act.

These three policies of sexual regulation may appear to have little in common beyond their enactment in the same presidential election year. But they are all, I argue in this book, policies of sexual regulation that reflect an effort to reify a hegemonic, white, heteronormative family ideal of citizenship. And the somewhat different fate of the three policies twenty years later has much to tell us about sexual regulation, sexual citizenship, and democracy in the United States.

In the United States, we have always been much better at talking about equality than about practicing it. In this book, I analyze the problem of inequality through the lens of sexual citizenship, looking at public policies in the U.S. that engage in sexual regulation as a form of exclusionary and disciplinary politics, enforcing hegemonic ideals regarding what it means to be a “good citizen.” As we will see, this ideal involves a citizen who is white, heterosexual, and sexually continent—whose sexuality is controlled and contained in culturally and politically acceptable ways. This is the hegemonic ideal of sexual citizenship—an ideal that is primarily a fantasy, rather than the description of majoritarian citizen conduct that it purports to be. But an ideal is hegemonic not because it is actually adhered to by a majority, but rather because it is the standard to which we all must respond. It is the standard by which less powerful groups are measured, and found wanting, and all of us are disciplined.

The State and Public Policy

Feminist, queer, and to a lesser extent critical race theory, in the period following the adoption of the policies discussed in this book, turned its attention more toward culture, affect, and the operations of power in locations outside of public policy and the state. Post-structuralism, along with the critique of liberalism, the unitary subject, and of rights claims, led to less attention in many feminist and queer circles on the specifics of political institutions, at least in the ways that social scientists usually view these institutions.

In recent years, some feminist scholars have questioned whether focusing political contestation on public policy made by the state is counterproductive for political change.4 Part of the concern is that this kind of claims-making contains the quest for political change in a limited arena of social and political life, reducing the impact of social movements for political change. Changing state policy is obviously not the only route to greater freedom and equality, and there are certainly ways that legal strategies have led to unintended consequences and to secondary exclusions. We can use this insight and bring it to bear on our analysis of public policy. Despite critiques of the nation-state as a political form, for the time being we still live in nation-states. As long as nation-states continue to make public policies in exclusionary ways, feminist scholars will need to continue to analyze those policies and states, and feminist movements will need to try to change them.5 For example, Nancy Hirschmann argues that rather than eschewing efforts to influence the state, feminists should articulate a feminist vision of the state and of the relationship between citizens and the state that would promote gender equality. Hirschmann’s approach is also attentive to multiple sites of power outside of the state, and to the role of social construction in creating and sustaining inequalities. Thus, arguing that we attend to public policy does not mean we do not need to attend to other forms of political power.

With respect to the policies considered in this volume, the policies were not sought or chosen by the groups who are subject to them. Women and men who have limited economic resources do not seek wedfare or workfare or the healthy marriage initiative—they seek basic support for themselves and their children. These policies reflect the enactment of hegemonic ideas of sexual citizenship into law, and conditioning benefits on participation is thus a form of sexual regulation. The attachment to these identities is actually on the part of elites, attached to the way that creating and reinforcing these deviant identities secures their hegemonic position in heteronormative citizenship. This is why, in this book, I develop my analysis by turning the lens around to look at hegemonic groups rather than the less powerful groups who are the intended subjects of these policies.

Public policy scholars and social scientists influenced by feminist, queer, and critical race theory have developed new analytic tools for bringing the theoretical ideas of post-structuralism, socially constructed identities, and more complex understandings of political power into analysis of the state and public policy, and I am drawing in this book on all of these scholarly currents.

Public policy enacts and produces hierarchies in many ways. These developments in scholarship mean that we now have better and more nuanced tools for analyzing public policy. The way that hierarchies are produced is not simple and straightforward. There may be ways to expand the practice of public policy to include different ways of thinking about democratic citizenship and inclusion, and thinking about some of these issues in terms of sexual citizenship is one way to do this. This analytic lens is one approach to thinking about political and public policy in a more heterogeneous way.

In this chapter, I begin to build this analysis of sexual citizenship, first by discussing the feminist literature on gender, families, and intimate life that provides the theoretical and historical entry point for thinking about citizenship in a broader way. Then, I discuss the intersection of economic life with intimate life. I also discuss the conservative interests that have come together to create the policies analyzed in this volume. I discuss sexual citizenship specifically, developing the idea of the hegemonic heteronormative family ideal and using the scholarly literature on this subject to develop my analytic approach to contemporary public policy. Finally, I outline the approach that I use to analyze the public policies examined in chapters 2, 3, and 4.

Citizenship, Feminism, and Intimate Life: What is the Connection?

Feminist Political Thought: The Personal is Political

When feminist scholars first began writing about citizenship and democracy, the focus of concern was on what was seen as the division between public and private life. Feminists have argued that the gendered nature of this historic division has played an important role in women’s subordination. This included the ways that women’s roles in private life created barriers to their opportunities in the public sphere, the ways that public life was created as a sphere for men, and the ways that the division between public and private was seen as natural rather than as a creation of human societies. As feminist scholarship developed, it became clear that this was not a singular but rather a whole array of problems, and that thinking of the matter in terms of public and private was itself a problem.6

It is still true that many of the practical problems that affect women’s lives, opportunities, and capacities are related to families and intimate life. But, given the developments in feminist, critical race, and queer scholarship in the past three decades, as well as changes brought about by social movements related to these areas of inquiry, we need broader, more inclusive ways of thinking and writing about intimate life, families, individual rights, and state policy. One way to do this is to look at the multiple ways that state power intersects with intimate life. This is why I think the literature on sexual citizenship is so useful as a way to focus our attention on some of these issues in a productive and inclusive way.

What these movements and modes of inquiry have shown is that the entire political system, and most especially the division between public and private, is premised on a system of domination and subordination that venerates the lives of some and extracts resources from the lives of others. A system of unequal citizenship is central to the development of the U.S. political system, and has been well documented by scholars of American political development.7

This has meant that the rights and duties of citizenship have been different for different groups of people based on their gender, sex, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ability, and marital status. For example, Pateman’s focus is on the (hetero)sexual contract that precedes the social contract, and much of the feminist literature has examined how the legal structure of the institution of marriage has worked to subordinate women and to reinforce heterosexual privilege and mandatory heterosexuality.8 The “racial contract,” as Charles Mills argues, premised the rights and opportunities of white citizens on the exclusion of African Americans, through slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, and continuing discrimination.9 And Shane Phelan, among many others, shows how citizenship is heterosexual and privileges heterosexual relationships.10 This history is intertwined with the history of citizenship laws that provided a different basis for citizenship based on ascriptive characteristics.11

Of course, the early focus of some feminist political theory on unequal gender roles in marriage reflected not only heteronormativity, but also the interests of women and men who were relatively privileged by race and class status. For example, the notion of “republican motherhood” applied primarily to white women who were married to propertied white men. Developments in feminist, queer, and critical race scholarship have enriched our understandings of the many ways that citizenship and intimate life had been intertwined. As feminist and critical race scholars have pointed out, the history of exclusions for African American and other women of color have each had their own trajectory.12 Many scholars have pointed to the ways that citizenship in the United States historically privileged economically independent white men, and established different citizenship status for all other groups.13 The clearest example, of course, is the development in the U.S. of chattel slavery and the use of “black codes” to deny all rights of citizenship to the African-American slave population, including restrictions on access to marriage and rights to family life. In contrast to family law that applied to the non-enslaved population, the status of a child followed the status of the mother, not the father, under slave codes. These laws were enacted to ensure reproduction of the slave population, and were especially important to slave holders and their economy of exploitation after the importation of slaves was banned in 1808. According to historians, African Americans eagerly sought the right to marry after the end of slavery, although a variety of mechanisms were also used in the South to restrict access to marriage and the legitimacy that this accorded to families.14

Access to the legitimacy of legally recognized familial relationships has been restricted in a variety of ways historically, for both native-born and immigrant groups. Restrictions on access to citizenship rights have involved both exclusions from access to the public sphere and restrictions on the rights available in the traditionally private sphere. For example, restrictions on marriage rights for and among different racial groups have limited opportunity for many different groups. Throughout U.S. history, many different groups have been permitted to emigrate to provide labor but have not been accorded the right to become citizens. Marriage restrictions included the possibility of women who were U.S. citizens losing their citizenship status if they married a non-citizen.15 Bans on interracial marriage persisted until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision and have involved many different racial and ethnic groups.16

In turn, restrictions on access to rights of citizenship can have residual and long-term, including generational, effects on families and intimate life. Linda Williams has shown the many ways that the public benefits of the post-Civil War, Great Depression, and Great Society periods worked to benefit white citizens more than African Americans.17 Even in a public policy arena that might seem distant from families and intimate life, such as housing policy, the existence of persistent redlining and discrimination in lending has had significant effects on families’ abilities to accumulate wealth over time.18 Reworking citizenship is thus complex and requires a reconsideration of how we think about politics and public policy.

Many feminist scholars have proposed different ways of thinking about these questions of inclusion and its implications for changing how we understand political life. Because I believe that we need more encompassing ways to look at these questions that take into account intersectional identities and the multiple ways that citizenship has been inegalitarian, I propose to use the framework of sexual citizenship. This approach does not solve all analytic problems, but for the policies that I am addressing it seems the most useful approach. In part, what this does is recognize that what has traditionally been seen as the separate public and private spheres are deeply intertwined and that there are many complicated relationships between public and intimate life.19

Political Power is the Basis of Inequalities in Intimate and Public Life

One of the important contributions of feminist political thought has been to make the point that decisions about how families, intimate life, and sexuality are intertwined with public life are made based on political power. This has been important because inequalities based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are often justified as natural. Thus, we see frequent references in defense of traditional understandings of gender, intimate life, and sexuality to nature, god, millennia of human practice, and so on. A very useful example of this is language used to discuss same-sex intimate relationships in the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), mocking the very idea that there might be a “constitutional right to homosexual sodomy.”20 This is very different from the respectful discussion in the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). One important change between 1986 and 2003 was historical and legal scholarship that showed the many false assumptions about the history of same-sex relationships as well as the history of legal regulation of these rela...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Sexual Citizenship
• Chapter Two Welfare Policy and the Politics of Sexual Deviance
• Chapter Three The Politics of Sexual Shaming: Abstinence-Only Sex Education
• Chapter Four Defense of Marriage Acts and the Politics of Sexual Regulation
• Chapter Five Sexual Citizenship after the White Hegemonic Heteronormative Family
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover